The children as young as 10 being groomed into county lines drug gangs

‘There have been times we’ve felt scared in our home’ (Picture: Getty Images/Katie Ingham)

There’s one harrowing memory that sticks in Michael White’s mind. It was a cold winter’s evening, when his 15-year-old son walked through the door after spending the night with ‘friends.’

The teenager, he remembers, ‘looked like a ghost’.

‘Something horrible had clearly happened to him,’ Michael* recalls

Since that day, his son, George* has tested positive for Hepatitis A. Now 16, he is also facing trial for a robbery, after being targeted by a drug trafficking gang.

‘There have been times we’ve felt scared in our home,’ Michael tells Metro.

Through a shadowy underground system known as County Lines, George had been groomed by a criminal gang into moving illegal drugs around the country.

Michael believes it was his son’s dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia conditions that made him the ‘perfect profile’ for gang leaders, who prey on vulnerable young children up and down the UK to carry out crimes for them.

Gangs use the rail network to exploit children and vulnerable people into trafficking drugs up and down the country (Picture: Henry Nicholls/AFP)

George, a bright boy from a financially secure family, had been targeted on Snapchat by the older men.

‘He told us he had to travel to London because he was meeting some friends for a McDonald’s’, Michael remembers.

But it turned out the ‘McDonald’s’ day out was a lie. George had, in fact, been lured into conducting drug runs between West London and west Wales, a distance of more than 400 miles.

He had made a point of turning off his Snap Maps – a function on Snapchat which shows your location – so he couldn’t be traced. Michael found a number of old phones along with eight sim-cards in his son’s possession and, after speaking with George, learned the teenager was trapped within the clutches of a criminal gang.

He didn’t want to carry out the jobs for the drug lords, but felt there was no other choice.

Michael saysneurodiverse teenagers are often targeted by County Lines gangs (Pictures: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Michael continues: ‘George disclosed that he had been held at knifepoint in a trap house after the second run, where he was denied food and forced to sit on the floor surrounded by drug addicts all night. I’ll never forget him telling me how he was terrified for his life.

‘The gang threatened him saying that they knew where he lived and that if he didn’t comply horrible things would happen to him.

‘There was another instance when he’d been out and came back home in the pouring rain. It was as if his body walked through the door, but he wasn’t there.’

George, who currently faces trial for his role in a gang co-ordinated robbery, is receiving help from Escapeline. His family was introduced to the charity – who Michael says ‘saved his son’s life’ – by a Police and Community Support Officer (PCSO) after George’s arrest. As part of his defence, support workers have tried to stress how little control the teenager had over his actions.

At George’s home today, paranoia is an unwanted houseguest in every room.

‘You can’t help but constantly remain alert to a door or window opening, the creaking of a floor board’, Michael explains. ‘You can never relax properly and remain constantly stressed about the welfare of your child who, despite your best efforts, will always remain in danger.

‘There have been times we’ve felt scared in our home, at the hands of our own son who’s being forced to choose between a violent and coercive gang and his family who he loves and what he knows is right, who he thinks he is protecting by doing the gang’s bidding.’

While shocking, George’s story is not uncommon.

Police forces across the country have witnessed a huge drop in the age of children arrested for drug crimes. According to FOI data exclusively obtained by Metro, there were 49,326 incidents between 2017 and 2023 where under 16s were arrested for drug offences. Data revealed that Sussex Police, Northamptonshire Police and The Metropolitan Police all detained children as young as 10.

‘Children are just easier to target’, Johnny Bolderson tells Metro. He works as a senior service manager at Catch22, a charity which supports vulnerable young people and their families.

‘If you think about it, whether it be online gaming or social media, every app has a chat function so really no matter where they are, young people are so easily contactable,’ he explains.

The top ten police forces who reported the highest number of total arrests involving under 16s for drug offences between 2017 and 2023 (Picture: Oliver Murphy/FOI)

‘Kids should be playing with their friends and doing children’s things. Instead, what we’re seeing is an increasing number of young people forced to worry that they might die if they don’t do the bidding of a criminal gang. That is not normal.’

Lockdown shifted society’s idea of socialising, meaning more children now interact through the likes of Snapchat and Discord – platforms where predators and gang members can easily strike undetected. Often, kids targeted will be from the same towns or estates, Johnny explains.

‘Unfortunately, once a gang has finished with one child, they can move on to another, so there’s no loyalty, there’s no commitment, and that young person is literally there to do a job,’ he says. ‘And if they’ve lost them in some way – they’ve been arrested and taken to court – they can move on to another.

‘But this is not just targeting young people; they will target the whole community and take over. Straight away, there’s a whole silence from that community that will not talk to the police or report crime.’

The cost of living crisis means children might help a County Line gang thinking it is a ‘quick win’ to help make some cash to support their family. What they don’t realise is that, once exposed to the criminal underworld, how hard it is to escape.

But Johnny thinks change is on the horizon, as awareness about online grooming and County Lines gangs improves.

‘The reason I’d say the issue of drug crime among children is an epidemic is because there are better systems in place now to recognise the victims of exploitation. Yes, because it’s happening, but also because we’ve got the systems in place to actually understand who is being targeted and why they’re being targeted, so that’s an improvement on previous years.’

And help is out there for victims and their families. Sharon McIver is head of safeguarding at charity Action for Children, and warns of the wider trauma that follows them into adulthood.

Sharon tells Metro: ‘When you try to get out of it [the gang] you’re likely to be threatened. There’s likely to be violence, your family is likely to be threatened, and the fear of the unknown means that if you do manage to walk away and you don’t have any contact with that group, you’re often looking over your shoulder and are constantly afraid.

‘We’ve had examples of young people who have moved away from that lifestyle, and the gangs have tried to abduct them, maybe four to six weeks later, or even longer than that. There’s this fear of what will happen if you walk away.’

Snapchat is one of the mediums used by gang leaders to target young people and win their favour (Picture: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Shutters)

Sharon doesn’t want any child to fall through the net or feel they have nowhere to turn. Action for Children makes use of mentors, who have their own lived-in experience of issues like County Lines, to support victims. In schools, they urge children and teachers to notice the ‘warning signs’, such as pupils who seem to be ‘disassociating’ from previous positive relationships.

‘When we’re working with young people, we’re looking to move them into a more positive kind of destination,’ she explains. ‘When somebody looks to exploit them again in the future, they need to be more resilient and more likely to recognise unhealthy relationships.

‘They need to have enough sense of purpose and belonging from other things in their lives, that they don’t feel the need to then go back into being exploited, running drugs, robberies or committing crimes.’

*Names have been changed

When contacted, a Snapchat spokesperson told Metro: ‘The exploitation of any member of our community is horrific – there is no place for this on our platform. We work in multiple ways to detect and prevent this activity, including use of proactive detection technology and confidential in-app reporting tools.

‘We have a dedicated team that supports police investigations and meet regularly with experts to understand drug-related trends, terminology and behaviours used by gangs. We also have extra protections for under 18s, including pop-up warnings if they are contacted by people they don’t know.’

Parents can visit parents.snapchat.com for guidance.

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