What changed

B100275/2026

B100277/2026

European Parliament resolution on Recruitmentthe recruitment of children by organised crime

(2026/2725(RSP))

– having regard to the Treaty on European Union, in particular Articles 2, 3 and 6 thereof,

– having regard to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, in particular Articles 7, 47 and 49 thereof,

– having regard to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,

– having regard to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 79/188 of 17 December 2024 on preventing and countering violence against children by organized criminal groups and terrorist groups in the field of crime prevention and criminal justice,

– having regard to United Nations Economic and Social Council Resolution 2024/12 of 23 July 2024 on the treatment of children associated with terrorist groups, including children who are recruited and exploited by those groups,

– having regard to the Commission communication of 1 April 2025 onentitled ProtectEU‘ProtectEU 2025–2030:2025-2030: a European Internal Security StrategyStrategy’ (COM(2025)0148),

– having regard to Europol’s report entitled ‘EUEU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (EU-SOCTA) 2025’,2025,

– having regard to Europol’s intelligence notification of 12 November 2024 entitled ‘The recruitment of young perpetrators for criminal networks’,

– having regard to the forthcoming EU action plan on the protection of children against crime,

– having regard to the STRIVE Juvenile project of the EU and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and its evaluation findings,

– having regard to Sweden’s national strategy against organised crime, ‘Resistance and decisive action’, and to the crime-policy, migration-policy and public security measures made possible in Sweden through the Tidö Agreement,

– having regard to Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market For Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (Digital Services Act), in particular its provisions on the protection of minors online, the assessment and mitigation of systemic risks linked to illegal content and harmful online behaviour, recommender systems, and the responsibilities of very large online platforms and search engines,

– having regard to the Commission guidelines under the Digital Services Act on the protection of minors of 14 July 2025,

– having regard to Europol’s Intelligence Notification of 12 November 2024 entitled ‘The recruitment of young perpetrators for criminal networks’,

– having regard to the UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight working paper of September 2024 entitled ‘Children’s Involvement in Organized Violence: Emerging trends and knowledge gaps’,

– having regard to the EU strategy on the rights of the child and the EU drugs strategy,

– having regard to the hearing of its Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of 4 June 2025 entitled ‘Radicalisation online, with a focus on the recruitment of children for organised crime and terrorism’,

– having regard to its resolution of 20 January 2026 on the murder of Mehdi Kessaci: urgent need for ambitious European action against drug trafficking,

– having regard to Directive (EU) 2016/800 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 May 2016 on procedural safeguards for children who are suspects or accused persons in criminal proceedings,

– having regard to Rule 136(2) of its Rules of Procedure,

A. whereas organised criminal and terrorist groups are increasingly recruiting and exploiting children as part of their operational strategies, including to shield adult perpetrators from detection and prosecution and expand illicit activities;

A. whereas organised criminal groups deliberately recruit and exploit children because minors are easier to manipulate, cheaper to use, less likely to understand the structure of the criminal group’s network and, in many Member States, less likely to face sanctions proportionate to the harm caused;

B. whereas Europol’s November 2024 Intelligence Notification shows that minors recruited by criminal networks typically have no direct contact with higher echelons of organisations and are mobilised through criminal service providers; whereas these minors’ limited knowledge of the networks’ structure and the frequent absence of prior criminal records make them low-risk operatives who are less likely to provide useful information to law enforcement if arrested;

B. whereas the use of children for murders, shootings, bombings, extortion, drug trafficking, robberies, money laundering, weapons offences and violence-as-a-service is not merely a social problem, but a direct assault on public order, victims, families, neighbourhoods and the rule of law;

C. whereas the recruitment and exploitation of children by organised criminal and terrorist groups violates the fundamental rights of children, including their dignity, with severe consequences for their safety and future; whereas children’s vulnerability to recruitment by organised criminal networks stems from cumulative and intersecting risk factors, including a lack of a sense of belonging, adverse childhood experiences and mental health challenges, which are deliberately exploited; whereas effective prevention requires integrated responses addressing these factors;

C. whereas recruited children may be vulnerable and may themselves be exploited, but a minor who commits serious violent or organised-crime offences is also a perpetrator; whereas the rights of the child must be respected, but victims must not be rendered secondary to offender-centred explanations or impunity;

D. whereas child recruitment has evolved from a primarily humanitarian concern into a systemic enabler of organised crime, becoming embedded in the operational models of criminal networks, and is an obstacle to peace, security and development; whereas criminal groups that recruit children undermine the EU’s security, fuel criminality and perpetuate cycles of violence and insecurity across generations;

D. whereas criminal networks have learned to exploit lenient sanctions on young people, confidentiality and secrecy barriers between authorities and government agencies, fragmented child-protection and justice systems, family loyalty, clan-based structures, residence rights, welfare fraud and online platforms;

E. whereas these practices are facilitated by certain technological developments that may normalise and incentivise criminal behaviour among children;

E. whereas the growing phenomenon of ‘baby gangs’ is evidence that organised crime groups are recruiting ever younger children;

F. whereas Europol’s 2024 mapping has identified 821 high-risk criminal networks active in the EU generating an estimated EUR 92-188 billion in annual revenue, accounting for approximately 0.7-1.4 % of the EU’s GDP; whereas minors are involved in more than 70 % of illegal market activities, including drug trafficking, extortion, online fraud, money laundering, illicit firearms trafficking, and violence-as-a-service schemes, with criminal networks exploiting children as young as 12 years old for tasks such as street dealing, cash couriering and extracting drugs from shipping containers;

F. whereas firearms, explosives, drugs and murder contracts move across borders; whereas organised criminal groups often use children as disposable operational tools while adult organisers, recruiters, handlers and paymasters remain insulated from prosecution;

G. whereas criminal organisations systematically target children in highly vulnerable situations, particularly those facing socio-economic exclusion, school dropout and family breakdown, or children in migration, exploiting their economic insecurity, social marginalisation and lack of awareness of risks;

G. whereas the Swedish policy shift that was made possible through the Tidö Agreement has demonstrated the need for a security-first and victim-first approach, including stronger penalties, better tools for law enforcement, better information sharing, special capacity for serious juvenile offenders, confiscation of criminal assets, return measures for foreign offenders and the destruction of the criminal economy;

H. whereas girls and young women are increasingly involved in organised crime, although they are often overlooked by criminal justice systems, with 22 % of identified trafficking victims in western and southern Europe forced into criminal activities, primarily drug trafficking;

H. whereas the first duty of the state is to protect law-abiding citizens; whereas families, households or clan-based networks must not be permitted to function as criminal infrastructure or to retain proceeds, advantages or expected benefits from offences committed by children;

I. whereas illicit trade in firearms and the illegal use of pyrotechnics have contributed to a shift from low-level offending towards more serious and violent crimes involving minors, including extortion and killings; whereas criminal recruiters may offer minors substantial financial incentives, ranging from a few thousand euro to as much as EUR 20 000 for killings;

I. whereas responses to child recruitment must distinguish between vulnerable children, who need early intervention, and children who commit serious offences, who must face immediate, secure and proportionate criminal-justice penalties;

J. whereas drug-related intimidation and coercion constitute a primary pathway through which organised criminal networks recruit and exploit children using debt, grooming and violence; whereas the cross-border reach of such networks means that these phenomena cannot be adequately addressed through national action alone;

J. whereas deportation, return, withdrawal of residence rights and withdrawal of nationality from dual nationals, including offenders who were minors at the time of the offence, should be available tools against people who recruit for, facilitate, finance, launder the proceeds of, conceal, benefit from, intentionally expect to benefit from or commit serious organised-crime offences; whereas, where existing EU, national or international rules prevent such consequences, the Commission and the Member States should propose legislative changes to make them available;

K. whereas expanding drug markets have driven the involvement of minors to alarming levels, as evidenced by sharp increases in the use of important logistical hubs, including ports; whereas the lack of harmonised effects of the current definition of organised crime across EU Member States complicates data gathering and comparability, and whereas data on minors in organised crime are scarce, often unreliable, and barely comparable due to varying ages of criminal liability and underreporting;

K. whereas the law should allow for the removal of a foreign child or dual-national child who commits serious organised-crime offences to the country of nationality or origin together with the parents, guardians or family unit where a court finds that the family environment facilitated, encouraged, protected, financed, concealed, benefited from, stood to benefit from or culpably failed to prevent the criminal conduct; whereas clan-based or family-based networks that function as criminal infrastructure should be removable as a whole, to the extent that everyone concerned is individually linked to the criminal benefit, facilitation or concealment, and subject to a judicial decision;

L. whereas underinvestment in public services, including prevention, education and health services, are the root causes of child recruitment by organised criminal groups;

L. whereas the damage caused by child perpetrators may include death, physical injuries, psychological trauma, threats, destroyed homes and businesses, loss of income, loss of freedom, long-term fear and the degradation of public space;

M. whereas fragmented institutional responses and insufficient coordination between child protection systems, justice authorities, security agencies and digital regulators creates gaps that criminal groups exploit; whereas Parliament’s resolution on the murder of Mehdi Kessaci in Marseille condemned the systematic recruitment of young people by criminal gangs and called for enhanced prevention, protection and prosecution, including specialised support for minors to escape exploitation and reintegrate into society;

1. Strongly condemns the recruitment, grooming, payment, coercion, transport and use of and instruction given to children by organised criminal groups and declares such conduct to be a grave attack on the child, victims of crime and society; calls for an all-out societal response to counter the phenomenon of child grooming and abuse;

N. whereas Europol set up an operational task force called ‘GRIMM’ in April 2025 to coordinate with tech companies to identify efforts to recruit children via social media and messaging platforms, which is led by Sweden and brings together police from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway;

2. Recognises that stable families and educational environments are the first line of prevention against the exploitation of children by organised crime groups; highlights the positive role of sports, extracurricular activities, parishes and religious communities in offering a local, healthy and community-based environment that can help prevent vulnerabilities;

O. whereas evidence-based approaches such as those developed under the EU-UNODC STRIVE Juvenile project demonstrate the effectiveness of prevention-first, cross-sectoral, trauma-informed, gender-responsive and child-centred responses;

3. Stresses the importance of addressing root causes of the vulnerabilities that make children susceptible to recruitment into organised crime, which are largely driven by mass and illegal migration;

1. Strongly condemns the recruitment and exploitation of children by organised criminal and terrorist groups in all forms, both online and offline;

4. Rejects any approach under which serious child-perpetrated gang crime is treated exclusively as victimhood; stresses that vulnerability may be relevant to sentencing and rehabilitation, but must never result in impunity for murder, attempted murder, bombings, firearms offences, rape, aggravated robbery, extortion, serious drug trafficking or other grave offences;

2. Recognises that child recruitment constitutes a serious crime against children and a serious human rights violation; stresses that it is an evolving internal-external security threat for the European Union, requiring a comprehensive response that focuses on protection, early prevention, access to rights and educational continuity, integrating internal security, justice, social and education systems, and strategies and measures aimed at strengthening the protective environment framework for children, both offline and online;

5. Calls on the Commission, in the forthcoming modernisation of EU rules on organised crime, to propose a specific aggravating circumstance for the recruitment, use or exploitation of minors and to ensure that adult organisers, recruiters, handlers, paymasters and criminal-service providers face penalties substantially higher than those for the underlying offence;

3. Recalls that a child is first and foremost a child and should be treated accordingly, and calls on the Member States to ensure that a child’s best interest is always the primary consideration;

6. Calls for the EU institutions to support Member States in reviewing rules concerning the age of criminal responsibility, youth-sentencing discounts and diversion practices so that organised criminal networks cannot use children as shields against effective criminal justice;

4. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to explicitly recognise prevention and responses to child recruitment by organised criminal and terrorist groups as a priority area within the forthcoming EU action plan on the protection of children against crime; calls for this action plan to include a dedicated prevention pillar with early-warning mechanisms involving schools, social services and families, and a youth-centred approach focused on developing life skills through direct community engagement;

7. Calls for secure juvenile detention, special youth-custodial capacity and, where appropriate, specialised juvenile prisons for minors who commit serious violent or organised-crime offences, with detention decisions being based on the gravity of the offence, public safety, risk of reoffending, intimidation of witnesses and continued gang contact;

5. Calls on the Commission to address the recruitment of children by organised criminal groups also in the upcoming legislative proposal for modernised rules on organised crime; invites the Commission to consider including in this proposal specific provisions, such as aggravating circumstances for the recruitment of children; reiterates, in this respect, its call for the establishment of a new common definition of ‘criminal organisation’, which also takes into account the use of violence, corruption or intimidation by criminal groups;

8. Stresses that ordinary open-care placements, voluntary counselling, generic projects conducted by non-governmental organisations or symbolic support plans must not substitute prosecution, secure custody, restitution, confiscation, exclusion orders, monitoring or return measures in cases of serious organised crime;

6. Calls on the Commission to publish, as soon as possible, a legislative proposal for the revision of the EU Pyrotechnics Directive to address the use of pyrotechnics as weapons, including the exploitation of vulnerable young people; encourages the Member States to intensify cooperation with Europol and Eurojust, particularly in ports, logistics hubs and urban areas with vulnerable communities, by sharing best practices and providing training on identifying and reporting suspicious activities involving children;

9. Supports the Member States in imposing strict and enforceable measures on minors involved in serious organised crime, including electronic monitoring, curfews, communication bans, school-area bans, gang-contact bans, weapons-area bans and geographic exclusion zones, with immediate secure detention for serious breaches;

7. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to recognise drug-related intimidation as an established recruitment pathway into organised crime; calls on the Member States to ensure that national strategies addressing child recruitment explicitly incorporate interagency responses to drug-related intimidation, drawing on emerging best practice models;

10. Calls for mandatory and immediate reporting by schools, social services, migration authorities, youth-care institutions and other public authorities of suspected gang recruitment, weapons possession, drug dealing, extortion, unexplained cash, threats or online grooming involving minors, while ensuring that rules on sharing information do not become a shield for criminal networks;

8. Urges the adoption of a prevention-first approach and integrated protection systems that are child-centred, gender-responsive, trauma-informed and cross-sectoral, focusing on the early identification of at-risk children, community-based interventions and strengthening families and social services; highlights the positive role of sport, educational associations and community organisations in offering safe, healthy and inclusive environments;

11. Supports the Member States in establishing joint police, prosecution, tax, customs, migration, prison and social-authority task forces focused on child recruitment, with lawful access to relevant data, rapid exchange of information and the power to map the adult network around the child perpetrator;

9. Considers that the cross-border nature of organised crime renders purely national victim protection responses inadequate for children and young people; calls for enhanced cooperation among the security, justice, child protection, education and health sectors, as well as public-private partnerships, to ensure integrated and cross-sectoral protective environment frameworks for children, both offline and online;

12. Demands a victim-first approach under which compensation is central to the sentence imposed and to any civil or criminal follow-up proceedings; stresses that victims should not be forced to bear the financial and psychological consequences of crimes committed by minors on behalf of organised networks;

10. Stresses that the online dimension of child recruitment is now central to the operational models of organised criminal and terrorist groups, which systematically exploit digital services to identify, target, groom, manipulate and coerce children; stresses that the online recruitment of children by organised criminal networks creates a significant enforcement gap due to limited cooperation by platforms; calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that current obligations for platforms are enforced;

13. Calls for compensation orders arising from serious violent or organised-crime offences to be enforceable into adulthood and, where possible, across borders until victims have been fully compensated, without arbitrary limitation periods, insolvency abuses or identity changes allowing offenders or networks benefiting from crime to escape payment; calls for the EU institutions to support Member States in making child perpetrators, parents or guardians, and any adult relatives, household members, companies, associations or clan-based networks jointly and severally liable where a court finds that they facilitated, encouraged, financed, laundered the benefits of, concealed, benefited from or intentionally expected to benefit from the child’s offence;

11. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure the robust, consistent and child-rights-compliant enforcement of the Digital Services Act, in line with the Commission guidelines on the protection of minors;

14. Calls for the EU institutions to support Member States in introducing or strengthening steep compensation and restitution orders covering death and bodily injury, psychological harm, destroyed property, loss of income, business damage, relocation costs, security costs, witness-protection costs and long-term trauma;

12. Calls on the Commission to ensure the full enforcement of EU digital legislation, and to strengthen, where necessary, the obligations on platforms to take action against the exploitation and recruitment of children, as well as to strengthen the protection of minors online through the upcoming Digital Fairness Act, closing regulatory gaps in areas such as safety by design, age-appropriate defaults, and targeted commercial practices directed at children, while ensuring that new measures remain proportionate, evidence-based, and consistent with the broader digital regulatory framework;

15. Demands the freezing and confiscation of criminal proceeds and unexplained assets linked to child recruitment or child-perpetrated organised crime, including cash, vehicles, phones, jewellery, luxury goods, weapons, homes, businesses, shell companies, welfare-fraud proceeds and assets held by proxies;

13. Stresses the growing threat of crime-as-a-service, including violence-as-a-service, through which young people are recruited online to undertake violent tasks; welcomes Europol’s Operational Taskforce GRIMM and calls on the Member States, Europol and Eurojust to strengthen joint investigations targeting recruiters, instigators and high-level actors, rather than limiting enforcement action to the minors carrying out the offences;

16. Calls for confiscated assets to be directed first to victims and, only after victims have been compensated, to law-enforcement, witness-protection and crime-prevention services;

14. Emphasises that children involved in criminal activities as a result of recruitment must be considered and treated primarily as victims, regardless of their alleged involvement in criminal offences, in line with international standards; recalls that engagement with violent groups is often driven by gradual coercion and group dynamics rather than ideological adherence;

17. Recalls that Member States may introduce legislative changes allowing for the withdrawal of residence rights, permanent residency, protection statuses and family-reunification rights, and the deportation of foreign offenders, including minors, who are convicted of serious violent or organised-crime offences, of recruiting or using children for organised crime, or of committing crimes for criminal networks, with removal to the country of nationality or origin following the sentence or secure custodial measure;

15. Calls for child-friendly, gender-responsive and trauma-informed justice systems and tailored cross-sectoral, trauma-informed reintegration programmes, including access to education, mental health and psychosocial support and recovery and rehabilitation services, protection from retaliation, including for the families, pathways to decent employment and measures to prevent stigmatisation and repeated recruitment; recalls that under Directive (EU) 2016/800, deprivation of a child’s liberty, in particular detention, should be imposed only as a measure of last resort and, where possible, Member States’ competent authorities should have recourse to alternative measures; notes that in certain Member States restorative justice has proven to be effective;

18. Recalls that Member States may enact legislation that enables them to withdraw citizenship from dual nationals, including people who were minors at the time of the offence, where they are convicted of murder, attempted murder, bombings, firearms offences, aggravated extortion, aggravated robbery, rape, serious drug trafficking, recruitment of children or other grave organised-crime offences, followed by removal to the country of their other nationality or origin and a long-term or permanent entry ban;

16. Urges the Member States to improve interoperable, cross-sectoral data collection and sharing on the recruitment of children into organised criminal and terrorist groups, including disaggregated and harmonised EU-wide data, to better understand trends and risk factors; stresses that any collection, processing or sharing of data concerning children must fully comply with data protection rules and the principle of non-discrimination;

19. Calls for family-based return or repatriation orders where a minor foreign national or dual national has committed organised-crime offences and a court finds that the parents, guardians, household members or family unit facilitated, encouraged, protected, financed, concealed, benefited from, stood to benefit from or culpably failed to prevent the crime; stresses that such orders should permit the deportation of the offender together with the parents or family unit to the country of nationality or origin where this is necessary to break the criminal environment and prevent renewed gang involvement;

17. Supports the scaling up of successful evidence-based initiatives such as the EU-UNODC STRIVE Juvenile project and its strategic successor, EU-UNODC Protecting Futures initiative, including in fragile and conflict-affected contexts;

20. Calls on very large online platforms, search engines, hosting services and relevant messaging-service providers to cooperate swiftly with law-enforcement authorities, preserve evidence, remove illegal recruitment content and provide the data necessary to identify recruiters, handlers, paymasters and cross-border networks, in accordance with EU law and judicial safeguards;

18. Calls for stronger international cooperation with partner countries to address cross-border recruitment networks and prevent the externalisation of criminal exploitation;

21. Calls on Europol and Eurojust to establish permanent operational cooperation on the recruitment of children by organised crime, with particular focus on cross-border murder contracts, recruitment chains, money flows, weapons trafficking, explosives and criminal-service providers;

19. Stresses that as part of such cooperation, particular attention must be paid to children in situations of heightened vulnerability, including unaccompanied and migrant children, and access must be ensured to safe reporting channels, guardianship, legal assistance and rights-based cross-border child protection mechanisms;

22. Calls for EU funding to prioritise police capacity, prosecutors, secure detention, prison intelligence, witness protection, victim compensation, border control, asset recovery, forensic capacity and information sharing, rather than soft projects that cannot demonstrate measurable reductions in recruitment, reoffending or victimisation;

20. Stresses the importance of addressing root causes, including poverty, inequality, exclusion, lack of education and exposure to violence and underinvestment in public services; calls on the Commission and the Member States to increase financial support for civil society organisations, community-based initiatives, sports associations and educational programmes in areas most exposed to organised crime recruitment, offering credible alternatives to criminal pathways;

23. Stresses that prevention is legitimate only when it prevents crime; calls for resources to be directed to interventions with measurable results, while insisting that serious offenders and the adult networks around them must face consequences such as criminal justice, confiscation, compensation and, where applicable, removal;

21. Is particularly concerned about the disproportionate targeting and exploitation of girls and young women by organised criminal networks, including through grooming, trafficking and sexual exploitation; stresses that girls face specific barriers to escaping criminal coercion and to accessing justice, recovery and reintegration, and calls on the Member States to ensure that all prevention, protection and support measures are gender-responsive and specifically address the vulnerabilities and needs of girls; recalls in this regard the obligations set out in the Anti-Trafficking Directive;

24. Insists that criminal networks using children must be dismantled at every level: child perpetrators must be stopped, adult organisers must be imprisoned, criminal assets must be confiscated, victims must be repaid and foreign offenders who abuse European hospitality must be removed in accordance with the law;

22. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to allocate adequate funding under relevant EU programmes to prevent and effectively respond to the recruitment of children by organised criminal and terrorist groups, and in particular to support the 116 000 missing children hotline network as key multi-agency partners in identifying children at risk;

25. Is particularly worried about the endemic phenomenon of grooming, exploitation and trafficking of vulnerable young girls, who once trapped into prostitution by organised crime networks have a tougher time reclaiming their freedom and self-esteem; warns that the banalisation and legalisation of surrogacy could lead to new forms of exploitation and trafficking of young girls by organised crime networks as outlined in the Anti-Trafficking Directive ((EU) 2024/1712);

23.26. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission, the governments and parliaments of the Member States, EuropolEuropol, andEurojust, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.Crime, the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations.