Picture a boy, maybe 15 or so, selling drugs or stealing cars or breaking into a department store and running out with everything he can get his hands on.
That kid is committing crimes, right?
Now, picture a different kid doing the same stuff. But instead of pocketing his illegal earnings he turns it over to a third party, a presumably older and more powerful person, someone who might do him or his family harm if that money isn’t paid.
Turns out, that second kid is living in a version of human trafficking known as “forced criminality.”
And, legally speaking, he, too, is committing crimes.
While police and prosecutors can (and often do) take an offender’s circumstances into account, they do so at their discretion; the law doesn’t carve out broad, automatic exceptions for cases of forced criminality. Crime is crime and, sometimes, the option to prosecute and incarcerate wins the day, even when the offenders in question are children and their lives suggest they don’t have much, or any, freedom.