A handbook on child criminal exploitation and the section 45 defence.
 
Reece is not a real person. His story is drawn from real cases of child criminal exploitation; names and identifying details have been changed. We didn't start with Reece. We started with the evidence — what the prison and prosecution data showed about children falling through a gap in the system — and then wrote him to give that gap a face.
 
Nobody ever explained anything to me.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. The whole way through — the flat, the cell, the court, all of it — there were grown-ups talking over the top of my head, about me, using words I didn't know. And not one of them stopped, got down on my level, and said: Reece. Here's what's happening to you. Here's what it's called. Here's what you can do.
 
So I'm going to be the one who explains it. Because somebody should.
I'll tell you how it actually starts — not a van and a stranger, nothing like that. It starts kind. Someone noticing you when you feel invisible, buying you something, making you feel chosen. By the time it's a phone you can't refuse and a debt you can't pay, you're already in — and you went in smiling. I'll tell you about the debt that's built so it can never go down. About why I never told anyone, and why saying nothing felt like the only way to keep my family safe. About pleading guilty to a thing I did but never chose, because there was no word for the middle and nobody offered me one.
 
And then I'll tell you the thing nobody told me until it was nearly too late. That there's a law. That what was done to me has a name — section 45, modern slavery. I know that sounds mad. I thought slavery was chains and history, nothing to do with a kid in trainers with a phone. It isn't. It was me the whole time. There was a door meant to open for me right at the start, people whose actual job it was to walk through it, and a defence written for boys exactly like me before I was even born.
 
I'm not the only one telling it. My nana saw it first — she'll tell you that. My mum reported me missing four times and couldn't reach me — she'll tell you that. And the officer who arrested me, who got it wrong and knows she did, she tells you herself how little it would've taken to get it right.
 
If you're a mum, a nana, a teacher, a copper — anyone who might be near the next one — this is for you. Because the next one's on a sofa somewhere tonight, and nobody's explained anything to him either.
 
I'm fifteen. Nobody walked into my room in time.
So I'm leaving the door open for the next lad.