A growing number of young women and girls are being recruited into the drug trade by “county lines” gangs. The syndicates are offering beauty treatments such as botox and lip fillers to lure these vulnerable individuals into criminal activity, according to a new report by The Independent.

For context, county lines are a form of criminal exploitation where urban gangs persuade, coerce or even force children and young people to store money or sell drugs on their behalf.

Nowadays, hangs have become increasingly “sophisticated” in their methods of exploiting children, with drugs, dangerous firearms, and weapons frequently being transported by vulnerable people, such as young mothers or girls in economically precarious situations.

According to St Giles Trust, a charity that works with people facing disadvantages such as homelessness, long-term unemployment, and severe poverty, there have been incidents in the West Midlands where teenage girls have been offered nonsurgical treatments such as lip fillers and beauty products to groom them into carrying out criminal activity.

Young mothers, on the other hand, have been manipulated into smuggling guns and drugs within their prams to avoid detection.

“We have seen a massive shift across the Midlands of more and more female children being exploited. What they’re being manipulated with is botox, fake eyelashes and fillers,” Jade Hibbert of St Giles Trust told The Independent.

“It used to be designer handbags or clothes but what we’re seeing is more perpetrators paying for treatments,” Hibbert continued.

Due to deeply rooted sexism, young women are often associated with inconspicuous characteristics such as nurture, calmness, care, and propriety, making them valuable for criminal organisations because they are less likely to attract attention from the police.

And since these operations of country line gangs are hard to track due to their insidious nature, the true scale of the problem remains unknown due to a lack of a solid dataset.

Indeed, crime statistics about gang violence are primarily focused on offences committed by young men, turning these young women into invisible victims.

Johnny Bolderson, a senior service manager for Catch 22, which specialists in County Lines support and rescue told the publication: “We are constantly having to fight for awareness and to say this person is a victim of county lines exploitation.”

“It’s not just women and girls gangs have been targeting,” he said. “We’ve seen a slight focus on targeting LGBTQIA+ youngsters, we’ve had three recent referrals. It’s the same as stopping a woman and girl on the train—the confidence to stop and search them just isn’t there.”

He added: “It’s just a natural progression. These gangs want to avoid detection so they go for a cohort that is less likely to be stopped.”

Charities like the St Giles Trust have warned that this lack of confidence among the authorities and police officers to correctly identify county lines exploitation has resulted in vulnerable groups failing to be recognised as victims sooner.