SCANDAL OF THE ‘CHILD SLAVE’ DRUG RUNNERS

They’re lured from urban care homes to peddle heroin in the shires 126 children as young as 12 arrested in one county alone

HUNDREDS of children are being enslaved by drugs gangs, the Daily Mail reveals today.

Criminals recruit them from children’s homes or outside city schools to flood suburban and rural areas with heroin and crack cocaine. The youngsters are known to their masters as ‘Bics’ because they are seen as disposable as the pens.

‘It’s essentially modern slavery,’ said one senior detective.

The ‘ county lines’ gang problem has been highlighted by a major investigation that led to 714 arrests in Norfolk. Officers detained 126 children, some of them only 12 years old. They had been sent from as far away as Leicestershire, Teesside and London to sell drugs.

More than 1,000 county line gangs are believed to be operating in Britain – a 40 per cent rise in just one year.

They make an estimated £1.8billion annual profit between them.

In 2015, only seven police forces

reported an issue with county lines, but now the problem extends to all the country’s 43 forces, according to the National Crime Agency.

The name county line comes from the mobile phone number that young pushers use to sell their drugs to addicts in the shires. Our investigation can also reveal that:

A six-month undercover operation by a single police officer resulted in 72 prosecutions of county lines gang members;

The youngest to be prosecuted in the probe was just 14;

Officers have gone to every secondary school in Norfolk to warn pupils of the dangers of joining drug gangs;

Prosecutors said tackling county line networks was like cutting off the head of the Hydra because new dealers replace those who are arrested;

Prosecution of children for drugs offences varies across the country because forces take different approaches. Some treat young offenders as victims, others as gang members.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that Norfolk, Devon and Dorset saw the biggest rise in arrests of minors for drug dealing.

Of the 126 children arrested in Norfolk between December 2016 and June this year, two thirds were found to have come from outside the county.

Police said 55 came from London and

SO- CALLED ‘ county lines’ involve city gangs recruiting and exploiting vulnerable children and addicts to sell drugs in the shire counties. They are made to travel with the illegal substances, allowing the dealers to extend their business into new locations.

They are named after the mobile phone lines set up by the gangs to organise the supply and distribution of the drugs. The Children’s Society says gangs often threaten or trick children into trafficking drugs, or bribe them with money, food, alcohol, clothes and jewellery.

another 26 from Essex, Hertfordshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Middlesex, Leicestershire and Teesside.

Most of the children were treated as victims of exploitation and referred back to children’s services in their home county for help or reunited with the parents or foster carers they had run away from.

But 49 teenagers judged to be seriously involved in county lines were charged with drug offences and one with attempted murder.

Detective Sergeant Craig Bidwell, intelligence co- ordinator for Norfolk Police’s latest county lines initiative, Operation Gravity, described the phenomenon as child slavery.

‘Ultimately they are still exploited children,’ he said. ‘It is essentially modern slavery.’

Some of the young drug couriers had been moved by local authorities in London to Norfolk to protect them from gangs in their area, only for them to join new gangs in Norwich.

Others recruited by dealers in London were offered £100 a day to sell drugs in the provinces.

Many of those trafficked are forced to have bundles stashed inside their bodies – known as ‘plugging’.

Living what one judge described as a ‘wretched existence’, a boy of 16 from Norfolk was caught in the middle of a snowstorm selling drugs stashed in a Kinder egg. He was prosecuted.

By contrast, the gang leaders often found in London are making huge profits, with each county line making up to £5,000 a day, or £1.82million a year.

In Norfolk it is estimated that county line gangs are making as much as £40million a year.

The NCA and other police forces are now engaged in trying to track down some of those at the top of the chain.

But often the crimelords hide behind a maze of foot soldiers and are based hundreds of miles away from where the drugs are sold.

Vince O’Brien, the NCA’s head of drugs operations, told the Mail the number of children involved was in the hundreds. He said: ‘In our last report, we had almost all forces saying county lines activity was in their force area.

‘We would now say that is in all forces. Three years ago we had seven forces saying there was county lines activity in their area.

‘ Now there are lines which might be operating from a city in the Midlands up to Scotland or down to the South Coast. It’s a national problem.’

He added: ‘We have seen children involved in county lines who come from a range of backgrounds. It might well be that looked- after children are vulnerable for particular reasons, but there have also been instances where children who would come from what people might perceive to be more stable or more affluent backgrounds might equally be vulnerable.’ He said it was important for police to visit secondary schools in order to reach all children who might be at risk.

Carlene Firmin, an academic at the University of Bedfordshire, has said the county lines problem has exposed shortcomings in child protection practices.

She said: ‘We’re challenged by criminal exploitation because it is a kind of child abuse for which the child protection system wasn’t designed.’