Children enslaved by county lines drug gangs are being rejected by councils even after they are referred for help, a leading charity claimed yesterday.
Local authorities are regularly turning a blind eye to drug runners as young as 12 who have run away from home because they don’t meet the ‘threshold for safeguarding’, according to St Giles Trust.
Evan Jones, head of community services at the charity, said half of their referrals to children’s services were ‘resisted’ because the victims weren’t abused at home.
St Giles Trust said local authorities are regularly turning a blind eye to drug runners as young as 12 who have run away from home
The charity has helped more children trapped in county lines gangs than any other voluntary sector organisation, but said many ‘blinkered’ councils still see children peddling class A drugs on the streets as a criminal activity that they chose to get involved in.
Senior officials, including local politicians and police and crime commissioners, still just ‘don’t want to know’ about the problem, he said.
Yesterday, Mr Jones called for a co-ordinated national response as he said local authorities needed to wake up to the ‘cult’ of county lines, so-called because of the phone lines used by gangs to sell and distribute drugs.
He spoke out after a Daily Mail investigation revealed the scale of the menace blighting Britain, which the Children’s Commissioner said could involve as many as 50,000 children.
The charity, which has centres in London, Cardiff and Kent, has been swamped by calls to help teenage drug runners all over the country from parents, police officers and social workers.
Among those they have helped was a girl of 14 being sexually abused in a house by drug users and dealers. In another instance a teenage boy was stabbed 15 times after straying into a rival gang’s territory.
The charity said it has been swamped by calls to help children from all over the country
Despite being the biggest charity in the sector, it can take on only a tenth of the calls and a number of the 60 to 70 children they help a year are rejected by their local children’s services.
‘I would say we get resistance on about half of referrals we make and then we get serious resistance on about 10 per cent – that’s really stonewalling, people who don’t want to take the case and are trying to find any reason not to,’ Mr Jones said.
‘One of the problems is the level of risk these young people are exposed to is not well understood by conventional children’s services and statutory services.
‘Social services tend to look at risk in the family home. For example, if a social worker came out to a house and found tin foil and a burnt spoon on the kitchen table they would probably whisk those children into care quick as you like.
Local MP Clive Lewis (pictured) said the scale is not surprising
‘But if one of those children aged 13 or 14 went missing for a week and as far as we knew they were in a crack house where there were dirty needles all over the place and vomit and people passed out in the corner, we have many occasions when we are told those children don’t meet the threshold for safeguarding because it is happening outside the family home. It is a blinkered thing.’
He went on: ‘There is a kind of a corporate blind eye being turned. People didn’t want to know about this issue.
‘We have been talking about it since 2012, it’s got better but there are still areas where it is not seen as a problem.’
Mr Jones said many social workers had no experience of county lines, unlike St Giles Trust which employs case workers who used to be drug runners.
On Monday, the Mail highlighted the problem of drug gangs in Norfolk, where police have made more than 700 arrests, including 126 children.
Yesterday local MP Clive Lewis said: ‘The scale of this saddens me but it is not a surprise.’