Deadly mob trap for kids
IS your teenage son or daughter being a bit of a nightmare at a the moment? Stroppy, rebellious, actin acting up, dropping their pals and hobbies?
Are they texting at all hours, skulking in their th bedrooms or disappe disappearing after school. Just h hormones, isn’t it? Normal tee teen angst. Your kid is clever, from a good home with a bright fu future ahead. That’s just what middle-class middl mum Jane thought about her sporty 1 13-year-old son.
Until the cops brought h him home one night saying he was involved with w a violent drugs gang and linked to a murd murder suspect.
Jane spent the next thre three years fighting to rescue him while dreading a phone call to tell her he had been murdered too.
The authorities thought thoug he’d made “a lifestyle choice” to becom become a drug dealer.
She rightly insisted her son was a victim of child exploitation. And he is just one of some 10,000 vulnerable kids being groomed, exploited and trafficked as drug mules for violent “County Lines” ne networks.
This is a multi-billion p pound industry that many of you won’t have hea heard of, and it beggars belief. But it’s such a thre threat to our kids and communities that parents must wise up.
Drugs lords in major cit cities groom kids with offers of easy money and “family” loyalty. Then they send their child slaves into the sticks to deal heroin and crack, as they take orders from users on mobile phone lines raking in up to £4,000 a day.
The kids get a tiny cut – and risk being beaten or stabbed if they foul up.
They are victims of a national crisis bigger than the child sexual exploitation scandals of Rotherham and Rochdale.
And while 80 per cent of police forces are tackling the gangs there is no national strategy involving youth services to rescue and help the kids. Charities like the St Giles Trust are the only ones offering a real lifeline to these youngsters. They work with specially trained ex-offenders who can get through to the brainwashed kids and make them realise these drug lords are abusing them, not looking after them.
Chief executive Rob Owen says kids are holed up in filthy drug dens, dealing 24/ 7, threatened and often subjected to violence and the effect on them is harrowing.
Don’t think it can’t happen to your child. Jane knows it can.
And she’s begging parents, police and the authorities to admit the scale of County Lines, learn to spot the warning signs and treat kids as victims, not willing criminals
Because if we don’t wake up to this crisis, more and more of our children will be trapped in a nightmare that will ruin their lives. MY boiler is playing up so I’m shivering grumpily under icy jets every morning.
But it’s good news for my employers. A Dutch study has found taking cold showers makes you less likely to call in sick to work.
I can’t wait for a long, hot soak – especially as This Morning host Holly Willoughby, 36, has just passed on her bathtime beauty tip. She likes to relax in a milk bath. Not in asses’ milk like Cleopatra – Holly just adds a bit of budget-friendly milk powder to her tub. It’s said to hydrate, boost collagen and act as a natural exfoliator – and Milky Bath kid Holly certainly looks amazing. But it gave me an annoying earworm – 70s classic, Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West). Because Ernie’s lover Sue liked to bathe in milk and he’d load up his cart saying: ”Do you want it pasteurised? Cause pasteurised is best. “She says, ‘Ernie, I’ll be happy if it comes up to my chest.’”