County lines, criminal exploitation and cuckooing part one: Greater Manchester's learning

[Introduction]

The Research in Practice and Research in Practice for Adults podcast, supporting evidence-informed practice for children, adults and families. 

Kate: Thank you for joining us at this Research in Practice, Research in Practice for Adults podcast. I'm Kate, Learning and Development Officer, and today I'm joined by Jayne and Deborah. We're going to be having a conversation around criminal exploitation and the effects on children, young people, adults, families and communities. This is the first of two podcasts. I'd like to introduce Jayne Horan, Complex Safeguarding Lead for Greater Manchester, and Deborah Hurst, Detective Sergeant in the Programme Challenger in Modern Slavery Team. 

Deborah: Yes, so I work within the Programme Challenger Team, which is Greater Manchester's response to organised crime, which covers the whole of Greater Manchester and it's a multi-agency response. So, within the central Challenger Team, we have a number of different agencies who work together, and that began in 2013 as a legacy to the tragic murders of two Greater Manchester police officers. So, the team began in 2013, and work very closely with other agencies such as immigration and local authorities, what we began to understand is that criminal offences and criminal types were changing. So, we'd always looked at the traditional types of crime, robberies, firearms, drugs, that kind of thing, but actually we started to understand that the changing in communities and the changing in criminality meant that we had to focus on vulnerabilities. So, we started to focus on things like trafficking and exploitation and look at how we can support and identify victims because a lot of this crime is very, very hidden and wasn't understood.

Jayne: So, I'm Jayne Horan and I'm the Greater Manchester Complex Safeguarding Lead. I've been in this post probably for just over a year now. Prior to this role, I was actually the Safeguarding Lead in Programme Challenger working with Debbie and colleagues in the Modern Slavery Unit as well. From a Complex Safeguarding perspective, we started doing work in this area in 2014-16, where we developed the Achieving Change Together Programme which was a pilot from DfE (Department for Education) funding to develop a new approach, really, to working with adolescents who'd been identified at risk of child exploitation that was specific to child sexual exploitation. The outcome of that piece of work was to develop a new way of working with young people that was an intense model of support but, actually, the lessons learned were that, actually, it was a model that could be applied to working with young people who were at risk of any form of exploitation. That started our pathway into understanding complex safeguarding and we wanted to have a system approach really into how we respond to young people, predominantly adolescents who are at risk of all forms of exploitation.

We started with a focus on sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation, modern slavery and trafficking with the recognition that we need to take some learning to how we respond to some of those issues. Then, we can start to broaden that out to look at other forms of exploitation, so for a complex safeguarding approach, we are developing teams in each area across Greater Manchester, so in the ten local authority areas, and building on the skills of the Challenger team which currently have local Challenger teams in each of those ten areas. We want to bring together those skills around disrupting organised crime with our current Child Sexual Exploitation Phoenix teams because we recognise having the skills and experience of those two teams together will enable us to be able to respond much more effectively to young people and to vulnerable adults who are victims of criminal exploitation and other forms.

[Definitions, what are we talking about] 

Kate: Brilliant, thank you very much, and welcome. I was just wondering if perhaps we could start off by exploring and expanding on the terms criminal exploitation, county lines, and cuckooing? 

Jayne: So, I will say, in Greater Manchester, we actually launched our Trapped campaign in October 2017 and we were very clear that we see county lines as a form of criminal exploitation. So, when we talk about county lines, criminal exploitation within Greater Manchester, we tend to refer to it as Trapped because that's our branding around it but, actually, we talk more in terms around criminal exploitation. As I say, county lines is just seen as one approach of that. We've seen young people being exploited in numerous ways to carry firearms, store money, commit assaults, arson, burglary. We were very clear that we wanted to have a broader definition so we could actually look at supporting young people across all of those areas, not just focusing on the drugs element. We recognise that is a significant issue. We are seen as one of the biggest exporters in the UK around county lines, but we also recognise that the drug lines don't just have to go outside of Manchester or Greater Manchester. We have ten boroughs that are joined up very well from transport networks, and some of the feedback from young people has been that actually you could go from one side of Greater Manchester to the other in a day to be selling drugs, so it isn't just the traditional county lines model that we look at here. We see it across all the different forms.

Deborah: Cuckooing is when an organised crime group might take over the home address of usually a vulnerable adult, and then that address will then be used for criminal purposes, so that really is what the cuckooing term means.

[Myths and misconceptions about exploitation – the limitations of definitions] 

Kate: You mentioned the, kind of, terms county lines and how they can be defined differently in different places. Are there any common misconceptions you've come across when people are using these terms? 

Jayne: I think from professionals who talk to us and, certainly, we're experiencing it a lot in Greater Manchester at the moment, is there's some confusion around whether a county line means that somebody has to be moved outside of a boundary area, or is it that somebody could be moved across the other part of a town or a city, for instance. I know the definition has changed and there was a definition that included cuckooing, and then one that wasn't. I think that's why, from our perspective, in Greater Manchester, we're trying to come up with a position that is meaningful for us in Greater Manchester that obviously recognises clearly and follows those national definitions, but something that is quite clear to the issues that are taking place here. As I mentioned before, we talk more so around criminal exploitation because what we are seeing is more reports of young people being asked to commit other forms of crime. That might just be that we haven't yet uncovered the extent of the county line problem as yet, as I say, because we are seen to be an exporter, but we see it very much that if we just stick solely to those singular definitions, we actually miss supporting and identifying a large number of young people and actually we don't actually have an effective response there.

Deborah: Like Jayne said before, the actual distance that people, young people, are being moved around is really unhelpful when you're talking about long distances, urban to suburban, rural, etc., because, certainly within Greater Manchester, we've seen young people actually being moved around the area of the places that they've actually grown up in. So, some of the distances can be really, really short. We can be talking streets as opposed to counties, and I think county lines, kind of, aligns itself to those longer distances which, for us, we're seeing much shorter distances too.

Jayne: So, an example of that, we have had a case, or we've had numerous cases, but one significant case that stands out within Greater Manchester of a young man who was, I think he was about fifteen, sixteen at the time. He was actually targeted by a peer of his who lived in the similar area who was only about fourteen at the time, and he had basically been on this person's bike and crashed it. This young man then sold the debt on to his uncle and his dad, and they were an organised crime group within that particular area, a very small area of Greater Manchester, where he would literally be moved street to street. So, it wasn't being sent outside of even his specific region of the city, but it was really street to street and he was exploited horrifically. I think it was about 22 hours a day, he was beaten up, he was being forced to sell class A drugs and he was, when he was discovered, he was really dishevelled, very malnourished. He'd not been sleeping, not been eating, hadn't been able to shower. He'd obviously stopped attending at college and he was identified due to a drugs warrant at his address.

Thankfully, officers identified that and were able to start asking some questions because of how he presented, but actually if you were to look at that, that looked like a young man who was just selling drugs. You know, he wasn't being taken far out of Manchester, he wouldn't have been taken outside of, kind of, our region area, so there's often that debate there, well, is he a victim county lines? If it's not outside of the boundary, is he therefore not a victim and he's just drug dealing? Well, actually, he's a victim of criminal exploitation and it's about how sometimes those definitions actually can stop being helpful because we just get so caught up on those specific definitions that actually we don't see the point of how we need to help some young people. He actually was supported really well and supported by police, and was actually given an opportunity to get out of that situation with his family. Obviously, they carry on their investigation around the organised crime group without having to include him in that process and use him as a witness, was actually, you know, the really important thing to do in that case. I think, certainly, for me, that stood out as quite a significant case because it was probably one of the first times an officer had started to question, 'I'm doing this drugs warrant, but actually something isn't quite right,' you know, where they could have locked him up for very significant amounts of Class A drugs.

[Some signs and indicators of exploitation] 

Kate: Are there common threads which show us what criminal exploitation can look like and the harm it can cause? 

Deborah: I think from a cuckooing perspective, that might present to professionals as antisocial behaviour, so you might get lots of calls for antisocial behaviour at housing. You might see a difference in lots of comings and goings to addresses, lots of different vehicles, lots of different people, lots of activity taking place all the time. Certainly, for some professionals who might be housing officers, etc., they might be able to actually look at, 'Well, if it's in a block of flats, who's gained access to that flat?' Like we were saying before, we were talking about criminalisation and definitions as such, I think sometimes with vulnerable adults, again, it's reassuring to think that the police are thinking differently. So, particularly in cuckooing cases, you might have vulnerable adults who are, for instance, being forced to cultivate cannabis. I think, traditionally, certainly one or two years ago, the police's response to that would be, you know, if they got that report, it would be a warrant and criminalisation of that vulnerable person, where I think now, again, it's about police officers having that awareness of, 'Well, actually, what else is going on at that address,' speaking to other professionals, who else has accessed that property? Are there reports of antisocial behaviour? And putting that all together and thinking, 'Well, is that person actually a victim?' rather than criminalising them, or not necessarily criminalising them, but it may be, from a local authority perspective, that they get kicked out of their property and they're moved on somewhere else. So, there are different ways that people are being targeted or being discriminated against. It might not just be criminally, it might be some of the other repercussions, I guess, of being a victim.

[Highlighting unhelpful stereotypes – anyone can be targeted] 

Jayne: I think, certainly from a child perspective, what we're seeing, and there are quite stark differences as well in that I think, stereotypically, we always have it in our head that somebody who's vulnerable is always going to be somebody from a really poor background, as being somebody who has been open to children's social care, are known to services for a number of reasons. There are cases of that, we know of many cases, you know, where there are young people who are from very poor backgrounds, very deprived areas where there's probably been a large prevalence of organised crime within those communities for a long time, so some of the behaviours appear to be normalised. You see what other people in those areas are doing and that might be a way to earn money because other people in your estate earn money that way. School exclusions particularly come up as a significant issue. You know, there's no structured timetable, young people being sent to PRUs (Pupil Referral Units) that comes up time and time again as a big concern. Not only can people be targeted through the PRUs because it seems to be an area, you know, where they meet other associates, but actually also, you know, they're out and about. There's no structure around them but, equivalently, we're also seeing young people who actually come from, you know, really wealthy backgrounds where they don't show any of those stereotypical signs of a young person who's open to children's social care.

They're being targeted in other ways and they might have other forms of vulnerability. It might be because they're being bullied in that school or it might be that they develop a relationship with somebody that they think is a positive, healthy relationship but, actually, they've been groomed for other purposes. You know, technology enables people, all young people, to be, kind of, contacted 24/7 all the time, so if you've got access to a numerous amount of devices, smartphones, etc., as a young person, we're seeing young people being contacted on Facebook and all other different ways to be asked to go and sell drugs and think that, 'Oh, if I can put-, you'll make £50 if you put this money in your bank account and you just have to keep it there for 24 hours.' If you're fourteen years old, are you going to think it's a great idea to get £50? You probably are, aren't you, because you can get some trainers or you can get things? So, I think it's quite hard to distinguish in the sense that you're a victim if you're A, B or C because criminal exploitation really isn't showing itself in that way. It doesn't seem to just silo off, and I think that's quite difficult for people when they're trying to say that they would identify somebody, because they have a stereotypical view in their head. I think it's also quite challenging because there's this whole debate about victim-offender.

[The importance of asking ‘why?’] 

You know, many young people who are committing antisocial behaviour might be stealing a bike. Are they going to see them as a victim, or are they seeing them as a young person who's just causing trouble? Do they ask themselves the question that actually, why are stealing that bike? What else is going on for that young person? I think that's a whole cultural shift across communities, cultures, you know, across organisations that has to take place to get us back to a space where we see a young person is still a child and maybe get us to start asking the question why when we see these things. I think it's quite hard to identify, and we certainly are seeing it as quite a difficult hidden crime or a hidden area within Greater Manchester. Some of the youth offending services have done some fantastic work where they've done some mapping exercises within their youth offending services to identify young people, looking through peer groups, associations, places where they, kind of, hang out with each other, and looking at different networks with schools that they attend and things like that. That's enabled us to really start to unpick some of the young people who are probably at risk of criminal exploitation and be able to put some support into place. But I think, you know, there are real challenges with that because what we don't want to do is say, 'You're only a victim if you show these signs,' because, actually, we're seeing this vary across such a range of young people and adults as well that, actually, we need people just to start opening their eyes and asking questions where they see something that's not quite right, just ask why.

[Outro] 

Kate: Thank you for listening. In part 2, we'll be looking at some of Greater Manchester's key considerations when responding to the criminal exploitation of children and adults such as strong multi-agency working, caring for professionals doing difficult work, and community engagement. 

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