Children across the UK are used to sell drugs, and the state appears more interested in arresting them than helping

SPACE (Stop & Prevent Adolescent Criminal Exploitation) is a self-funded, specialist support response to the phenomenon of ‘county lines’, which has trapped thousands of children and young adults into organised crime and serious violence. It exists to highlight the gaps and shortcomings in statutory recognition for domestically exploited UK victims, and in victim support within the UK modern slavery and child protection framework.

A fully anonymous organisation, SPACE has supported hundreds of parents who have been affected by county lines. It operates a 24/7, national service to help parents navigate their way through the challenges of having a victim of county lines in their family, as well as the harmful impacts of law enforcement responses.

The number of British children identified as potential victims of county lines-related trafficking has risen sharply since 2015. But as attention on the issue grows, alarms have also been raised around failures in safeguarding and the racism and classism imbuing responses. In 2024 alone, 1,845 people (mostly boys) were identified to the state as potential victims of county lines – accounting for a staggering 10% of all modern slavery referrals that year.

Referrals, of course, only capture the tip of the iceberg for victimisation. As the Crime & Policing Bill proceeds through Parliament and cuckooing becomes a new criminal offence, there is a sharp risk that legislation ostensibly designed to protect the vulnerable will result in further criminalisation of exploited children and young people. The recent authorisation of pepper spray (PAVA) for use in young offender institutions also raises further concerns for the wellbeing of incarcerated children in England and Wales.

BTS caught up with SPACE to discuss the damage county lines has wrought, and how state responses are wreaking havoc in families already torn apart.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ella Cockbain (BTS): ‘County lines’ has only recently become a common phrase here in the UK, and it’s not really used elsewhere. Could you start by explaining what it means?

SPACE: County lines is the use of children to sell drugs by organised criminals. It’s named after how this model of exploitation operated around ten years ago. Children were trafficked from one county to another and given phone lines to complete the sales. That’s literally what it is: ‘county’ relates to the UK counties and ‘lines’ relates to phone lines. The model has evolved since then, but the name has stuck.

Ella: How has it evolved?

SPACE: When it started out, county lines was the movement of drugs and illegal substances across police and local authority boundaries. That continues to happen to an extent – you still hear of children from cities being trafficked out to rural areas and coastal towns. But as attention has grown over the last decade, we’ve seen a switch to keeping things closer to home.

Organised criminals started recruiting children and trafficking them locally – keeping them in their home area. This way the children aren’t crossing boundaries, aren’t missing from home for prolonged periods of time, and thus aren’t raising as many red flags. What you see more of now is children being trafficked to sell drugs up the road from where they live.

Ella: You said county lines as a term is about ten years old. Do you date the model to starting about that time, or does it go back earlier?

SPACE: If we look at Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, which was 1838, it’s all about kids being exploited for crime. So the idea itself is much older. But when it comes to the county lines/drug model itself, what existed before the last decade was indeed different.

The ages have gotten younger. The violence is off the scale. Kids from high protective factor homes are getting recruited in higher numbers than they ever used to. And the outcomes for the children caught up in county lines are appalling – they’re completely unprecedented.

When I talk about the current model of the last decade, that’s what I’m talking about. Children are not only propping up this criminal underworld. They’re the ones paying the price.

It's an appalling failure of child protection

Ella: What is cuckooing, and how does it fit into this?

SPACE: Children caught up in county lines will often be trafficked to a property. Usually an adult with mental health, substance misuse, or alcohol issues will be living there, but the exploiters will commandeer the property to use it as a base for drug deals. This is called cuckooing.

The child will stay in the cuckooed property until the drugs are sold. They will receive instructions over the phone, going where they are told in order to sell drugs to the people who have ordered them. Then they will return home for a few days, before being trafficked out again. If the property is raided by the police, it’s the trafficked children staying there or those trafficked to replenish stock or collect cash – not the criminals on the other end of the phone line – who will be arrested.

Ella: Why are children falling prey to this?

SPACE: That’s a big question, but I’ll give you one example of how this can work.

During an initial honeymoon period, recruiters will entice a child with status, money, vapes, or other things the child wants or is manipulated into believing they need. The children in our service come from average, normal families and comfortable homes – they have everything they need already.

The child will then be ‘entrusted’ to do some tasks to prove themselves before being recruited (trafficked to traffic drugs). Sooner or later the recruiter will arrange to have the child mugged while they’re either carrying the drugs to the sales point or returning with the money, instantly putting the child into debt bondage.

It’s highly unlikely the child is going to own up to their parents about what has happened. Instead, they’ll be entrapped into working off the debt, which is unending. That opens the door to their continual re-trafficking.

Ella: County lines has been a designated priority for policing since around 2018. How has that affected the experience on the ground?

SPACE: They may say that county lines is a priority, but what they mean is that the crime is a priority – not the slavery. The police want to be tough on crime, but they miss out on the fact that within the criminality lies the exploitation, trafficking and slavery of children. Being ‘tough on exploitation’ should be done in parallel with dealing with the criminality, if not prioritised over it. But that’s not what’s happening. Nowhere are they tackling the exploitation.

So you’ve had arrests, and you’ve had convictions. But the people being caught are the low-hanging fruit, not the real criminals. I challenge any police force out there to demonstrate that the people they’re putting through the courts weren’t child victims themselves in the past five to ten years. But rather than being treated as such, they’re described as kingpins or mid-level managers of a county line, and put into prison because they’re now over 18.

This is not a result to be proud of. It’s an embarrassing, appalling failure of child protection.

Ella: Given what you’re seeing, who do you think are the offenders, and who are the victims? And what’s slipping under the radar?

SPACE: Organised criminals use children so they don’t have to get their own hands dirty. The model works so well because it keeps the real criminals at a safe distance while pitting the authorities against the children. So it’s very clear who the offenders are. They’re the exploiters and traffickers who are nowhere near the drug deals taking place.

For the children it’s a murky picture. Nobody likes crime, but the exploitation these children are experiencing has them committing criminal acts, and so they are painted as criminals. For the police especially, whose job it is to put people through the courts, this framing is very strong.

Nobody’s trying to look beyond that to see the child’s victimisation as the source of their criminality. We’re not asking, why has this child got drugs? Why is this child miles away from home? Why does the story begin where it suits the police – with the child’s criminal act – rather than showing the problem in its entirety? There is a very uncomfortable dual status there.

What’s slipping under the radar? The whole framework of modern slavery. The Modern Slavery Act became law in this country in 2015, but with county lines it’s being bypassed.

Ella: How is it being bypassed?

SPACE: Children’s social care and the police are the main two gateways for British children to enter the National Referral Mechanism (the process for accessing modern slavery protections). They are routinely neglecting their statutory duty to carry out those referrals.

Under the Modern Slavery Act, children are deemed unable to consent to exploitation, abuse and slavery – they cannot be anything other than victims. But that legislative framework is being ignored in favour of being tough on crime, and these children are viewed as committing a crime.

That puts us in a situation where the tough on crime approach is being applied to victims. And there is something severely wrong when those victims are or recently were children.

The police have a vested interest in seeing a criminal over a victim

Ella: Official statistics suggest victimisation is being recognised more, on some level at least. Since 2017 there’s been a huge increase in the number of children being registered with the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) as potential victims of trafficking or modern slavery due to involvement with county lines. According to the Home Office, 246 males and 29 females under the age of 18 were referred in 2017; in 2022 it was 1739 males and 165 females. So it looks as if awareness of the UK’s modern slavery provisions is increasing.

SPACE: There has been a huge amount of awareness raising since 2018, as well as training for police forces, authorities, and charities. But in general I think there remains massive resistance to seeing county lines as slavery.

There is a core conflict of interest at play here. The police are a designated first responder for modern slavery: they’re supposed to be out there spotting slavery and trafficking. But ultimately they get to choose who they suspect of trafficking or of being trafficked. Why would they choose to see victims of county lines when they could instead see them as criminals? After all, that’s what they view as their real job – to put criminals through the courts. The police have a vested interest in seeing a criminal over a victim.

That’s what’s happening. The numbers of referrals may have increased, but they’re still just a drop in the ocean. More children are not being referred into the NRM than there are being referred. I’m certain that people who know what's going on in this context would agree with that. As horrific as the figures are, county lines remains under-referred. The stats are absolutely unrepresentative of the actual scale of the problem.

Ella: Apart from resistance among law enforcement, why do you think that is?

SPACE: A few things. One, protective services ignore the slavery of county lines as well. SPACE runs a free national service for affected parents to help guide them through all of this, and very few of the parents we meet have heard of the NRM. A lot of these parents have been involved with multiple agencies already for months, yet it’s often when speaking to us that they first learn about the modern slavery side of this conversation.

Once they know, it can still take them six, eight, 12 months to persuade a police officer or social worker to make a referral. Parents get a lot of resistance, to the point of outright refusal. Instead they’re told, “Johnny’s gone down the wrong route and is involved in crime; you’re not parenting properly, you should have been doing X, Y and Z.” You really have to have your wits about you and bags of energy, because it’s a full-time job to make it happen. It’s very easy for a parent to say, “I just can’t deal with this.”

That’s bad already, but it causes even more problems if the child turns 18 while their referral is pending. As long as the child was under 18, their parents could push for a referral without their consent. But once they hit that birthday the authorities require consent to continue consideration of the case. The kids caught up in county lines will rarely give that consent, and the NRM referral is closed.

There is unquestionable loyalty from these children towards their exploiters

Ella: Why wouldn’t a young person consent to continue a process that was started for their protection?

SPACE: With county lines there’s a distinct type of grooming that we at SPACE call rewiring. It’s effectively the deliberate separation of children from their protective-factor parents – relationships are completely breaking down because of the stuff that’s being put into these children’s heads.

They end up viewing their exploiters as their family and the family as their foes. The rewiring can be so complete that children from protective families can end up making completely fabricated allegations of abuse against their parents so that they get taken into care, and thus end up under the influence of their exploiters 24/7.

If the rewiring is advanced enough, a 14-year-old child won’t recognise they’ve been exploited, and will deny that they’ve effectively been scammed. So at 18, they won’t consent to anything that might put their relationship with their exploiters in jeopardy. They’ll tell the Home Office that they’re not exploited, and the referral will close.

A lot of people find this hard to believe. They assume these drug-dealing kids would raise their hands and say “I’m being exploited” if given half the chance. But it’s not nearly that simple. They either don’t see themselves as trafficked victims or there are reprisals for speaking out.

Many choose to go to prison rather than disclose exploitation, as the risk to self and family is high. There is unquestionable loyalty from these children towards their exploiters. And by the time they realise they’ve been exploited, it’s too late.

Ella: What is the main consequence of this for the children then? You said earlier that the outcomes of county lines have been appalling for them.

SPACE: Children are dying. Children are going to prison. Before a child turns 18 there may be some safeguarding measures, albeit ineffective, still in place. But once they turn 18 the gloves are off. The police have likely been telling the child for a while now that “this isn’t going to wash for long – if you carry on committing crime you’ll be going to prison”. In doing so they’ve been completely ignoring the elephant and driver of offending: slavery and trafficking.

The model is thriving, and there are hundreds of kids like that now standing before the courts. They’re being painted as real, proper criminals, even though they were trafficked minors only a year or two ago. They’re often said to have terrible and traumatic histories, but nobody seems to care how and why they amassed those histories. All that matters to the courts is their offending.

In prison they meet their rivals, even their exploiters. It’s dangerous for them and there’s nowhere to run. If they make it out alive, they leave in a worse state than when they went in. This is because they now have a criminal record and are indebted to their exploiters, because the drugs in their possession were seized. Our systems are not designed to recognise or respond to those complexities, and as a result victims are going to prison.

Victim and prison should not be in the same sentence. Modern slavery first responders should not have vested interests to see offender over victim, but that is the reality.

Ella: Can county lines be prevented?

SPACE: County lines will never be fully preventable. Children are susceptible to recruiters’ tactics because they are just that: children. There’s no easy fix there. Even adults are easily scammed through dating websites, bank frauds, etc. But in this country, we have more sympathy for adults losing their money than for children being scammed into being trafficked. It’s a fact that very savvy children fall prey to this type of recruitment. We can’t stop it.

All we can do is equip services, first responders and parents to know what the signs look like, so a child’s trafficking doesn’t end with the common outcome of prison or death. Prevention is too big an ask. But we should at least know who is currently experiencing trafficking so we can act accordingly.

That’d be better than arresting trafficked children who become trafficked young adults, putting them before the courts for being consenting drug dealers when slavery law deems minors unable to give informed consent to engage in criminal activity, and then congratulating ourselves for being tough on crime.

We’re not getting even the basics right.