“You must be fantasising, a young boy your age can’t be living that type of life.”

These are the words Sosa Henkoma remembers being told by a social worker when he was 11 years old. He had just told them that a gang had used him to sell drugs, and now they were threatening to kill him.

After being abused by his stepmother, and placed in foster care, Sosa was exploited by a drug gang who sent him from London to Margate to sell drugs to an addict there.

As social services weren’t going to help him, he turned to another gang for protection. This group would pick him up from school, take him to a forest, and teach him how to shoot.

“Then after that, I was put to work.”

In part one, Sosa tells Annie Kelly about how he was groomed by multiple gangs, and what made him vulnerable to exploitation.

He now trains the police, NHS and social workers on how to work with people who have experienced child criminal exploitation. He works alongside the anti-trafficking charity Causeway.

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