Girls now account for over a fifth of county lines victims, charity data exposes persistent gender blind spots

When the national county lines support service, operated by the charity Catch22, released its annual caseload statistics for 2025, the headline figure that a little more than one in five of the identified victims were girls or young women did not merely indicate a demographic shift but also laid bare a systemic failure of many intervention frameworks to recognise, accommodate, and appropriately respond to the gendered dimensions of organised criminal exploitation, a failure that had previously been glossed over under the guise of a generic victim narrative.

According to the published data, the proportion of female victims rose from fifteen percent of the total caseload in the preceding year to twenty‑two percent in 2025, a rise that, while numerically modest, represents a relative increase of nearly fifty percent and thus compels a re‑examination of both the methods used to identify victims and the underlying assumptions that have traditionally rendered young women invisible within a predominantly male‑focused discourse on county lines activities; this upward trend, observed by a service that interacts directly with victims across the United Kingdom, suggests either an actual growth in female recruitment by organised drug networks or, more plausibly, an improvement in the capacity of services to label girls as victims rather than as willing participants, a distinction that has historically been muddied by gendered stereotypes.

Charities and advocacy groups, drawing on the same set of figures, have repeatedly warned that the prevailing ‘gendered understanding’ of crime – a framework that tends to associate drug trafficking and related coercion almost exclusively with male perpetrators and male victims – has systematically disadvantaged girls who, when caught in the same machinery of exploitation, are often dismissed as juvenile delinquents rather than as individuals in need of protection, a mischaracterisation that not only hampers access to specialised support services but also perpetuates a cycle of under‑reporting and policy neglect, thereby reinforcing the very blind spot that the new data now forces policymakers to confront.

In the context of these findings, the role of law enforcement and statutory bodies becomes especially salient, as the increase in identified female victims inevitably places pressure on agencies that have historically oriented their training, resources, and investigative priorities around a male‑centric model of county lines operations; the implicit expectation that existing protocols should automatically cater to all victims without adaptation reveals an institutional inertia that, despite being ostensibly committed to safeguarding vulnerable youth, remains ill‑equipped to address the nuanced ways in which young women are recruited, coerced, and silenced within the same criminal networks.

Ultimately, the rise to twenty‑two percent of female victims in 2025, as recorded by Catch22, functions less as an isolated statistical curiosity and more as a symptomatic indicator of a broader structural inadequacy that allows gender‑biased assumptions to persist within both charitable interventions and official responses, a circumstance that, unless corrected through deliberate policy revision, gender‑sensitive training, and the allocation of resources expressly designed to meet the distinct needs of girls and young women, will likely continue to produce an under‑recognised and under‑served cohort of victims whose experiences remain relegated to the margins of a discourse that has, for far too long, been satisfied with a one‑dimensional portrayal of county lines exploitation.

Published: April 19, 2026

Published: April 19, 2026