For those who don’t know: “County lines” are a term to refer to a type of drug trafficking in the UK from the big cities into the local towns in counties normally by employing,bargaining and:or threatening young locals to sell’s narcotics around.

5 comments

  1. Unlikely that the Ueber-law-abiding denizens of AskUK will easily answer this from personal experience.

  3. Plenty documentaries on this topic if you’re super interested.

    I don’t have a lived experience of what it’s like to be involved in county lines but I did help a few young men to get out of the life. Won’t go into any real detail but I was shocked to learn a fourteen year old boy had credible threats made on his life.

    Going way, way back some OCGs used to get my mates to move money and gear around but the reason they used us was because being a child out you off limits. The world has changed.

  5. I wasn’t in it but used to work with homeless young people, so worked with a lot of young people who were caught up in it. It’s absolutely terrifying.

    Kids, and I am talking about KIDS, not adults, would turn up daily with trainer marks stamped on their faces, all black and blue or would have stab wounds. Young women would be subject to r*pe. I even witnessed an acid attack. Usually this would be because they had lost what they were supposed to be transporting or had refused to participate. Kids would be set on other kids, no one higher up the chain ever does the dirty work. If you get told to stab someone and you don’t do it, you get stabbed, that’s how it goes.

    The police and ourselves could move young people half way across the country and they’d still be found eventually and beaten to a pulp. It was relentless.

    The heartbreaking thing for me was that a lot of the ‘runners’ were kids with learning difficulties who were selected as easy targets and absolutely terrorised into doing it. Also, if one sibling got caught up in it and the social found out, whole families would have to be broken up because the risk to the other siblings and the rest of the family was so high. It really is that bad.

    I still struggle to understand why stopping it is not one of the government’s number one focuses.

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