‘How I escaped a county lines drug gang’
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Hundreds of children are recruited each year by brutal county lines gangs around Britain. Thanks to Action for Children, Jay found a way out.
By Joe Shute, senior feature writer
Christmas 2021, Jay* turned up on the doorstep of his family home, gaunt and dishevelled. The then 18-year-old, who has special educational needs, had disappeared for over a week, sent by a gang from his native north-east to sell drugs from a squalid address in a city in the Midlands.
‘He looked terrible when he came back,’ his mother, Elizabeth*, recalls. ‘He wouldn’t make eye contact or communicate. It was like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. It was horrific.’
This had been Jay’s life for the previous two years after becoming embroiled in what is known as county lines, a tactic increasingly adopted by criminal gangs in which children are groomed and recruited to sell drugs nationwide. From the age of 16 he would slip out from the family home in the dead of night and disappear across the count...
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