‘Cuckooing’, ‘Mate Crime’, and ‘Remote Mothering’: Securitizing Vulnerability at the Front Line

Abstract Chapter 5 moves to the frontline professionals who have the responsibility to safeguard victims of criminal exploitation and modern slavery. In a context of ‘austerity localism’ where local authority bodies have experienced severe funding cuts, the frontline professionals I shadowed agreed on a central point: that the tools of multi-agency partnership work and data sharing, central to the enforcement of modern slavery policies at the front line, offered an opportunity to safeguard those most vulnerable to criminal exploitation. And yet, reality was not so simple. In their efforts to identify individuals ‘at risk’ of county lines involvement, professionals also came to closely monitor individuals, even—or perhaps especially—where no crime had been committed. Such monitoring further acted as a basis for developing classificatory knowledge about ‘suspect’ communities that reconceived of intimate relations as a site of coercion and exploitation. Frontline responses are best understood as forms of techno-moral governance that deepen, rather than depart from, the logics of pre-emptive policing central to the government’s domestic ‘wars’ on enemy populations. Thus, the rise of vulnerability constitutes yet another facet of liberal order building that works through the securitization of everyday life in racialized and working-class communities.