Street gangs and coercive control: The gendered exploitation of young women and girls in county lines

Tirion Elizabeth Havard,Andrew Whittaker,James A Densley,Jane Wills

doi:10.1177/17488958211051513

Tirion Elizabeth Havard, Andrew Whittaker + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211051513

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Abstract

This article explores young women and girls’ participation in gangs and ‘county lines’ drug sales. Qualitative interviews and focus groups with criminal justice and social service professionals found that women and girls in gangs often are judged according to androcentric, stereotypical norms that deny gender-specific risks of exploitation. Gangs capitalise on the relative ‘invisibility’ of young women to advance their economic interests in county lines and stay below police radar. The research shows gangs maintain control over women and girls in both physical and digital spaces via a combination of threatened and actual (sexual) violence and a form of economic abuse known as debt bondage – tactics readily documented in the field of domestic abuse. This article argues that coercive control offers a new way of understanding and responding to these gendered experiences of gang life, with important implications for policy and practice.

Highlights

This study contributes to the growing literature on female gang involvement in Britain (e.g. Batchelor, 2009; Beckett et al, 2013; Deuchar et al, 2020; Firmin, 2011; Harding, 2014; Young, 2009; Young and Trickett, 2017) and the criminal exploitation of children and young people in ‘county lines’ drug sales (Harding, 2020; McLean et al, 2020; Spicer, 2021)
Professionals reported that they felt girls and young women were becoming increasingly involved in gang activity: There’s lots of females getting involved : that’s a growing trend, definitely. (Participant 8, female statutory sector professional)
When this idea was explored further, there was an acknowledgement that it was difficult to ascertain the true nature and extent of young women’s involvement in gangs, in part because they were less visible on the streets and because no agency was centrally or systematically tracking the prevalence of female gang involvement: There’s a silence around it as there is in most communities around gangs

Summary

Introduction

This study contributes to the growing literature on female gang involvement in Britain (e.g. Batchelor, 2009; Beckett et al, 2013; Deuchar et al, 2020; Firmin, 2011; Harding, 2014; Young, 2009; Young and Trickett, 2017) and the criminal exploitation of children and young people in ‘county lines’ drug sales (Harding, 2020; McLean et al, 2020; Spicer, 2021). In-depth interviews and focus groups with criminal justice and social service practitioners in London, England, revealed that an evolving county lines business model of drug distribution (Whittaker et al, 2018, 2020a) has facilitated the recruitment of girls and young women into gangs, exposing them to uniquely gendered risks of victimisation and ill treatment. Existing narrow, gendered constructions of gangs and gang membership, in turn, have obscured the violence and abuse perpetrated by gang-involved men against women. The theory of coercive control is offered as a way to make sense of interviewees’ accounts of this gender-based vulnerability, foregrounding the violence and abuse girls and young women experience and contextualising the roles and functions they play in gangs. Other sources using different definitions of gangs and gang membership, and different samples and methods, including school-based surveys, estimate that almost half of gang members are female (Alleyne and Wood, 2014; Auyong et al, 2018; Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2018)

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