Vulnerabilities to Successful Engagement: A Virtual Reality Intervention for Child Criminal Exploitation

The aim of the research is to identify potential risk and protective factors that may limit children’s engagement and successful completion of a child criminal exploitation (CCE) virtual reality intervention. The intervention, titled ‘Change Your Game’, is a 180-degree first-person intervention depicting methods an exploiter may use to entrap a child into selling drugs, with the scenes depicting the consequences of being involved becoming more negative throughout. Despite virtual reality interventions being used in research, limited studies have identified factors that can reduce engagement and the success of the intervention, potentially leaving children more vulnerable to negative real-world outcomes related to CCE. The research addresses this gap in knowledge, measuring children’s affective state and decision-making during an emotive virtual reality intervention designed to highlight child criminal exploitative practices. This research is novel and includes a hard-to-reach sample containing children which the participating schools feel are most vulnerable to real-world exploitation outcomes, however, this detail was not shared with the researcher. Initially, the research included a systematic review on known factors for CCE to identify the most prevalent real-world vulnerabilities, which the research was then based on. The research uses a mixed-methods approach, involving both practitioners and children who have participated in the intervention. Practitioners who experienced the intervention (n = 14) were interviewed and the data analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with findings highlighting influential factors to examine further: individual demographic differences and adverse childhood experiences. The findings from this chapter and the systematic review aided the full development of the research methodology for the quantitative studies. Children, aged between 15-17, then completed a survey (n = 98) while taking part in a CCE virtual reality intervention. Data collection for the survey was conducted at three timepoints before, during and immediately after the intervention using PANAS-C-SF (Ebesutani et al., 2012) to assess a child’s affective state changes throughout the intervention. Studies were split into factors influencing engagement and the influence of decision making and vulnerability to real-world negative outcomes. The first study analysed demographic information, adverse childhood experiences and affective states across three timepoints using mixed ANOVAs and independent samples t-tests. Results highlighted no specific factor negatively influenced a child’s ability to engage, cautiously suggesting that after completing the intervention, their real-world vulnerability to CCE would be lower. The following study considers the association between risky decision making and the influence of individual demographics and adverse childhood experiences. This was analysed using chi-square, with no factor shown to influence risk decision making that could increase their real-world risk of exploitation. In relation to the intervention, the research suggests that despite the emotive content shown to increase negative emotions, there are no vulnerabilities from the factors examined that suggest a child’s engagement will be impaired in the intervention. However, results must be interpreted cautiously as the small sample size and other factors that could not be tested within the research may have influenced findings.