Surviving in the Margins: Understanding Children’s Perceptions and Experiences of Child Criminal Exploitation and County Lines

This thesis explores perceptions and lived experiences of criminally exploited children aged 9-18. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews, the study deepens understanding of children’s victimisation within the framework of county lines exploitation, adopting a trauma-informed and public health lens to uncover the causes of the causes that lead to increased vulnerability.Findings reveal that children are coerced into criminal activities within county lines networks at very young ages. Even at 9 years-old, these experiences are daily occurrences, more ad hoc and opportunistic than the organised and prolonged grooming typically presented in intervention strategies and awareness campaigns. This generates a cohort of younger “invisible victims” seldom heard, and seldom safeguarded. Children’s accounts portray environments underscored by exposure to violence, weapons and drugs, leading to a "learned apathy" toward danger and an ambivalence regarding safety. This results in a skewed sense of acceptable risk – ‘is it safe enough?’. Externalised as bravado, such behaviours mask children’s visceral fear, and reflect deeply rooted survival responses formed from multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences and trauma. Serving as a barrier to victim-identification, this is misinterpreted as voluntary recklessness and complicity in criminality rather than an attempt to reclaim control and power by children existing on the periphery of society whose agency is repeatedly denied. This prevents children receiving vital protection, instead leading to criminalisation and intensified victimisation.This study concludes with a new application of “fawning”: a survival response by children to “please, appease and pacify” county line exploiters, not just for safety but to ascertain a sense of belonging, security, autonomy, and status thus creating trauma-coerced bonds. Children’s marginalisation and socioeconomic strain culminates in a fatalistic worldview - with school exclusion representing a pivotal moment that entrenches negative self-perceptions and sense of hopelessness. This demonstrates the cyclical nature and complex dynamics of marginalisation, vulnerability and victimisation presented in this study.