A city in despair
MINISTERS have issued advice on how to spot children as young as 12 being used as drug mules.
The Home Office has published updated guidelines highlighting the problems of youngsters being exploited by gangs to run Class A narcotics and money around Britain.
The campaign focuses on the ‘ county lines’ networks, where criminals use boys and girls as ‘ couriers’ to flood small market towns and seaside resorts with heroin and crack cocaine.
More than 1,000 county line gangs are believed to operate in Britain – a 40 per cent rise in just one year – making an estimated £1.8 billion annual profit between them. Their operations are named after the highly lucrative telephone lines used to organise the illegal trade.
The guidance, updated yesterday as the Daily Mail exposed the scale of the scandal, is aimed at parents, teachers, social workers, GPs and nurses, police officers and council staff. It will enable people to understand ‘the nature of this harm... recognise its signs and respond appropriately to that potential victims get the help and support they need’.
It says county lines gangs, mainly based in cities including London, Merseyside and Manchester, ‘exploit children and vulnerable adults to move and store the drugs and money and they will often use coercion, intimidation, violence (including sexual violence) and weapons’.
Police forces across the country say gangs are using machetes, boiling water, knives, bats and hammers, resulting in broken and even amputated limbs.
Children are lured into becoming mules by being promised hundreds of pounds a week, drugs or designer clothes, status, protection or perceived friendship or affection. Others get involved to stop someone carrying out a threat to harm their family.
The guidance says the majority of children recruited by county lines networks are aged 15 or 16. White British children of both sexes are often targeted because gangs believe they are more likely to evade police detection, it says. Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, is used to make initial contact with children.
The ten-page document says criminals are known to target vulnerable children, including those who have been neglected or abused, come from broken homes, are homeless, linked to gangs or have mental health issues. The advice says a young person’s involvement in county lines activities ‘ often leaves signs’. Those include persistently playing truant from school or going missing from home and unexplained acquisition of money, clothes or mobile phones.
Adults are urged to take note if a youngster receives excessive text messages, phone calls or has more than one phone.
Excessive text messages