Jayden was just eight years old when he ran his first errand for his Uncle Alex.
“He asked me to run a package three bus stops down,” Jayden says. “It’s like at school when you get picked to take the register back to the office. You feel pleased you’ve been chosen. They say, ‘well done’ – it makes you feel good.”
Jayden’s parents were going through a financial crisis after a bad investment. Uncle Alex, a close family friend, was happy to step in and pay for trainers, haircuts, spending money.
“I didn’t have the greatest relationship with my mum and dad,” Jayden says. “There wasn’t a lot of love there. I always wanted to be around Uncle Alex instead.”
In fact, Jayden was being groomed to become part of a drug gang, one of more than 27,000 young people across the UK involved in ‘County Lines’ operations across the UK. Around 600 County Lines – where gangs and organised crime networks use dedicated phone or “deal lines” to distribute illegal drugs – were identified by the National County Lines Co-ordination Centre last year alone.
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“By the time I was 16, I’d got really good GCSEs,” Jayden says. “I wasn’t in any trouble with the police. I wanted to be a paediatrician. I didn’t know the steps to take to be a paediatrician, but I was shown how to sell drugs. They gave up the time to invest in me.”
Jayden is 30 now and spends his time educating young people about gangs via the Serenity Welfare programme. He is speaking out because of the explosion in recruitment of children following the pandemic. Covid-19 has seen the perfect storm of job losses, family breakdown, lockdown school closures and drug use rocketing as Britain is gripped by a mental health crisis. Meanwhile, many youth services decimated under Austerity have been shuttered under Covid.
This week, new figures from the Office of National Statistics showed death from drug poisoning in England and Wales reach the highest number since records began in 1993, and higher in Scotland. This drug epidemic is fuelled by County Lines networks that groom and exploit children and vulnerable adults to move, store and sell drugs, and may be linked to a spike in teenage murders in London. The gangs use coercion, sexual violence, weapons and torture. But it often starts with the promise of a better life. “Kids are sold dreams, that’s what County Lines is,” Jayden says.
In 2008, what Jayden calls as “the first knife crime epidemic”, recruitment often happened outside chicken shops. “But it’s got easier to recruit in lockdown because kids spend so much time online,” he says. “They recruit via X-Box, Instagram, music videos, ads on snapchat. They recruit by social media and pay by PayPal.”
He describes a Dickensian network of Fagins seeking out lost children. “Men look for young girls who have experienced sexual abuse. With girls and boys, they are looking for a broken home or somewhere without much love. They see that vulnerability.”
Jayden was 17 when he made his first County Lines trip to a town in the Midlands. He and other teenagers were installed in a flat with burner phones, drugs and weapons including a gun, knives and homemade clubs with nails. By this time, he says he was “totally desensitised” to violence. The kids’ job was to supply an endless stream of punters with Class A drugs, mostly cocaine, crack and heroin.
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“Usually, it is five to 10 days,” Jayden says. “You are working 6am to 6am, 24 hours, it’s very minimal sleep, on a floor or a settee. You go down to make the sale, and the money comes back up to the flat. Everyone is given a phone without internet so the police or gangs can’t track you. You don’t know where you are, you are lost really.
“It’s stressful. Maybe there is already a gang in that county. Maybe there are undercover police. The flats we would use would belong to someone’s girlfriend or an addict. Or we would be ‘cuckooing’ with someone who was vulnerable. Maybe they have learning difficulties. Eventually it brings attention, and you get out.”
At 21, Jayden lost a close friend. “There was a scuffle, and they used a knife on him. Another time, I saw a grown man with acid thrown all down his arm. I watched his arm burn, but you can’t show any emotion. I wanted to leave but it’s not that simple.”
Leaving the gang would mean proving his loyalty. “They knew I didn’t like violence,” he says. “I was told I had to go to a party and stab one of the opposing gang’s members. I didn’t have to kill him, but I was the one who had to do it. I had never stabbed anyone.
“I stabbed him in the leg. It was horrible. I was shaking. I just went to the party and did it as quickly as possible. It was rushed. I came home thinking, what if I hit a major artery, what if he’s dead? I found out later he survived.”
Outside the gang, Jayden suffered an identity crisis. “I was 22, no CV. I tried a series of jobs. Then I suffered a deep, severe depression.”
Therapy at 27 helped Jayden accept his past. Emily Aklan, founder and CEO of Serenity Welfare, says his experience is essential to teaching services about how County Lines operate. “The current situation is absolutely horrendous,” she says. “The pandemic has made everything worse. Mental health is through the roof. There are more and more young people coming into care. There has been more domestic violence in lockdown, gangs are more rife. There is more Child Sexual Exploitation.
“It’s not just children from deprived backgrounds, we see a lot of middle-class children where marriages have broken down or there is domestic violence. These gangs say, come and be part of our family.”
County lines is not a crisis of drugs, but of lost children. As Aklan says: “Grooming happens online via apps like Tik-Tok and Houseparty, yet we have a care system stuck in 1901. The government’s Care Review has been long promised. These are our next generation. The system is completely broken and there is nothing being done to fix it.”
To save lives, we need to listen to more experts like Jayden. “These are victims, not troublesome kids,” he says. “We need to try and listen to them. It’s no different from sexual abuse or domestic abuse. If they are under 18, they are a child. It could be anyone’s child.”
- For more information visit serenitywelfare.org
