Most people I speak to don’t know what the term “county lines” means. I didn’t either, but when a child close to me became entrapped, I had no choice but to climb a steep and terrifying learning curve.
“County lines” refers to the mobile phone numbers used by criminal networks to sell and distribute drugs around the country. The term sounds kind of street and clever. But it’s a sanitisation of what county lines drug gangs really represent: the slavery of our children and young people for the purposes of making vast amounts of money. Child slaves are being recruited in our communities, under our noses, in parks, town centres and outside schools across the country. Criminals actively target communities they deem to be easy targets: those with cut-to-the-bone services, thin policing and a belief that “this sort of thing doesn’t happen here”.
But it does. In the provincial town where I live, you can still see the bloodstains on the pavement from a recent knife attack. It was frighteningly close to home and a rare visible sign of the lucrative, violent and exploitative multibillion-pound drug trade that is running amok in towns such as mine across the UK. I’m working in my community to try to combat the local county lines operation here. To provide any more detail on my work would be to put myself and my loved ones at risk. This isn’t a bit of small-town drug dealing, it’s The Wire, but with fewer police.
The grooming process starts with gifts that appeal to children – sweets, some money, a bag of cannabis – and ends with children psychologically chained to a very dark world with no escape. Controlled through terrifying threats of severe violence, addiction and brainwashing, children will do what they are told. They won’t snitch because they know that “snitchers get stitched”.
Getting “stitched” means being stabbed. “Stabbed” is another sanitisation. A stabbing infers a quick in and out, perhaps a puncture wound. “Mutilation” would be more appropriate. When children don’t do as they’re told, or they lose money or drugs, or they get caught up in wars between gangs, they may suffer the most vile and shocking mutilations. Controlled with this level of fear, they will transport drugs and money short and long distances, sometimes inside their bodies; they will be prostituted and forced to recruit and control other children.
Part of the grooming process is driving a wedge between children and their families, schools and anyone that stands between the criminal network and potential profit. If you’re a parent of an exploited child, you don’t have a hope in hell of countering the control being exerted over them. They will disappear without warning, for anything from an hour to a night to days on end. They will return home dirty, injured and hollow. Their wellbeing will plummet.
Attempts to understand and prevent what is destroying your child will be met with terror and violence. They become lost to you. All you can do is pray through the long, troubling nights that the next knife attack or overdose doesn’t involve your loved one, that they don’t lose part of their face, their gums or a slice of their arm, or that they haven’t been coerced into carrying out that kind of attack on someone else.
Once you become aware of child slavery and the drugs trade you see signs of it everywhere. Just a few days ago, I was in the optician’s in the centre of our town and the receptionist and I watched a deal being done in the street opposite the practice. “It happens all the time,” she told me, as a skinny perhaps 13-year-old boy zipped his cross-body bag up, looked around furtively and walked away checking his phone. After my appointment and on the way back to my car, I saw another deal. There’s a normality to it that’s dystopian.
The announcement of £20m funding to combat county lines this week by the home secretary, Priti Patel, is a welcome start. But it needs to be followed up with national and local strategies for tackling the growing crisis of child slavery in our country.
In my work, I hear a lot about how “clever” the county lines drug organisations are. Clever is not the first word that comes to mind to describe luring, trapping and enslaving children, ruining their lives and trashing the lives of their families. Our response as a civil society to this mafia-style takeover of our provincial towns is the opposite of clever, it has been utterly woeful and slow.
• Sally Donovan is a pseudonym for a campaigner against county lines. She is the author of The Unofficial Guide to Therapeutic Parenting
