County lines, criminal exploitation and cuckooing part two: Greater Manchester's approach

[Part two of the podcast series]

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 for Adults podcast. I'm Kate, Learning and Development Officer, and today I'm joined by Jayne and Deborah and 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 second of two podcasts. In the first podcast, we looked at Greater Manchester's context of criminal exploitation. In this, the second, we will talk about Greater Manchester's approach to tackling it. Last time, we talked about changing attitudes and the need for effective responses to criminal exploitation. How did Greater Manchester go about coordinating that and bringing people along?

[Changing the system – Complex Safeguarding]

Jayne: So, certainly, one of the things around the Complex Safeguarding work is that we are developing, kind of, the idea is we have a central team, which is myself, two Practice Leads and an Analyst and we are based with the Challenger team and work collaboratively. There's the central Challenger team Debbie talked about, and we're setting up services within each of the ten areas. They are multi-agency, you know, they're teams that include police, health, children's social care, youth offending, your voluntary sector agencies within this, and we have the Independent Child Trafficking Advocates in there, the Children's Society Disrupting Exploitation workers, and in other areas, we'll have locally commissioned voluntary sector partners that they work with. It's really through having that really robust multi-agency approach that you will be able to have an impact in those communities and be able to work more closely with them to have those interactions and those conversations about changing culture. That obviously informs how we then have, kind of, a shift within our own organisations by being able to work more closely in those partnership teams.

[Working with communities]

There's a long journey to go on, and we've developed lots of campaigns to start some of the work, so I mentioned the Trapped Campaign which is focused specifically around criminal exploitation, county lines. The Challenger also have the Would You? Modern Slavery Campaign, and we have the It's Not Okay, Phoenix CSE Campaign, so we have lots of different campaigns and we do weeks of action. We go out into communities. We had a week of action where we spent an entire day in the Trafford Centre talking to people all day, were there for 12 hours, and we've done that in other areas across Greater Manchester. So, this is really about us getting out there and talking to people in communities, not just, kind of, sitting back and talking about it to each other. We want to interact with people and have those conversations.

[Looking for evidence of exploitation]

Deborah: I think we also want people to actually understand from a police perspective. We aren't just about criminalising and prosecuting either. It's really difficult when perhaps you might have somebody who's in custody, whether it's for possession with intent to supply drugs or for cultivating cannabis, etc, or burglaries, thefts, whatever. If you've got that person in custody and they're not telling you that they're a victim, then the police naturally would go down, you know, the court process, prosecution process. So, it's really important, and a lot of our awareness-raising and training is to particularly front-line police to understand that when they are in custody or they are at a warrant, they're looking not just for evidence for a prosecution, but they're looking for clues and signs that somebody actually might be a victim, particularly if that person isn't coming forward as a victim and there's no other evidence. So it's looking on police systems, speaking to the family, has their behaviour changed? Does the intelligence suggest that perhaps they're associating with organised crime groups, and thinking is that person a victim? Then, having that conversation with CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) and, ultimately, you know, having a more informed decision around whether we go down the suspect or the victim route. Also, the Modern Slavery Act offers a statutory defence for exploitation, criminal exploitation, so, again, it's getting that message out. So, we're letting young people know, that that defence is out there, that legislation is there to protect them and actually trying to get them to engage with the police, to speak out if they're a victim as opposed to being fearful that they're just going to be prosecuted because they know they've been selling drugs, because they know they've been committing criminality.

[Multi-agency working – using the National Referral Mechanism]

Jayne: We've been successful in that, haven't we, quite early on actually? So, in one of our areas where we have a Complex Safeguarding response and they work closely with our Barnardo's Independent Child Trafficking Advocates, we were informed about a young man who was from Greater Manchester, but he was charged in another part of the country with having Class A drugs. He got notified, one of the Youth Defendant Services up here got notified because obviously he was a young person from our area. Actually, we came together and had a multi-agency meeting that included the Youth Defendant Services, Children's Services, police and the Modern Slavery Unit, myself, the Independent Child Trafficking Advocate, and we were able to review all the information about that young man and come up with a decision that we were very clear he was exploited, that he'd ended up there because he was actually exploited and sent there to sell drugs. We used all of that to put in a defence for him with the NRM (National Referral Mechanism) and, actually, we were successful and he wasn't actually prosecuted for those offences. He's been able to be supported and moved out of the area because that's what he chose, he wanted to do that, move on, and get him settled in another part of the country with ongoing support.

Actually, we were only able to do that by bringing those people together and having those conversations. No one agency can do that on their own, and that's one thing that we know is coming up time and time again as a challenge, I think, for practitioners around criminal exploitation, certainly. Around, like, the NRM and when you submit it, when you don't submit it, and is it right for criminal exploitation? There are lots of different messages, and we're very clear that, you know, if you've got a concern, you think somebody is exploited, yes, you do submit it. But if you can sit down as a multi-agency and get more in-depth knowledge and understanding of what's gone on for that young person, or an adult, you know, you can put a much more informed NRM forward would actually support that person, and you're more likely to get a better outcome for them. So, we're very clear it's those partnerships that make that work. What I would say really helps having the police and Children's Services together and the Complex Safeguarding teams, the Complex Safeguarding workers have lower caseloads, so while they're social workers, they are not carrying out the statutory function.

[Partnership working with children, young people and families]

There are statutory social workers in the area teams, they will have a role that's more around engagement with those young people, spend lots of time getting to know them, developing that trusted relationship, and they share a wealth of information around them. Those young people know that they work very closely and are co-located with police officers and youth offending workers and with health, and with other partners. By being able to develop those relationships, we get to find out more what's going on with those young people, and we can use that together jointly to give them the best support we can in a system that's probably not very well designed to respond to some of these issues because, you know, it's quite difficult. A lot of these risks are outside of the family home and, actually, we need to be able to support families and young people to, you know, work through these risks, particularly when there are threats around organised crime. So, it's absolutely crucial we do it as a partnership, but critical to that is how we obviously support young people and families through the process.

Kate: You've spoken about raising awareness within communities and how you've tried to adjust the culture of silence. Could you expand on how you've been able to work with and learn from the community?

[Community work – listening and acting]

Jayne: We've done work with specific, like, community groups, particularly with youth projects. So, when we developed our Trapped Campaign, actually, we worked with The Factory Youth Zone in North Manchester, and that's a youth project that works with lots of young people who access it all the time and do different activities there. We worked with them to come up with the idea of what the message should be and what we should call it, and we worked with the local youth, sorry, theatre company, to devise our first campaign film and we've worked with them a couple of times. We're going to obviously look at other areas and do a very similar thing. What we don't want to do is design campaigns, materials, messages, and say this is what it is because, actually, it needs to come from the other way around. So, we do have forums that we link in through our Complex Safeguarding steering group, we have some operational groups. We have the NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) forum as well that Challenger runs that we link in with a range of NGOs who, kind of, come together. It's bi-monthly now, isn't it, and share information and talk proactively about what's happening and help each other see what other support is out there, different services that are there. So, we've got different networks that we do that with, with young people, with the NGOs, and in different forums really. We, kind of, will bring those messages back and see how that will inform how we change as move forward and how we develop our services.

[Transitional safeguarding – exploitation doesn’t stop at 18 years old]

The Modern Slavery Unit over the past four years have been really great at engaging with adults, particularly where there have been concerns, modern slavery and trafficking concerns, and providing links into the NGOs through an NGO forum that was set up by Stop the Traffik. There was a Stop the Traffik worker based within the Modern Slavery Unit whose role really was around setting up the NGO networks. We could access support and obviously look at different services. I think that was really helpful in linking into NGOs where there were concerns around adults being identified. I know, certainly from a Complex Safeguarding perspective, some of the teams are looking at an all-age Complex Safeguarding team and are building in that transition element because we know very clearly the magic age of 18, you know, people don't just stop being victims or don't stop needing support. We need to be able to support them all the way through, and I know there are some excellent examples, I know Rochdale had a team that was set up around sexual exploitation. They've recently been able to support on some visits around a case where there were concerns that linked both adults and children around exploitation. I'm sure Debbie will be able to give you some more detail about that.

I would just say, I think there is a gap when it comes to adults from an adult services perspective because many of the cases, I think, that we've referred in previously, it's not quite met the threshold, and that's been a big challenge for us because the concerns haven't always been around somebody's capacity to consent or specifically around health concerns. It's actually been around them being a victim of trafficking, and some of those issues related to them potentially then being homeless and other things that we might need to provide support around. I think they're the areas we've probably struggled most with. I think we've moved on a bit and I certainly think, as we're developing a response with the Complex Safeguarding teams where they're having an all-age approach, or at least having an adult worker based in there to, kind of, help them navigate through some of the issues around the legislation and the services, we're starting to see some shift in that. Certainly, as I've mentioned, we've had quite a recent case in Rochdale where there's been some quite good success, hasn't there, Debbie?

Deborah: Yes, so they've been really proactive from that area, so having had a lot of awareness training around criminal exploitation, they've traditionally been looking at one particular organised crime group involved in large-scale drug dealing Class A drugs across the whole of the borough. Following some inputs around criminal exploitation, traditionally, the approach to tackling an organised crime group, particularly dealing with drugs, will be to look at the importers, the people moving around the large quantities, and attack, prosecute those individuals. What the team did, which was groundbreaking really, was look at some of the phone lines and look at some of the phone traffic and cross-match that with some of the young people who had already been open to services, particularly around CSE (Child Sexual Exploitation). What they identified is that some of those young people were the ones who were involved in dealing the drugs, so instead of looking at the phone traffic in relation to the importers, they looked right at the end of that phone track to look who were the dealers, and a lot of those dealers were previous CSE victims, but not just ones who were known, but also very young people. Their approach to looking at that was to obviously safeguard, and within that group of victims, there were also a number of vulnerable adults who were being cuckooed as well.

[Safeguarding as opposed to criminalising people]

What they didn't want to do was have the onus and the pressure of those children and vulnerable adults to provide all the evidence for that case. So, they looked at how they could corroborate the intelligence so that those people would never have to go to court. So, a lot of it involved evidence in the telephony, but the team went out and actually spoke to some of the end users, the drug users who were buying from the children. A lot of them were really morally outraged really, the fact that, albeit they still needed to buy the drugs, the fact that they were being sold drugs by children, a lot of them were quite willing to come forward and say, 'Actually, this is wrong,' and provide statements, which was really good. I know that the NRM isn't from an investigative point of view, it's there to support victims, but having had a number of positive NRM decisions in relation to, say, twelve children, that supported the case as well because we were able to say, 'Look, we've got twelve positive decisions here around twelve young people.' So, it was really important, and what was really good is that that case was brought to trial without ever having to have any vulnerable adults or young people give evidence, which was great. From the outset, that team actually looked at it from a safeguarding perspective rather than criminalising the people that they were coming across. You know, you looked at some of those individual cases, there were children, boys as young as thirteen, fourteen, who'd been groomed within such a short period of time.

I don't have a lot of experience around CSE, the experience I have around criminal exploitation is that a grooming process can be really quick. It's a case of, certainly in this case, children wanting, so they want the designer stuff, they want that status, they want to stand out. They want that persona, so they were being given extravagant clothing and gear so that they could walk around with, and then they were being taken off them really, really quickly. In order to get them back, they had to, you know, at first, in one case, sell a little bit of weed, cannabis, and then within a couple of weeks, progressing to being driven around and dealing Class A drugs, and also committing crime against other OCGs (Organised Crime Groups). So, you can see the threat to those young people, it's not even just about drug dealing now. It's about actually being targeted by rival drugs OCGs because they're being forced to commit criminality against them too.

[Cuckooing]

Kate: From what you've been saying, it seems that often exploited adults are not getting the support they might need. As it can be quite difficult to navigate an individual's capacity, choice, coercion, consent and exploitation, perhaps it might be helpful if you could describe what cuckooing might look like to help professionals more easily identify people and knowing when to share this information.

Deborah: So, we have an example of a vulnerable male. He was a professional, and unfortunately lost a member of the family who took his own life. Life then spiralled out of control for him, he developed a drug habit which then led him to have a drugs debt that then led him into a situation where an Organised Crime Group were then using his address. So, they were taking his benefits, he wasn't eating, he lost a significant amount of weight within a very short period of time. He was being beaten horrendously and, for him, it got to the point where he literally had to physically escape because he took a really severe beating. Now, for it to have got to that stage, there must have been clues along the way. There must have been professionals who were involved with him, neighbours, other family members, who perhaps could have spotted those signs but, for him, it got to really the end of the line where he had no choice because whichever way he went, whether he came to the police or whether he remained with the OCG, the threats were horrendous and it would have had terrible consequences for him. So, I think what's really important is that spotting the signs, the awareness for professionals, for members of the public, for police officers.

I know that his address then became an address that was used to sell drugs from, so the police would have been to that address. Neighbours would have heard the commotions that were going on. Health is huge, isn't it, because a lot of these young people, vulnerable adults, must be presenting at A&E (Accident and Emergency Departments), so as a multi-agency, we all need to spot the signs, understand, talk to each other, share information because, again, I think, certainly for a number of agencies, that can be a prickly subject, can't it, around data protection and stuff. Ideally, we wouldn't want to get it to that end stage, as it happened for that person, who ultimately consented to going into the NRM, so the National Referral Mechanism, but, again, that's only for a limited amount of time. There has to be a plan for when that person then comes out of the NRM and where he will be housed and have some kind of risk assessment plan in place that, again, has to be multi-agency to make sure he's adequately safeguarded, you know, in the future.

[The impact of bereavement and trauma on people’s lives]

Jayne: I think the point you made about bereavement at the start there is quite important. We did some work, I think it must be about four years ago now, with the Home Office and UCLAN (University of Central Lancashire). Across Greater Manchester, there were, I think, five areas, and it was classed as young people's pathways into organised crime. Technically, they were young people who were being criminally exploited when you started to look through it further, but the research that we did, or the work that was done and then UCLAN came in and evaluated it, it was very clear for all of those young people who ended up on that trajectory to getting involved in organised crime in some way or another, there'd been some significant bereavement or significant trauma right at the start of that pathway. Often, the bereavement was around, for the males, a male role model and that loss of a male role model, and then they were, kind of, it made them more vulnerable to being targeted and groomed and exploited then, which were predominantly older males then within that. But I think that was a really significant thing that we learnt from that that we need to apply looking at criminal exploitation as well because, for lots of the young people, there is some form of trauma that may have occurred that has meant that they are vulnerable to being targeted or groomed for some specific reason. I think that's something that we don't often always ask the questions about why. We deal with, kind of, the presenting issues, but we don't always ask the questions why and look at those underlying issues for young people and their families. I think that's something we need to start doing differently to be able to actually respond to this much better.

Kate: Are there any key ways that social workers can support a proactive and positive multi-agency response?

[Improving multi-agency working]

Deborah: I think close working and sharing information. Like I said before, it can be a touchy subject but, for instance, thinking about one incident, I know we debriefed an ongoing operation which involved exploitation of children and adults. Some of the findings from that debrief were that I think social workers were sometimes having information that, for them, was just day-to-day stuff and weren't aware that actually if the police had known that, it wouldn't have meant they'd have taken enforcement activity or anything that would have compromised their relationship with that person. Actually, that little piece of information might have been a tactic for the police to safeguard that person better. So, for instance, if a social worker picked up on the fact that a young person they were working with was being driven around by a member of, you know, a gang or whatever, or in a particular vehicle, there might be interventions that the police could have took [sic] in relation to that person that could have safeguarded somebody. So, I think sharing information is so, so important, working together because, again, I think that sometimes there are misconceptions around, 'Oh, we all have different roles.' I think we all have the same role, and it's about safeguarding and doing the right thing by victims. Certainly, in Manchester, in Greater Manchester, having the Complex Safeguarding teams working together, it makes absolute sense because we do all have the same objectives and goals. By talking to each other, particularly when we're co-located, I can only see great benefits from it really.

Kate: If people want to know more information about the work you're doing here in Greater Manchester, is there a way they can contact you or find out more?

Jayne: Yes, there is a Programme Challenger website, so that's Programmechallenger.co.uk, and there's lots of information, strategies posted on there, and campaign information around Trapped, modern slavery and other information regarding how we're tackling organised criminality across Greater Manchester.

Kate: Brilliant. Thank you every so much for that, and thank you so much for your time this afternoon. It's been really helpful.

Jayne: It's alright. Thank you.

Deborah: Thank you.

[Outro]

You've been listening to the Research in Practice and Research in Practice for Adults podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Why not share with your colleagues and share your thoughts on Twitter? Tweet us at @researchIP or @RIPFA [please note @ripfa is not in use, please contact us @researchIP]. Thanks for listening.