How to spot if your kid is one of 50,000 lured into UK drug gangs with money, designer clothes and status
Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield likened the crisis to child-sex grooming gangs operating in towns like Rotherham.
THE threat drug gangs pose to kids is equal to terrorism, the Children’s Commissioner has warned, with as many as 50,000 currently enslaved as drug runners.
Commissioner Anne Longfield's warning comes as ministers issued advice on how to spot children as young as 12 being used as mules.
The Home Office campaign focuses on "county lines" networks, where criminals nickname their underage runners "bics" because they are seen as disposable as biro pens.
The kids are exploited and used to flood rural areas and seaside resorts with heroin and crack cocaine.
Longfield likened the crisis to child-sex grooming gangs operating in towns like Rotherham.
She told the Daily Mail: "That issue was made a national priority, in fact it was made a national threat alongside terrorism and national security, and I think this is just the same.
"It can be tackled, children can be protected and this can be prevented. But at the moment there is no one with a clear responsibility to do that."
"The methods that the gangs use to tie them in are vicious and extremely dangerous.
"Very often part of the process will be that the gang will arrange for that child on their first run to be robbed by someone in the gang and that child will come back and probably get beaten up and told, 'now you owe us for the price of the drugs and the phone'."
Yesterday a revealed hundreds of children were being enslaved by gangs, earning them millions as they ferry and deal drugs around the country.
Longfield said she had been talking to middle-class parents of children performing well at school who had been lured into drug networks.
"I think this is an issue that’s much bigger than urban areas, it’s much bigger than children in care. It is something that should be a concern to every area of the country."
The new guidelines suggest the majority of children recruited are aged 15 or 16.
White British children of both sexes were often targeted because they were more likely to evade police detection.
Norfolk has been identified as a particular hotspot.
Penny Carpenter, Norfolk County Council’s chairman of children’s services, revealed the council had launched a £250,000 dedicated taskforce to protect children from gangs.
She said: ‘We are all working extremely hard but I think the parents have a role to play in this about understanding a child, knowing where that child is, about excessive phone use, or if you haven’t given them the money but they are walking in with a new pair of trainers."
The role of county lines gangs, which have exploded in recent times, has been revealed by a major police operation that led to 714 arrests in Norfolk.
Officers also detained 126 children as young as 12.
They had been sent from as far away as Leicestershire, Teesside and London to sell drugs.
County line gangs get their names from the mobile phones they use to coordinate drug activities outside their traditional urban dealing points to rural areas.
More than 1,000 county line gangs are believed to be operating in Britain.
This constituted a 40 per cent rise in just one year.
They make an estimated £1.8billion collectively every year.
Crime minister Victoria Atkins said the Governments strategy to combat the growth includes a new National County Lines Co-ordination Centre, which would be established with £3.6million of funding.
The Daily Mail investigation also reveal a six-month undercover operation by a single police officer resulted in 72 prosecutions.
The youngest to be prosecuted was just 14.
Prosecution of children for drugs offences varies across the country because forces take different approaches.
Some treat young offenders as victims, others as gang members.
Some children recruited by dealers in London were offered £100 a day to sell drugs in the provinces.
Many kids are forced to have bundles stashed inside their bodies – known as ‘plugging’.
Living what one judge described as a "wretched existence", a boy of 16 from Norfolk was caught in the middle of a snowstorm selling drugs stashed in a Kinder egg.
The exercise is highly profitable, with each county line making up to £5,000 a day, or £1.82million a year.
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National Crime Agency head of drugs operations Vince O’Brien told The Mail the number of children involved was in the hundreds.
“We have seen children involved in county lines who come from a range of backgrounds.
“It might well be that looked-after children are vulnerable for particular reasons, but there have also been instances where children who would come from what people might perceive to be more stable or more affluent backgrounds might equally be vulnerable.”
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