When Kate (not her real name) decided to quit “county lines” drug trading she nearly lost her life. She told the dealers she worked with that she wanted to go home and started packing. But when she tried to text her mother to tell her she was coming home, she was shot by one of the dealers she had been working with.
“I thought it was game over but I didn’t let myself go as I wanted to see my mum. That was the only person who went through my mind and I thought, ‘I’m not letting go,’” she says.
Kate, who was 17 at the time, managed to get to hospital and was in a coma for eight days. The impact of the shooting has had lasting consequences and she will have to take medication for the rest of her life.
Now aged 19, Kate became involved in county lines dealing – when urban gangs use children to traffic drugs in out-of-town locations using mobile phones or “lines” – when she was 14, dealing heroin and crack. Excluded from school, she ended up in a pupil referral unit, where she says she learned more about “going cunch” or “OT” (out there), as county lines dealing is known.
“I got involved at a young age, and grew up around it. I had family members in and out of jail and in gangs ... I started running away from home aged 14 and kept going back and forth,” she says.
Her family never wanted her to get involved, but she ended up dealing anyway.
She says she ran drugs all over the UK, from London to Basingstoke, or Cambridge and Oxford. She would be driven out to the countryside and left to operate from someone’s house while she dealt drugs – a practice known as “cuckooing”.
“Usually the person whose house we were in would be getting drugs for letting us stay. I was away for as long as the drugs lasted. When they ran out I would come back to the area and the same routine would begin again,” she says.
She says demand in the countryside for drugs is huge and that on a good day she could make between £2,000 and £3,000. Kate was reported missing by her family many times, she says, although the police never found her. “I never felt unsafe, but of course some would. You are a girl going up [to the countryside] and you don’t know what people will do to. You could get raped or killed up there. Smokers out in country ... are way rougher than they are in London, they will just pull out a knife on you and say, ‘give me your stuff or I will put this knife in you,’” she says.
The deeper she got into that world the harder it was to get out, she says, and the people around her started to show their true colours, leading to the day she tried to leave and was shot.
While recovering in hospital, Kate was spotted by social services and the St Giles Trust, a charity that helps young people facing severe disadvantage.
“They found me a new place to live ... I don’t think the police or the government would have done anything. .”
“Once you get yourself into county lines, it’s hard to get out ... Kids need to be taught what is right and what is wrong. No one could not do anything for my generation but maybe they can for young ones now before it’s too late.”