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UK response to county lines an ‘appalling failure’ [1]
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Date: 2025-06
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.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/county-lines-and-cuckooing-an-appalling-failure-of-child-protection/
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