COVID-19 and Child Criminal Exploitation: Closing Urgent Knowledge and Data Gaps on the Implications of Pandemic for County Lines.

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The number of potential victims of modern slavery referred to the National Crime Agency's National Referral Mechanism has risen consistently since the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. A significant contributor to this rise is the emergence and prominence of Child Criminal Exploitation, typified by 'county lines' trafficking, where narcotics gangs use groomed children and 'cuckooed' properties to export and sell drugs from larger metropolitan areas in rural towns and villages.COVID-19, specifically the social distancing measures designed to slow rates of infection, will affect both the illegal activity and the responses to it. The pandemic's impacts require an urgent response in the areas of detection, enforcement, prevention and safeguarding. By interviewing key frontline multisectoral stakeholders from police, NGOs and others in the statutory sector, and analysing appropriate data, we will identify any changes to criminal business models and modus operandi, and subsequent impacts on safeguarding, offering recommendations for mitigation and other remedial interventions. We will investigate whether changes to criminal practice will prove more profitable and/or lower risk, thus facilitating a long-term reconstitution of criminal behaviour that is more difficult to detect and more resilient to the effects of future exogenous shocks such as the one caused by COVID-19.