Abstract
‘County lines’ drug supply has grown into a powerful cultural, criminological and political concern in the UK. In recent years, the criminal law has been mobilised, through the use of anti-trafficking and modern slavery legislation, to increase punishments for those found responsible for the exploitation of children. In this paper, I use insights from actor-network theory (ANT) to explore the first test case in which judges authorised this strategic repurposing of legislation. By opening up the ‘black box’ of legal thinking, my aim is to both scrutinise the technical forms of practice that make up criminal lawmaking and to situate such practices within a broader cultural apparatus of blame.
Introduction
Few institutions in the UK remain untouched by ‘county lines’ drug supply. This refers to the long-distance transportation of illegal drugs across areas or county boundaries, often involving the use of children or vulnerable people, and using designated mobile phone ‘lines’ to conduct trades. A range of organisations, including religious groups, foster care organisations, health agencies, schools and third sector organisations have produced reports and guidance on identifying suspicious activity related to county lines (Clewer Initiative, 2022; Houghton, 2022; Wigmore, 2018). It has also been the subject of multiple television and radio programmes and at least one film (County Lines, 2019), and there is now a well-funded County Lines National Coordination Centre. The National Crime Agency (2019) emphasises the distinctiveness of this form of offending, describing the practice as a ‘new export model’ involving increased levels of violence between rival gangs, the exploitation of vulnerable groups, particularly young people, and the need for tougher criminal justice responses. Unique features of county lines offending are said to include a reliance on technology such as mobile phones, and elements of exploitation that include coercion, debt bondage and forced labour (Atkinson-Sheppard et al., 2023; Coomber and Moyle, 2018). Concern about the phenomena has recently led to the use of anti-trafficking/modern slavery legislation to punish those involved more severely (Stone, 2018), although police forces have been pressing for more severe punishments since the early 2010s (Spicer, 2021).
Criminological studies on ‘county lines’ have drawn attention to various problems with the framing and impact of these policies and practices within modern slavery and trafficking. They suggest that this framing reinforces racialised policing methods and the victim/offender binary that is deployed in them is reductive (Atkinson-Sheppard, 2024; Bhattacharyya et al., 2021; Coliandris, 2015; Densley et al., 2023; Koch et al., 2023; Windle et al., 2020). However, the precise ways in which trafficking and modern slavery legislation, hitherto reserved for dealing with cases of criminal exploitation across borders, has been mobilised in court cases relating to the domestic drug trade have not been subject to significant scrutiny, despite having far-reaching effects (although see Stone, 2018).
In this paper, I aim to deepen our understanding of drug supply as a problem of modern slavery and human trafficking by focusing on the role of the criminal law, and particularly the first test case, Karemera and others (2018), in which the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act 2004 (amended by the Modern Slavery Act in 2015) was used to prosecute drug suppliers. The case, heard in the Court of Appeal, involved three defendants who were found guilty of both drug supply offences and, later, human trafficking offences on the grounds that they used under-18 as couriers. Using theoretical and methodological insights from actor-network theory (ANT), and related work on ‘ontological politics’ (Mol, 1999), I scrutinise the court transcript of the case, which details the judicial reasoning behind the decision. In what I call an onto-cultural approach, my intention is, first, to open up the ‘black box’ of legal thinking by closely examining the technical forms of practice that produced realities about county lines offending. Second, I explore the ways in which the receptiveness of these legal practices and realities makes sense according to cultural patterns of blaming. This approach thus involves both recognising the specificity of legal practices, and the fragility of realities about criminality that are made in court (the ‘ontological politics’ of knowledge-making), while also attending to the cultural apparatus of blame under which some ontologies, and not others, are preferred by judges (Carvalho, 2023; King and Valverde, 2025).
This line of inquiry provides important insights into judge-made processes of criminalisation and the strategic role of courts in reproducing cultural patterns of blaming. I draw attention to the ways in which judges ‘entangle’ and ‘bracket’ (Blomley, 2014) different objects and subjects to arrive at particular outcomes, producing knowledge about offending and harm. These practices enabled drug-trading activity to be constituted as a problem of child slavery, rather than economic need, and frame relations between individuals as necessarily victimising. They also enabled facts and principles to be presented as obvious, neutral and incontrovertible, rather than fragile and potentially ‘otherwise’ (Latour, 2010). I then consider how the realities produced by the Court reflect the use of punishment to resolve social anxiety about gangs, drugs and youth, and a collective sense of powerlessness in the face of inequality and criminality (Carvalho et al., 2025). I suggest that, by reproducing bifurcated categories (trafficker/trafficked; exploiter/victim; agentic/dependent), and reinforcing punishment as the solution to the complexities of county lines offending, the courts promote a reassuring image of a social order that otherwise feels lacking. Before discussing these observations and the case of Karemera and others in more depth, I begin by reviewing existing criminological critiques of the county lines phenomenon, followed by an explanation of the methodological and theoretical approach.
County lines and modern slavery: critical perspectives
The use of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA), and – before the MSA came into effect – the human trafficking clauses under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act 2004 (AIA) (s 4(4)(d)) to prosecute offenders who exploit young people by using them as drug couriers, have proved contentious. Although the concept of modern slavery is itself elastic and controversial, the MSA had universal, cross-party support (Carvalho et al., 2025). The initial aim of both statutes was to address human trafficking across national borders, with a particular focus on sex workers (Koch et al., 2023). The MSA introduced a defence for some offences, including those that are drug-related, for victims of exploitation (s 45).
The National Crime Agency was influential in driving forward the links between county lines and modern slavery, not least, argues Jack Spicer (2021), because the language of slavery aligned with the perceived ‘monstrousness’ and ‘gang-related’ nature of the activities. However, there was scepticism about the use of human trafficking and modern slavery laws to prosecute suppliers from the very beginning, both among researchers and third sector organisations as well as law enforcement officers. According to Spicer (2021), when guidance was first introduced, frontline police officers doubted that enforcement under anti-slavery provisions would be feasible or effective in deterring behaviour. Similarly, criminological researchers, including Densley et al. (2023), criticised the ‘standard story’ of county lines, including the premise that tougher sentencing measures were appropriate or would prove effective. The two parts of this story are that, first, county lines represents a marked shift in the organisational and economic rationale within drug markets and, second, that it foregrounds the concept of ‘vulnerability’ within discussions about policing and prosecution. The authors argue that people migrate from cities for personal and family reasons, not just ‘at the direction of gang leaders’; that there is an overemphasis on mobile phone usage as a driver of changing markets; and that the focus on child criminal exploitation is reductive. They also indicate that, while some participants in their research were ‘demonstrably vulnerable and exploited’, many others ‘were habitual offenders who entered into county lines of their own volition, fully embracing a life of deviant entrepreneurship’ (Densley et al., 2023: 101). Their position aligns with other work that has problematised the apparent binary distinction between victim and offender in the drug trade; for example, because of how young people exhibit agency as a response to marginalisation and exclusion (Atkinson-Sheppard, 2024; McLean et al., 2020). It also corresponds with a body of work that has sought to critique normative understandings – and hyperbolic framings – of human trafficking and modern slavery and the lack of evidence for simplified formulations of perpetrator/victim or choice/compulsion (Doezema, 2010; O’Connell Davidson, 2013; Weitzer, 2015).
Other researchers position the emergence of county lines within racialised discourse on criminality. Koch et al. (2023) argue that the ‘discovery’ of county lines provides a new means of disproportionate criminalisation ‘in the name of saving the vulnerable and the poor’. They found that those identified as affected by county lines were disproportionately black and male, and that ‘[t]he same young person who was identified as a “lave” and as “criminally exploited” by one set of authorities could face charges for drugs or, more seriously, for human trafficking [or] joint enterprise murder’ (Koch et al., 2023: 5). Bhattacharyya et al. (2021), meanwhile, argue that the phenomenon ‘is about familiar crimes (read: urban, black) occurring in new places (read: non-urban, white). The real fear is that black criminality is migrating out of black urban enclaves and spreading, virus-like, into unsuspecting parts of the country’ (p. 33). A critique shared by many researchers is the focus on individual vulnerability or accountability in county lines discourse and practice, to the detriment of structural factors including poverty, race and gender (Moyle, 2019). The methodological and theoretical approach in this paper both builds on these important contributions and departs from them in ways to which I now turn.
Brackets, jurimorphs and entanglements: a methodological approach
In this section, I address the relevance of ATN for understanding Karemera and others. I then consider how legal practices and ontologies are informed by the cultural importance of blame in managing social insecurity and anxiety, and the value of an ‘onto-cultural’ perspective to understanding criminalisation. ANT focuses on materiality, relationally and the agency of non-human forces and objects (Latour, 2005). Although ATN has been used in criminology, the approach in this paper is distinctive in three ways. First, the use of ANT by criminologists has focused on human–technological interactions, such as the use of CCTV (Robert and Dufresne, 2015), rather than on processes of criminalisation. Second, although there is a rich body of criminological work on criminal lawmaking (Becker, 1963; Gusfield, 1963; McNamara et al., 2019), much of this concerns the development of statutes, legislation and institutional reforms, rather than judicial precedent-setting that occurs in courts. Third, although sociologists of law have applied ANT perspectives to judicial decision-making and reasoning (Latour, 2010; McGee, 2015), the implications of these findings have mainly been assessed in the context of legal studies rather than criminology.
According to ANT, the criminal law must be understood as a regime of truth that ‘stabilises’ entanglements of humans and non-humans (Cloatre, 2018). Contrary to doctrinal, normative or structural perspectives, criminal lawmaking is not, therefore, simply a response to a given (or preordained) formulation of harm or risk, or a consistent and stable ‘reality’ that is out there for all to see. Rather, it is contingent, unstable and precarious. Levi and Valverde (2008: 820) point out that ‘Much like a laboratory experiment, legal outcomes are uncertain before a decision is reached; yet, the result is somehow regarded as representing a synthesis of existing rules and principles’. The point is not simply to criticise decision-making as an unjust process or the reflection of unequal power dynamics (although it may be both those things), but to consider the foundations upon which normativity is being enacted (Cloatre and Pickersgill, 2014).
If we fail, therefore, to explore and unwrap a given set of what Kyle McGee calls ‘legal devices’ – assemblages of non-legal beings that have been mobilised to give consistency and direction to a specific legal trajectory – we give way and defer to a set of ‘black box’ values including neutrality, objectivity, certainty and the rule of law (McGee, 2015). McGee uses the term ‘jurimorph’ to explain the connections that are made, omitted or discovered when objects (such as phones, drugs or trains) and subjects (children, drug suppliers and so on) are drawn into the path of the law. As explained below, the resultant jurimorphs – for example, ‘exploitation’ or ‘trafficking’ – comprise the (fragile) entanglement of these objects, resulting in, for example, obligations or punishments. That is not to say that these terms, trafficking or exploitation, did not exist outside, or prior to, legal discourse, but that they obtain a specific legal character through jurimorphing (see also Seear, 2020). An ANT perspective also recognises objects themselves as ontologically unstable and ‘multiple’ rather than fixed and decided (Mol, 1999). Exploring the ‘ontological politics’ of a given text, such as court transcripts, means recognising that the ‘real’ and the ‘political’ are intertwined, and that ‘reality does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather shaped within these practices’ (Mol, 1999: 75). Legal meaning-making must therefore be understood as an inherently political exercise. Terms such as exploitation, slave and even child are not neutral or even consistent categories, but are rather made in court during deliberative practices.
In the analysis of the judgment below, I also draw on Nicholas Blomley's (2014) related work, and particularly his consideration of legal ‘bracketing’, which he explains as: [T]he attempt to stabilize and fix a boundary within which interactions take place more or less independently of their surrounding context. That which is designated as inside the boundary must be, in some senses, disentangled from that identified as outside. (Blomley, 2014: 4)
To reiterate, scholars such as Latour and Blomley focus on legal practices themselves, avoiding constructionist or structuralist discussions about how power or punishment operates or manifests. However, while attending to such practices, I also explore the ways in which the ‘receptiveness’ of these legal practices and ontologies makes sense culturally – what I term an onto-cultural approach. This approach is informed by the work of Carvalho and Chamberlen (2018), who examine the ways in which punishment is inherently affective and consider the role of blame in managing social insecurity and anxiety. They argue that criminal justice measures, including the infliction of pain and violence, are a means to direct attention away from social structures and towards the actions of dangerous criminals. This idea relies on the notion that punishment can produce a ‘kind of solidarity that allows individuals to pursue emotional release together with a sense of belonging, without having to question or address why it is that they felt alienated and insecure in the first place’ (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2018: 228). Building on this idea, Carvalho (2023) considers the law of ‘joint criminal enterprise’, whereby co-defendants are held equally responsible for an offence. He argues that this has been ‘conditioned by a specific danger formation centred on the racialised and hostile construction of the image of the urban gang and the dangerousness of gangsters,’ which is in turn relied upon and reinforced, both symbolically and materially, by the criminal law (Carvalho, 2023: 337). The danger formation concerning the gang is rooted in two kinds of interrelated forms of anxiety, namely a fear of violent urban crime and a more ‘general insecurity about socio-political fragmentation and uncertainty’, including the rise in poverty and inequality (Carvalho, 2023: 346). These anxieties are then channelled in a way that ‘essentialises’ underlying issues and focuses feelings of hostility upon specific populations earmarked for blame (namely black young men).
Integrating ANT and cultural perspectives on criminalisation through an onto-cultural approach can create, I suggest, opportunities for challenging apparently objective interpretations of criminality or wrongdoing. Our understanding of the politics of criminal knowledge-making can also be strengthened by an appreciation of the cultural and affective context in which ‘realities’ about exploitation find a receptive audience in court. As Blomley (2014: 13) argues, certain ideas may be successful not necessarily because of their correctness, but because of ‘their ability to mesh with and constitute a receptive world’. In what follows, I first pay closer attention to the technical forms of practice that produce knowledge about county lines in Karemera and others. I then situate these findings within a broader understanding of affective punishment and its function in preserving a hegemonic civil order.
The case
Karemera and others involved three defendants who were found guilty of drug offences. They were subsequently tried for further trafficking offences in 2018, contrary to section 4(1A)(b) of the AIA, on the grounds that five children, between the ages of 14 and 16, as well as one adult, had been involved in the operations. This AIA was in force until 2015 when it was replaced by the MSA. However, the definition of exploitation as applied to children (section 3(6)) remained unchanged. The AIA applied in this case because the incidents all took place prior to 2015. The case was first heard at Woolwich Crown Court in 2016. The Crown Court judge ruled there was no case to answer, and that the matter should not be left to a jury. The prosecution appealed, and the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial. This was widely publicised as a landmark judgment aimed at deterring county lines activity (Garcia, 2024). The Crown Prosecution Service and the Youth Justice Legal Centre emphasise the importance of the case on their websites. The judgment has been cited favourably in subsequent reported cases, both in relation to county lines and other matters (see, for example, R v Stephens (Ajay) [2022]; R v DPP [2022]).
The relevant clauses of the AIA, paraphrased here but discussed further below, state that someone commits an offence if they arrange or facilitate a person to travel within the UK with a view to that person being ‘exploited’. A person is exploited if they are encouraged, required or expected to do anything, or subjected to force, threats or deception designed to induce them to provide services or benefits to another person. They must have been chosen for that purpose on the grounds that they are young or otherwise vulnerable. The Crown Court judge was not persuaded that the children were ‘chosen’ by the defendants on the grounds of youth or that travel had been arranged or facilitated. Moreover, and significantly, she disagreed that the children ‘were deprived of the ability to consent’ (para 19) and found ‘it difficult to accept that a child cannot agree to participate in a criminal act’ (para 24). She added that ‘To leave this to the jury would be to risk penalising [the defendant] for having chosen, if he did, [child] not because he was plainly ready, willing and able to do so but for the artificial basis that he was less than 18’ (para 24). The Court of Appeal ultimately agreed with the prosecution that there was no need to prove the absence of consent or lack of willingness, only that the child had been chosen because of their youth, and that someone older would likely have refused (para 23). In the following sections, the ways in which questions of age, capacity and exploitation were entangled in the judgment are examined in more depth.
Entangling age, ‘youth’ and capacity
The translation of human trafficking and modern slavery legislation into the county lines context, which in turn rested on the assertion that people under 18 years old are incapable of consenting to participate, was therefore novel. However, in arriving at their decision, the Appeal judges acknowledged that this translation, framing the drug supply activities as instances of exploitation, was ‘far from easy to construe’ and relied on the work of lawyers who had ‘assisted us substantially in clarifying the meaning’ (para 63). At the same time, lawyers in the lower court were complicit in the ‘false’ or incorrect understanding of the law by the Crown Court judge as she was ‘led into error by the arguments of all parties which proceeded upon a variety of false bases’ (para 63). The implication was that the ‘real’ meaning was a priori – waiting to be discovered by higher court judges – rather than formulated during proceedings as lawyers sifted, selected and performed legal arguments. As we shall see, this is an important part of lawmaking because, by entangling various legal devices and objects, ‘law brings off the miracle of proceeding as though, by particular linkages, we were held to what we say and what we do’, even though ‘there is neither real continuity of courses of action nor stability of subjects’ (Latour, 2013: 370).
It should be acknowledged that the adaption of legislation to suit new circumstances is not unusual, although it is rare for provisions to be transposed into a completely new context. In relation to other areas of the law, adaptions have tended to reflect innovations, such as the discovery of a new method for creating embryos, affecting the interpretation of legislation on the licensing of clinics (R. (Quintavalle) v. Health Secretary [2003]), or changing business practices leading to novel interpretations of company law (Arden, 2008). Scholarship on the processes or values that guide English and Welsh courts in this respect is limited, although courts must only interpret the law and not attempt to ‘cure a gap in a legislative scheme’ (Arden, 2008). Judges may therefore need to determine what Parliament intended when drafting the legislation. The Court of Appeal judges cite a case concerning the trafficking of children to grow cannabis (R v K (M) [2019]), concluding that: ‘the statutory purpose of section 4 is clear; it too was designed to protect the vulnerable from trafficking with a view to exploitation and to comply with the state's duty derived from various international instruments’ (para 44.). This assertion appears to be incontrovertible, both in terms of the moral logic of protecting the vulnerable, and because of the judges’ claim that the intention of Parliament was self-evident. However, as the judges go on to discuss, questions relating to ‘vulnerability’, ‘trafficking’ or ‘exploitation’ proved more difficult to assess, and the techniques of bracketing and jurimorphing were required to perform the ‘reality’ of county lines exploitation into being. This was achieved by entangling various facts relating to age, capacity and recruitment with the principle of parliamentary intention and a variety of value-objects. These techniques were productive, creating not only lines of separation but new zones of relations.
First, they referred to the legal age of childhood in the Children Act 1989 (17 or under), and concluded that ‘youth’ for the purposes of trafficking was commensurate with childhood. This interpretation was not inevitable. A recruiter in their late teens or early twenties might also be considered ‘young’ and therefore a victim if caught couriering. Once the nature of ‘youth’ was established, a key question for the Court was whether those under 18 can consent to involvement in couriering drugs. Importantly, the couriers who were the subject of the allegations refused to give evidence in court. When arrested, they insisted that they had not been exploited, knew what they were doing and were aware of the risks. One offender, Wabelua, later claimed that he saw no difference between the 16-year-old runner and his 20-year-old self while they worked together. Wabelua had also been subject to similar forms of couriering as a teenager, had been homeless and felt he had limited options to make money. According to a New York Times article for which he was interviewed, [T] hey [Wabelua and the couriers] had grown up in the same corner of southeast London, played soccer in the same fields and smoked marijuana at the same parties…They both sold drugs to make ends meet…The 16-year-old runner held similar views. (Gebrekidan, 2022)
Again, this decision was not inevitable. It departs from other legal provisions relating to capacity and consent in relation to under-18s in UK law. Regarding sexual consent, for example, there is a presumption that men and women can give legal consent to either opposite or same sex relations from the age of 16 (Sexual Offences Act 2003). Under the Family Law Reform Act 1969, 16-year-olds are presumed to have capacity to consent to medical treatment. The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales remains at 10 years old, one of the lowest in the world (Children and Young Persons Act 1933, s 50).
From an ANT perspective, however, the bracketing of age and capacity created not only lines of separation between immaturity/maturity and autonomy/dependence, but also a new framing of the relationship between the parties. Evidence to suggest that they may – in their own words – be friends, peers and/or contemporaries was excluded, or left outside the bracket. The relationship was defined as one of exploitation, attributing relative agency, maturity and invulnerability to the recruiter as much as incapacity, vulnerability and immaturity to the courier. Agency was also constituted as individual, stable and atomised, rather than relational or formed intra-action (Barad, 2008). Work on the ‘ontological turn’ in childhood studies has questioned this tendency to presume ‘that a particular sort of being is realized through the exercise of a particular sort of agency’ and whether this reflects the contingencies of daily life (Spyrou et al., 2018: 5). For example, the evidence to suggest that the runners may have made active and informed decisions to participate, dismissed by the Court of Appeal, accords with research suggesting that ‘victims’ of county lines may in fact express agency through their roles as ‘deviant entrepreneurs’, as discussed above (Densley et al., 2023). The judgment not only constitutes a working relationship between over-18s and under-18s as inherently suspicious and unequal, but also infers that children can only express themselves in ways that accord with normative expectations of innocence and vulnerability. As King and Valverde (2025) argue, judges are themselves aware that claims about various phenomena, such as children/childhood or traffickers, are not simply the result of differing interpretations of facts/principles but competing ontologies.
This is not to suggest that exploitation does not occur, or that there is no need to identify instances of victimisation and to protect those who are vulnerable. The point, rather, is to draw attention to the specificity of legal practices and their role in producing knowledge about county lines and in ‘making’, rather than simply interpreting, relations. The stabilisation of the child (victim)–adult (exploiter) categorisation may also have served a broader purpose. As discussed further below, this constitution of relations provides a reassuring image of a stable social order in which unscrupulous gang members recruit and exploit innocent victims, thus assuaging unconscious feelings of powerlessness in the face of the frightening, yet structurally complex, circumstances in which the drug trade operates (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2018).
Making exploitation
The Court's reading of the actions and state of mind of the exploiter/trafficker, and particularly the question of recruitment, were also instrumental to the decision. Aside from the bare fact of the victim's age, the Court was asked to determine the extent to which a young person's age must be the only ground on which they are selected to participate in exploitative activities. The judges found that age need only be one consideration among many, and not even an important one. In this section, I suggest that, in citing then ‘bracketing’ off other factors that may have contributed to the decision to recruit, such as willingness and gender, the judgment constituted exploitative relations as irreducible to the question of age alone. In addition, I consider other technical forms of practice involved in these legal processes, particularly the use of analogy or comparison to frame these seemingly immutable outcomes as preordained, rather than unpredictable and unstable.
Section 4(4)(d) of the AIA states that B is exploited if (and only if) a person uses or attempts to use him to provide services or benefits or to enable someone to acquire benefits ‘having chosen him for that purpose on the grounds that— (i) he is … young … and (ii) a person without the … youth … would be likely to refuse to be used for that purpose’. It had been argued by the defence in the prosecution in the Crown Court that the courier's youth had to be the sole ground. The lower court judge accepted this argument (para 21), noting that although the word ‘solely’ did not appear in the relevant provision, the phrase ‘if (and only if)’ at the beginning of section 4(4) did effectively mean ‘solely’. In the Court of Appeal, this was challenged by the prosecuting barrister, who claimed that ‘There is nothing in the 2004 Act that explicitly requires youth to be the sole or determinative characteristic behind a decision to use him or her’ (para 22). She said, therefore, that age would be a significant factor, but ‘not to the exclusion of all else’ (para 22). This would otherwise place an undue burden on the prosecution. The judges agreed that youth need only be one of the reasons for the ‘choice’, and not even the most important factor, concluding that: ‘Ground’ is another ordinary word and includes ‘cause’ or ‘reason’. The question of causation is not one determined by an overly literal reading of the statutory language. In the present context the prosecution need only establish that the age of B and the likelihood of an adult refusing are two factors, possibly amongst many others, which formed a part of the defendant's thinking. Each ground must be ‘a’ factor but need not be the ‘main’ or ‘principal’ factor. This is not a strict ‘but for’ test. (para 54)
However, my argument is not that the Appeal judges erred in focusing on age, but that the process of translation and bracketing resulted in a characterisation of drug-trading activity as a problem of child slavery rather than economic need, and that this in turn relies on an understanding of relations between potential co-workers as necessarily victimising. As discussed further below, rather than simply focusing on the final decision of the Court, interrogating the means by which judges make decisions in such circumstances reveals the ontological politics of lawmaking and the Court's role as both a producer and adopter of cultural approaches to blame.
In arriving at this decision, the judges made use of terms such as ‘ordinary word’ and ‘overly literal reading’ to frame the decision as rooted in irrefutable interpretations of everyday language. Similarly, in relation to travel, ‘arranging’ is explained to be ‘a common word which in our view needs no further explanation’ (para 43). This points to the ways in which the court may read a given provision either literally, or in the spirit of the legislation (according to parliamentary intention), depending on the circumstances of the case and the discretion that it affords itself. It may draw on dictionary definitions, other unrelated case law, and even archaic texts to explain its decision. While this would suggest that ‘common sense’ is an important guiding ‘value-object’ in the service of interpreting statutory language, it also functions to present the outcome as stable, natural and inevitable, potentially obscuring the normalisation of hierarchies and power relations.
This reading was also apparent in the Court's use of analogy. The judges drew on the interpretation of laws on dangerous driving to establish whether age needed to be the primary factor when traffickers were choosing their victims. They engaged in an analysis of case law in relation to the causing of death by dangerous driving under the Road Traffic Act 1988. They pointed out that, according to judicial precedent, the defendant's driving need not be the ‘substantial’ or even major cause of death, and only needed to have contributed more than ‘minimally’. The judges cited an extract from another judgment: [T]he meaning of causation is heavily context-specific and that Parliament (or in some cases the courts) may apply different legal rules of causation in different situations. Accordingly, it is not always safe to suppose that there is a settled or ‘stable’ concept of causation which can be applied in every case. (para 57)
1
By bracketing causation as it applies to exploitation with that which applies to road traffic accidents, the Court established and simplified a causal pathway between the actions of the recruiter and the involvement of the young person. The victim's contribution to their own death, or in this case the willingness of the courier, are immaterial. This once again upheld a normalising representation of adult–child relations, whereby under-18s are innocent and incapable and over-18s are competent and rational. The techniques of bracketing and comparison served to broaden the circumstances in which individuals may be held culpable for exploitation, thus appeasing anxiety about county lines offending – through punishment – without the need to further interrogate the context in which such activities occur. The implications of this analysis are considered further below.
Non-human relations: tickets, phones and spatial boundaries
In addition to age boundaries, the arranging or facilitating of travel across geographical boundaries had to be established to hold someone liable under county lines provisions. Although organisations such as the National Crime Agency state that county lines do not exclusively occur across police and local authority boundaries, 2 the use of child couriers within such boundaries has not thus far attracted significant concern or policy attention. Arranging travel within a more localised area, such as between London boroughs, has not been judged to constitute ‘trafficking’ in any reported cases. However, according to the release of the County Lines Strategic Threat Risk Assessment covering the period from April 2023 to March 2024, by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), county lines are changing to become ‘more localised’ with ‘fewer lines running outside force boundaries and fewer children recorded by the police as involved in any capacity’. 3
According to the court transcript in Karemera and others, the defendants arranged or facilitated travel for the couriers by, for example, arranging taxis, meeting the courier at the railway station, travelling with them and giving directions for travel from London to towns and cities on England's south coast (para 6). The use of mobile phones was central. Recall that county lines is so called because it is a term used to describe the use of dedicated mobile phone lines to facilitate long-distance drug supply. In this judgment, and in others on county lines offending, the phone is an essential source of evidence, along with the name given to a specific ‘line’ (for example, the ‘Duffy Line’ and the ‘Fly Line’). Both the physical instrument and the digital records obtained from phone companies were used to demonstrate drug supply activity. Considerable importance was attached to text messages, calls and the ‘co-locating’ of devices ‘suggestive of drugs availability coinciding with [the courier's] trips’ (paras 11–12).
The language of the mobile phone line is instructive, because – in the same way that brackets or boundaries may be productive as well as reductive – a ‘line’ can indicate both boundary and connectivity, or separation and unification. While others have argued that the use of mobile phones, as well as other technologies, are the outcome of social network processes that have transformed drug markets (Barratt and Aldridge, 2016; Friis Søgaard et al., 2019), an ANT perspective views the phone not simply an inanimate object that is engaged through human agency but has agency itself. It demonstrates the exploitative relationship or connections between the defendant and the courier, and the boundary between the urban ‘home’ of the drug gang and the rural or provincial locality where the exploitation is taking place. The phone is not just a means of communication, or a technical device, but an actant that affords, changes and makes relations (Latour, 2002). In the judgment, the agency of the phone was amplified yet also diminished because it only afforded a particular kind of unequal relations. This denied the possibility, for example, that those at either end of the line may have been involved in a consensual, mutually beneficial business arrangement.
The legal brackets engaged in the judgment also organised time and space. It mattered that the travel was to a smaller town or city, rather than another London borough, even if the distances may be comparable. The spatial boundaries between cities, towns, counties and boroughs were thus important in framing the activity as a particularly deleterious form of drug-trading activity. Travel was facilitated and arranged, rather than voluntarily embarked upon. The judgment's bracketing of phones and couriers, and the timing of text messages that coincided with couriers’ trips, were also important to this framing. However, as Blomley (2014) notes, brackets face ‘overflow’ (see also Riles, 2006). Hence, as mentioned above, the city/provincial distinction is unstable, the definition of ‘arranging’ or ‘facilitating’ is contingent, and children morph into ‘youth’ depending on whether they are regarded as a victim or an offender. Boundaries are thus not simply lines of separation, but zones of relationality that require work and attention to be maintained (Blomley, 2005).
Despite seeming that way, the decision was not inevitable but rather dependent on the streamlining and jurimorphing of various objects and relationships, human and non-human, into a specific legal trajectory. This in turn required the disentanglement of others that pointed towards a more complex or alternative ecology, making relations between objects and subjects anew.
Discussion
In this paper, I sought to open up the ‘black box’ of legal thinking in relation to county lines to understand how courts produce knowledge about victimisation, offending and punishment, and the cultural reasons for alighting on particular ontological interpretations. Using ANT, the analysis provides important insights into the ways in which criminal courts ‘entangle’, ‘jurimorph’ and ‘bracket’ different phenomena to enact knowledge about criminality. These practices produced drug-trading activity as a problem of child slavery which in turn relied on an understanding of relations between individuals as necessarily unequal and victimising. Age boundaries therefore signalled not only binary lines of separation, but new zones of relationality. I also considered the politics of comparison in legal deliberations, and the importance of understanding such techniques as a means of upholding normalising hierarchies, rather than the consequence of objective decision-making. The discussion then turned to the participation of non-human agents, such as the mobile phone, within legal practices and their role in framing relationships.
Using an ‘onto-cultural’ perspective, I argued that these practices should be understood within the broader context of punitive practices, and the courts’ use of punishment to resolve feelings of insecurity and anxiety, thus preserving a hegemonic social order (Carvalho et al., 2025). The county lines phenomenon assimilates a number of the insecurities and anxieties that characterise contemporary living, including socio-political fragmentation and the fear of violent, urban crime (Carvalho, 2023; Garland, 2001). It encapsulates long-standing, racialised fears about drugs, new technologies, threats to childhood (including from technology) and gangs. The standard images of gang members and drug dealers remain those of black young men from marginalised areas (Williams and Clarke, 2018), demonstrating that the ‘myth of black criminality’ remains very prevalent (Gilroy, 1982). For Carvalho (2023), this is a function of the link between civility and hostility since anxieties about social division are reconstituted as hostility towards specific populations earmarked for blame (i.e. black young men), who are then marginalised. As a result, ‘traits that would otherwise be seen as signs of vulnerability (such as socio-economic deprivation and exclusion) become reinterpreted as “markers of dangerousness”’ (Carvalho, 2023: 346). Blame is established through the use of circumstantial evidence and ‘markers’ of gang activity, including phone records, appearances in Rap and Drill videos, tattoos and postcodes (Carvalho, 2023; Pitts, 2014).
In addition to racialised fears about gangs and urban disorder, discourses on county lines involve metaphors of disease that reveal cultural concerns about the contagiousness and corrupting nature of drug use (Flacks, 2018, 2021). The purity of childhood might in turn be understood as a metaphor for rural or provincial (white) ‘innocence’, both of which are under threat, in county lines imagery, from the infectious spread of urban disorder and black criminality. It is in this context that the creation of binary categories (trafficker/trafficked; exploiter/victim; agentic/dependent) must be understood not merely as the inescapable consequence of a rigid system of legal neutrality, but as a means of creating a reassuring image of social order that otherwise feels lacking. The choices between ‘competing ontologies’ (King and Valverde, 2025) and legal practices such as jurimorphing and bracketing do not therefore take place in a vacuum. Asserting culpability and advancing simplistic, punitive solutions to the complexities of county lines offending serve a cultural function by resolving unease about threats and our apparent inability to resolve them politically.
I have also argued that it is important to attend criminologically to judge-made criminalisation practices. The strategic role of the courts in constituting criminal activity has attracted less criminological scrutiny than other processes and institutions, such as parliaments or other public bodies. McNamara et al. (2019) argue that a ‘processes’ approach may cultivate a more ‘rigorous assessment of the quality of decisions and actions that expand or contract different modalities of criminalisation’ and promote deeper analysis of the ‘relationship between the processes by which criminal laws are shaped and re-shaped’ (see also McNamara et al., 2018: 406). The decision in Karemera and others was not the consequence of internal, incremental changes to courts’ understandings of trafficking legislation, nor simply the objective interpretation of facts, norms and principles about drug trade activity, but the result of years of work by criminal justice agencies to bring supplementary sentencing powers to bear on drug suppliers. The Court of Appeal was an important actor in this process, producing knowledge about exploitation, capacity and harm, constituting relations between parties, and influencing policy on county lines offending. Given this impact, greater attentiveness to the specificity of judge-made criminalisation processes, and the ontological politics of knowledge production, within court decision-making is an important criminological project. This would include, for example, not merely troubling seemingly stable legal categories such as ‘childhood’ or ‘victim’, and the apparently objective and neutral criteria for establishing them, but examining the precise mechanisms by which such realties are enacted in court. An onto-cultural approach that both recognises the technical forms of practice that generate law, while attending to the cultural apparatus in which competing ontologies vie for position, can thus generate a richer understanding of the ways in which courts shape, rather than simply interpret, truths about criminality.
Case law
R v K (M) [2019] QB 86
R v Stephens (Ajay) | [2022] EWCA Crim 410;
R (on the application of COL) v DPP [2022] EWHC 601 (Admin)
Karemera and others [2018] EWCA Crim 1432
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.