Problematising ‘County Lines’: Practitioner Constructions of ‘County Lines’, Exploitation, Vulnerability, and Agency among Care Experienced Boys and Young Men

This thesis examines how practitioners across a range of frontline services understand and
respond to ‘county lines’ drug supply, with particular attention paid to the involvement of
care experienced boys and young men. It seeks to explore how ‘county lines’ is
conceptualised, how care experience is constructed in relation to vulnerability and
exploitation, and how practitioners negotiate tensions between victimhood, agency and
culpability when responding to young people involved in drug supply. In doing so, the thesis
moves beyond dominant policy and media narratives that frame ‘county lines’ as a fixed
supply model and position young people as either passive victims or offenders.
Using a qualitative research design, the research draws on semi-structured interviews with
twenty practitioners and informal conversations with nine experts in children’s social care,
criminal exploitation and drug supply. The analysis is further informed by the researcher’s
own lived experience in the field, offering an embodied and reflexive perspective that
enriches interpretation, highlights the emotional dimensions of conducting research as a lived
experienced researcher, and foregrounds marginalised experiences often overlooked in
criminology.
The findings demonstrate that practitioner conceptualisations of ‘county lines’ are neither
uniform nor stable. Rather than representing a unified model of drug supply, ‘county lines’
emerges as a dynamic set of practices situated along a continuum within wider local drug
market activity. Definitional ambiguity, particularly regarding the role of geographical
distance, has implications for safeguarding thresholds, resource allocation and multi-agency
responses, producing inconsistent outcomes for young people, such as unnecessary
criminalisation, continued victimisation or inadequate protection from harm. The research
further shows that care experience is frequently framed through deficit-based and
deterministic narratives. This thesis challenges these deterministic and linear explanations
and instead, reconceptualises involvement in drug supply as materially and symbolically
meaningful within contexts of structural inequality, disrupted relationships, constrained
opportunities and systemic pressures within the care system. Finally, the thesis problematises
binary victim–offender frameworks and advances the concept of a victim–offender continuum to better capture the fluid and contextually situated nature of young people’s
involvement in drug supply. By foregrounding agency alongside exploitation, and by
highlighting the structurally produced nature of vulnerability within the care system, this
study advances a more nuanced understanding of drug-related exploitation. It calls for a shift
beyond reductive ‘county lines’ narratives towards relational, context-sensitive and
structurally informed responses that better account for the lived realities of care experienced
young people.