Enticed by free trainers and cash, children are being drawn into the county lines drug world - held by gangs as modern-day slaves to act as their runners and dealers on the streets.
Police chiefs in Essex have recorded a quadrupling in the number of children under the age of 16 arrested for drug dealing.
In 2017, there were 15 arrests of children under the age of 16 for supplying controlled substances. Last year it was 53.
But many are now seen as victims of modern-day slavery. In a method to ensure they are controlled by gangs - that a senior Essex Police officer says “chills the blood” – children are now being in gangs in what is described as “debt bondage”.
Detective Inspector James Healy said police are now more focused on tackling what is now seen as a form of modern-day slavery – for which the courts are increasingly prosecuting criminals higher up the network.
He added safeguarding activities around diverting people away from gangs and keeping them permanently away saves lives.
DI Healy said: “We are all very firmly focused on not just actually getting out there to disrupt these county lines and putting people behind bars, as effective as that is, it is that exploitation bit as well and that work is really important.
“Because that is genuinely about homicide prevention. Those people you are seeing murdered up and down the country are the sort of people our early intervention is diverting from that world."
Those held in debt bondage may be made to run or deal drugs for free to ‘repay’ the debt incurred when drugs or cash are seized by police in an arrest that could have been initiated from a tip-off from the gang itself.
DI Healy said: “It chills the blood, but the information coming to us could easily have been given to us from a criminal network – the same drug line – that that runner was working for.
“They were informing on that runner in order to make that person even more dependent on the drug line than they were before.
“They lost all the drugs, all the money they made and the person controlling them can say ‘you owe us £100 and you’ve lost all our drugs’.
“You see that young people, vulnerable people, looked-after children are being enticed into this world with promise of free trainers, cash and then they’re in and all those rewards they were getting at the beginning have gone and they are in debt bondage.”
Detective Sergeant Mark Ghosh, who is in charge of six officers focused purely on safeguarding children and vulnerable adults, added: “It wasn’t long after the modern slavery act came into existence that we recognised that children and vulnerable adults being forced to deal drugs is a form of forced labour – ergo modern slavery and human trafficking.”
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