County Lines as Modern Slavery: Saving Vulnerable Communities ‘From their Own Kind’

Abstract Chapter 2 unpacks the ‘making’ of county lines drug dealers as both victims and perpetrators of modern slavery offences. It investigates how the county lines narrative became logical to think with, and what it tells us about the workings of state power. Contrary to the dominant story of newness, the discovery of ‘modern slavery’ on home soil was not unprecedented, nor did it come out of nowhere. Rather, it brought the logic of earlier neo-abolitionist efforts to the national scene, as the British government’s ‘war on gangs’ became repurposed to protect vulnerable children from ‘criminal exploitation’, ‘modern slavery’, and ‘human trafficking’. And yet, the state’s binary of victim and perpetrator, slave and trafficker, also breaks down when we turn to the voices of those caught up in the street-level economy of heroin and crack cocaine. I argue that far from constituting a neutral, less even a benevolent narrative, the story of ‘saving’ the vulnerable has revived a colonial logic of redemption that constructs Black, racialized, and working-class youth as in need of saving from themselves, for their own good, and with dramatic implications for those targeted by policing and legislative efforts.