Picture a casual evening at home. Your eleven-year-old is curled up on the couch next to you, face illuminated by the familiar glow of a smartphone, thumbs flying across the glass. You fondly assume he is playing a video game, messaging a classmate, or scrolling through TikTok.

But what if he isn’t? What if, in that quiet, domestic moment, he is using Telegram to accept a contract for a gangland hit? What if he is receiving the precise GPS coordinates for a shipping container in a foreign port – one filled to the brim with cocaine?

It sounds like the plot of a dystopian thriller. Tragically, for a rapidly growing number of families across the European Union, this nightmare is a dark, present reality. As the European Parliament prepares to debate and vote on a crucial resolution under the ProtectEU strategy during this plenary session, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: the criminal underworld has industrialised the recruitment of our children, and the primary weapon is the screen in your child’s hand.

The scale of the machinery we are fighting is staggering. Europol tracks over 800 high-risk criminal networks operating within the EU, fuelling an illicit drug market valued at €31 billion annually. 

To insulate themselves from law enforcement, these syndicates have pivoted to a horrifyingly effective strategy, using minors as a completely disposable workforce. According to Europol, minors are now involved in over 70% of criminal markets.

The pipeline relies on sophisticated psychological grooming. Cartel middle managers, often older teenagers labelled ‘elders’, are required to recruit a crew of younger children. They have quotas. To do this, they have gamified crime. By mimicking popular influencers on Snapchat, TikTok, and Telegram, they use specific emojis, such as a snowflake for cocaine and trees for marijuana, to frame highly illegal acts as thrilling videogame quests.

Once a child clicks ‘accept’, the exploitation turns lethal.

In Latvia, teenagers are tricked into selling their digital identities for pocket money, instantly turning them into money mules wrapped in fraudulent debts. At the port of Antwerp, cartels use the ‘Trojan container’ method, locking children inside dark, steel shipping containers for days with nothing but a sleeping bag and a bucket, waiting to break out and extract drug shipments. 

Most chillingly, in Sweden, gangs use chat apps to hire children as literal contract killers. Over a ten-year span, Sweden has witnessed an unprecedented 391% increase in murder or manslaughter suspects between the ages of 15 and 20.

For Malta, this is not somebody else’s problem. As one of the most connected societies in Europe, with some of the highest rates of internet and smartphone use among young people, Maltese children are exposed to the same online recruitment techniques being deployed by criminal networks across the continent. Geography no longer provides protection. A criminal gang operating in Stockholm, Antwerp or Riga can reach a teenager in Valletta or Gozo with the click of a button.

Furthermore, these syndicates ruthlessly exploit our blind spots. They heavily recruit young girls to transport firearms and launder money because they trigger less suspicion from authorities. They also prey upon the migration crisis, swallowing thousands of undocumented, unaccompanied minors into an invisible, highly abused underclass.

Some critics will argue that expanding police search powers or tightening digital regulations risks over-criminalising vulnerable youth who are themselves victims of poverty or broken homes. They are right about one thing: these children are victims. But we cannot allow compassion to paralyse enforcement. Closing the legal loopholes that cartels exploit is not about punishing children; it is about stripping organised crime of its tactical advantages.

We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis using fragmented national laws. The cartels exploit the EU’s open borders far better than legitimate businesses do, mapping out variations in ages of criminal responsibility and routing their operations through the weakest legal links.

True protection requires a two-front European assault.

First, we need a unified, EU-wide enforcement approach. Under the Digital Services Act, we must legally compel tech giants to alter the algorithms that enable digital grooming to propagate in plain sight. We must also harmonise the definitions of organised crime across all Member States to ensure no legal vacuum remains.

Second, we must treat this as the public health and security crisis it truly is. We must learn from innovative, localised models. Look at Italy’s ‘Free to Choose’ project, which legally removes children from deeply entrenched mafia families to break the generational transmission of criminal ideology. Consider Ireland’s ‘Green Town’ project, which combines physical disruption of criminal spaces with intensive economic support to families. We need to implement intensive deprogramming for these children, offering them a pro-social reality, education, and mental health support that is genuinely more compelling than the cartels’ toxic illusion.

Time is running out. If we do not sever this recruitment pipeline right now, imagine what the European criminal underworld will look like in a decade. The groomed teenagers of today who survive the system will not stay at the bottom of the hierarchy. They will become the cartel bosses of tomorrow, a generation of leaders completely desensitised to extreme violence and human exploitation since childhood.

The battle for the future of Europe’s security is not just being fought in shipping ports or at our external borders. It is being fought right now, in our living rooms, on the screens reflected in our children’s eyes. The EPP Group refuses to surrender that territory. It is time for Europe to stand up, unite, and protect its future.

17.06.2026.