Ruthless drugs gangs are ‘grooming’ youngsters and recruiting them through online gaming, MPs are warned
- The social welfare campaign group Catch22 warned MPs yesterday
- The group added that the pandemic has pushed young people to online gaming
County lines drugs gangs are recruiting youngsters through online gaming, offering tokens and gifts to win their trust, MPs were warned yesterday.
Children as young as seven are among the 27,000 in England used to run drugs for ruthless gangs, according to Johnny Bolderson, of social welfare campaign group Catch22. He warned that youngsters spending more time online leaves them vulnerable to recruiters.
‘Online gaming and social media is the foundation of online grooming,’ he told the Commons education select committee.
‘The pandemic pushed young people towards online gaming: exactly where exploiters and groomers want them to be.
County lines drugs gangs are recruiting youngsters through online gaming, according to the social welfare campaign group Catch22
‘They [gang members] are tapping into a world that parents just don’t understand.’
The warnings come as British Transport Police said it had seen messages sent by drug dealers to children asking ‘who wants to make £500 this weekend?’.
A survey of 1,500 boys aged between 13 and 19 commissioned by the BTP found almost one in five knew someone who dealt or transported drugs.
Banning mobile phones in schools would help restrict access gang members had to children but would not fix the problem by itself, Mr Bolderson added.
‘I don’t think it would stop it, I think the pressure they [children] would get from their exploiters to make sure they do have their phone on them might increase,’ he said.
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The gang recruiters were so sophisticated that they were even researching support groups like Catch22, which provides intervention services for young people at risk, to improve methods of targeting vulnerable youngsters, Mr Bolderson told MPs.
‘The gangs are using exclusion and will fish for information and will contact support services like ourselves trying to understand what is in place to support a young person,’ he said.
‘We have recently had a phone line connected and they will phone us trying to find out what support is in place.
‘It is a business model, we are talking about a lot of money these gangs have got and if we are going out there challenging this then you are challenging a multi-million pound business.’
BTP set up a county lines taskforce in 2019 which has since arrested 2,250 suspects linked to the gangs, 40 per cent of whom were aged under 19.
Of the under-19s, just 20 per cent have faced criminal charges because so many were recognised as victims of exploitation.
Detective superintendent Gareth Williams said the youngest his team had encountered was a boy aged 13.
‘In that case the couple controlling him to courier drugs were jailed for over 12 years,’ he added.
‘We’re relentless in our pursuit of these heartless human traffickers, and we are utilising modern slavery legislation to ensure they serve adequately lengthy jail terms.’
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