The early 1990s saw a spate of cases involving young people, apparently in the care of various councils, running amok. The cases of ‘Rat’ and ‘Spider Boy’ highlighted how ill-equipped the criminal justice system was in managing young people caught up within social services care, and the debate of balancing the interests of protecting these children and the safety of the public at large was never more exposed. Money was spent on increasing the provision of secure accommodation units and the laws were relaxed so that the prosecution no longer had to prove doli incapax, the presumption in law that children aged under 14 did not know the difference between right and wrong and were therefore not capable of committing an offence.

Twenty-five years later we again see a crisis with children in the criminal justice system. Today the issue of ‘county lines’ has arisen and has become the blight: a social pandemic where vulnerable children are exploited by criminal gangs to pedal drugs across the country. County lines does not just involve children being encouraged to take part in large scale drug dealing, it also involves them becoming embroiled in the violence that is so often associated with it – the rise in knife crime and shootings correlates directly with these societal problems.