Children as young as 7 are being put in danger by criminals who are taking advantage of how innocent and inexperienced these young people are. Any child can be exploited, no matter their background.
Criminal exploitation is also known as ‘county lines’ and is when gangs and organised crime networks groom and exploit children to sell drugs. Often these children are made to travel across counties, and they use dedicated mobile phone ‘lines’ to supply drugs.
How many young people are affected by ‘county lines’?
No one really knows how many young people across the country are being forced to take part, but The Children’s Commissioner estimates there are at least 46,000 children in England who are involved in gang activity. It is estimated that around 4,000 teenagers in London alone are being exploited through child criminal exploitation, or ‘county lines’.
Tragically the young people exploited through ‘county lines’ can often be treated as criminals themselves.
We want these vulnerable children to be recognised as victims of trafficking and exploitation. We want them to receive the support they need to deal with the trauma they have been through.
How are children being exploited?
Criminals are deliberately targeting vulnerable children – those who are homeless, experiencing learning difficulties, going through family breakdowns, struggling at school, living in care homes or trapped in poverty.
These criminals groom children into trafficking their drugs for them with promises of money, friendship and status. Once they’ve been drawn in, these children are controlled using threats, violence and sexual abuse, leaving them traumatised and living in fear.
However they become trapped in criminal exploitation, the young people involved feel as if they have no choice but to continue doing what the criminals want.
What are the signs of criminal exploitation and county lines?
Returning home late, staying out all night or going missing
Being found in areas away from home
Increasing drug use, or being found to have large amounts of drugs on them
Being secretive about who they are talking to and where they are going
Unexplained absences from school, college, training or work
Unexplained money, phone(s), clothes or jewellery
Increasingly disruptive or aggressive behaviour
Using sexual, drug-related or violent language you wouldn’t expect them to know
Coming home with injuries or looking particularly dishevelled
Authorities in Copenhagen are set to open a second facility where drug addicts can shoot up under the supervision of social workers. The goal was to clean up the capital’s streets, but not everyone’s happy.
It’s a grey and rainy Wednesday morning in Vesterbro, Copenhagen’s former meat-packing district, but 40-year-old drug addict Annette is in a buoyant mood. Relaxing in a light and airy first floor office in the city’s drug consumption house, she told DW why this place has changed her life.
“Until quite recently I was homeless. The only options I had when I needed to take drugs were to hide in a basement or huddle behind a car – in the snow sometimes.”
The “fixing room” – as the Danes call it – allows users to inject hard drugs away from the streets, without fear of being arrested. (Nurses and social workers make up the staff at Copenhagen’s fixing room.)
“It can be hard to find a good vein on a drug user and often I’d have to try 15 times before I hit the right one. It was deeply unpleasant, but that’s what life was like for me.”
Hard tracks
The past six years of drug abuse have taken their toll on Annette’s body. Her cheeks are hollow; her denim jacket hangs loosely over her tiny frame, and all but one of her teeth are missing. Perhaps her upbeat demeanor is down to her having flushed cocaine into her veins shortly before I met her. But this safe haven for addicts has given her some dignity back, she says.
“I don’t need to hide anymore or be afraid that someone walking past while I’m shooting up in public might kick me and say: ‘Get out of my way, junkie.’ … My drug habits shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.”
While there have been more than 60 overdoses in the fixing room since it opened last year, no one has died. Drug dealing is not tolerated inside and police are a constant presence outside the yellow brick building, keeping a watchful eye on those hovering at the entrance.
While the surrounding area has been gentrified, the square next to the facility has been the center of Scandinavia’s biggest open drug scene since the late 1970s. Each day, between 500 and 800 people linked to drugs come to the area says manager Rasmus Koberg Christiansen.
Inspired by similar facilities in Germany, Switzerland and Spain, social workers and local residents campaigned for a consumption room in Vesterbro, in the hope of reducing death by overdose and dirty needles left lying in the streets. When a new government came to power in Denmark in 2011, funding was made available.
“After the first day, there had been 130 injections in the consumption room. We thought if we could have between 100 and 200 injections within a year, it would be a success. So after one day, we had achieved the goal. Now we see between 200-300 injections in the room a day,” says Christiansen.
According to a report from Copenhagen Council, the amount of drug paraphernalia left lying around the streets has been reduced by more than half since the drug consumption room opened.
However, while there may be less dirty needles in the area, the number of drug users in the area has not dropped.
“This place is only part of the solution. Our goal is to provide clean, calm and safe drug injections for the people who are using drugs in this area. But if the users tell us they want to do something else with their lives than take drugs, we can help them get treatment.”
Public reaction
“We are blessed that this neighborhood is positive about drug consumption. The problem is that the very close neighbors are very frustrated. That is very understandable, because of course we provide the service, but the users are still here and they can be very emotional, loud and sometimes violent.”
That frustration is strongly felt by Michael Knudsen, the caretaker of Rystensteen Gymnasium, the high school across the road.
“When the fixing room opened last year, we went along with it because they said it was temporary. But we were worried because we thought it would mean more drug users on our doorstep, and unfortunately that’s exactly what happened,” he says.
“Sometimes drug addicts will enter the school premises, use our toilets and computers and smartphones will disappear. Despite the fact that there’s a consumption room right there, they still inject drugs right under our noses and that scares our students. We even caught one of them selling drugs inside the school recently. Sometimes they are aggressive and it’s just a bad situation for us. Our students don’t feel safe,” he says.
While Knudsen has sympathy for what the fixing room does for improving the lives of drug addicts, he says the school wants it to go.
“We’ll have to find a political solution to this to move it somewhere else. We’re all in favor of helping drug users, but we just can’t live with the facility being ten meters from our students.”
Clearly living next door to where drug addicts are injecting is a challenge and the expansion of the consumption room this month is likely to provoke more anger. But the idea of giving addicts some dignity back and cleaning up the streets seems to have caught on – recently a British government minister went on a fact-finding mission to Copenhagen to see how the fixing room worked. Brighton Council in the south of England is now considering opening something similar.
In Scotland under the current legal framework this kind of facility does not exist (and will not, until the law changes) as the Police would have no discretion in the matter of arresting people who possess drugs. However in order to fight Scotland drug problems we should first reduce the harm these substances with an NHS initiative as this epidemic is a public health issue primarily.
The number of drug-related deaths increased by 27% in 2018 to reach 1,187 – the largest number ever recorded and more than double the number recorded a decade ago. Most of the increase in drug-related death rates has occurred in the 35-44 year old and 45-54 year old age groups. Greater Glasgow & Clyde had the highest rate at 0.23 per 1,000 population, followed by Tayside and Ayrshire & Arran with rates of 0.18 and 0.17 per 1,000 population respectively. National Records of Scotland
“The Child may not remember, but the body remembers.”
Researchers have recently discovered a dangerous biological syndrome caused by abuse and neglect during childhood. As the new documentary Resilience reveals, toxic stress can trigger hormones that wreak havoc on the brains and bodies of children, putting them at a greater risk for disease, homelessness, prison time, and early death. While the broader impacts of poverty worsen the risk, no segment of society is immune. Resilience, however, also chronicles the dawn of a movement that is determined to fight back. Trailblazers in pediatrics, education, and social welfare are using cutting-edge science and field-tested therapies to protect children from the insidious effects of toxic stress—and the dark legacy of a childhood that no child would choose.
Boys in poor urban areas around the world are suffering even more than girls from violence, abuse and neglect, groundbreaking international research published suggests.
The study in the Journal of Adolescent Health, along with similar new research, suggests an adequate focus on helping boys is critical to achieving gender equality in the longer term.
“This is the first global study to investigate how a cluster of traumatic childhood experiences known as ACEs, or adverse childhood experiences, work together to cause specific health issues in early adolescence, with terrible life-long consequences,” Dr. Robert Blum, the lead researcher for the global early adolescent study, said in a statement. “While we found young girls often suffer significantly, contrary to common belief, boys reported even greater exposure to violence and neglect, which makes them more likely to be violent in return.”
The study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at childhood traumas suffered by 1,284 adolescents aged 10 to 14 in more than a dozen low-income urban settings around the world such as the United States, China, the U.K., Egypt and Bolivia.
Overall, 46 per cent of young adolescents reported experiencing violence, 38 per cent said they suffered emotional neglect and 29 per cent experienced physical neglect. Boys, however, were more likely to report being victims of physical neglect, sexual abuse and violence.
While higher levels of trauma lead both boys and girls to engage in more violent behaviours, boys are more likely to become violent. Girls tend to show higher levels of depression.
Separately, a new report to be released next month at an international conference in Vancouver concludes that focusing on boys is critical to achieving gender parity. The report from the Bellagio Working Group on Gender Equality — a global coalition of adolescent health experts — finds boys and men are frequently overlooked in the equality equation.
“We cannot achieve a gender-equitable world by ignoring half of its occupants,” the report states. “It is crucial that boys and men be included in efforts to promote gender equality and empowerment.”
For the past six years, a consortium of 15 countries led by the Bloomberg School of Public Health and World Health Organization has been working on the global early adolescent study. The aim is to understand how gender norms are formed in early adolescence and how they predispose young people to sexual and other health risks.
Evidence gathered by the study indicates boys experience as much disadvantage as girls but are more likely to smoke, drink and suffer injury and death in the second decade of life than their female counterparts.
The key to achieving gender equality over the next decade or so — as the United Nations aims to do — involves addressing conditions and stereotypes that are harmful to both girls and boys, the researchers say. They also say it’s crucial to intervene as early as age 10. The norm is now age 15.
“Gender norms, attitudes and beliefs appear to solidify by age 15 or 16,” the working group says. “We must actively engage girls and boys at the onset of adolescence to increase total social inclusion and produce generational change.”
Leena Augimeri, a child mental-health expert with the Child Development Institute in Toronto, agreed with the need to focus on boys as well as girls. At the same time, she said, the genders do require different approaches.
“Boys are equally at risk,” said Augimeri, who was not involved in the studies. “When we look at the various issues that impact our children, we have to look at it from different perspectives and lenses and you can’t think there’s a one fit for all.”
Willow Service is in partnership between NHS Lothian and the City of Edinburgh Council and they work with a number of different partners to address the social, health and welfare needs of women in the criminal justice system.
Willow aims to:
Improving women’s health, wellbeing and safety
Enhancing women’s access to services.
Reducing offending behaviour.
They offer a wide range of services to women aged 18 years or older, resident in Edinburgh or returning to Edinburgh from custody. Women participate in a programme 2 days a week involving groupwork and key work support. The programme is designed to meet the specific needs of women and is delivered by a multi-disciplinary team. The team consists of criminal justice social workers, criminal justice support workers, a nurse, psychologists and a nutritionist. The team provides a range of interventions to:
assess all aspects of physical, mental and sexual health
support follow up where necessary
help cope with the effects of trauma and abuse
consider women’s pasts and support them in planning safely for the future
address offending behaviour
improve mental health and well being
develop new skills and coping strategies
address substance use problems
develop plans for education, training and employability
Apex Scotland’s work is about reducing re-offending, promoting desistance, tackling deprivation and making communities safer.
Those who are at risk of (re)offending are given the education, support and opportunities they need to change their behaviour, become effective citizens and live a fulfilling life.
There are many reasons why people get involved in crime. Often the people who use Apex Scotland services have been both the victims and perpetrators of crime. Their needs are both complex and varied and Apex believe that each person should receive the service that is best for them. The staff are committed to engaging with the people they work with, helping them to progress through the areas in their lives which, at that time, require more support and guidance towards a positive destination.
The need to make prisons places of hard work and meaningful employment is set out in the Government’s new Green Paper on justice reform.
Prison Industries are meeting the challenge by linking up with companies in the private sector.
One of these is Timpson – the UK’s largest shoe repairer, key cutter,
engraver and watch repairer. Timpson’s 2,400-strong workforce includes
89 ex-offenders who trained at the company’s prison workshops.
James Timpson is Managing Director of Timpson, and believes that
prison works for his company as well as for the former prisoners on his
payroll. And as a result, he’s always looking for his next ‘superstar’
employee.
‘I find the staff we’ve recruited from prisons are among the best
colleagues we’ve got,’ James says. ‘We see this as a great way of not
only helping people but of getting people to work for us.
‘We simply recruit people who we feel deserve a chance,’ he adds. ‘I
think the best way to avoid people going back to prison is to give them a
good job.’
Training on the job
James’ relationship with Prison Industries started eight years ago
when he recruited a young offender who impressed him during a visit to
HMYOI Thorn Cross.
‘When he was released I gave him a trial and he’s been with us ever
since and now ex-offenders make up about four per cent of our staff,’ he
says.
Since then, James has worked with prison industries to set up special
training workshops for offenders. A workshop opened two years ago at
HMP Liverpool and it’s been a great success.
‘Today we have 12-14 prisoners being trained there at any one time,
and on release we guarantee them a trial period with Timpson,’ James
explains. ‘In 2009 we opened a second Timpson workshop at HMP
Wandsworth, which like Liverpool operates every weekday. We also have a
prison industry at HMP Forest Bank, where prisoners do welting, which is
part of the shoe repair process.’
And does he feel these workshops have been successful so far?
‘Well, 75 per cent of staff who join us from prison are still with us
after six months. We’ve got shops everywhere – 900 across the country –
so we’re very flexible about where people work. Some prisoners want to
work in their home areas, while others want to be far away from where
they come from, and we have the flexibility to help in both
circumstances.’
Room for expansion
The success of the workshops has led to plans to train prisoners in other areas of the Timpson empire.
A photo processing business as part of the Max Spielmann chain (owned
by Timpson) at women’s prison HMP New Hall has already been approved
and is in the planning stages. It will give the women who take part
confidence and skills, and as in male prison workshops, they will be
offered a trial job on release.
‘The business is growing very quickly so I always have room for more staff,’ James says.
‘I’m starting to recruit ex-offenders for other retailers as well, so
in the future all the jobs might not be for us specifically, but we’ll
still be providing jobs in retail. I think the whole corporate agenda is
moving towards this approach. Social enterprise is now becoming much
more relevant, it’s seen as something that’s good for the business, but
also good for society.’
Success stories
In the eight years he’s been involved in working with prison industries, James admits there have been some hiccups.
‘We’ve had to let people go sometimes – we give people a chance but we don’t take any messing,’ he says.
But the cases that don’t work out are clearly outweighed by those
that do. He cites the example of an ex-offender from Liverpool who had
never worked in his life and had problems with drugs and alcohol.
‘He was 47, and had been in prison for 28 years on and off. He’s been
with us for two years, and he keeps his monthly pay slips on a board to
show the months he’s been out of prison. He’s great.’
Ex-offender Sarah is another shining example of how employment can help rehabilitate offenders.
‘She served a five year sentence before joining us, then became
runner up in our Apprentice of the Year 2009 competition,’ James says.
‘She’s about to start managing a shop and everyone thinks she’s
absolutely wonderful.’
And with successes stories like this behind him, James believes his
business contemporaries would do well to join forces with Prison
Industries.
‘I would say that if you’re in the business of wanting good people to
work for you, you would be wise to look for talent in strange places,
and one of those places may be prisons because from our experience,
we’ve found lots of superstars there.’
How we reduce reoffending to improve public safety is going to change. Have your say in the Green Paper consultation: ‘Breaking the cycle: effective punishment, rehabilitation and sentencing of offenders.’
Beyond Barriers 