Street gangs and coercive control: The gendered exploitation of young women and girls in county lines
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211051513 |
| Author | Tirion Elizabeth Havard,James A Densley,Andrew Whittaker,Jane Wills |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211051513
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2023, Vol. 23(3) 313 –329
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/17488958211051513
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Street gangs and coercive
control: The gendered
exploitation of young women
and girls in county lines
Tirion Elizabeth Havard
London South Bank University, UK
James A Densley
Metropolitan State University, USA
Andrew Whittaker
London South Bank University, UK
Jane Wills
London South Bank University, UK
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.
Corresponding author:
Tirion Elizabeth Havard, School of Health and Social Care, London South Bank University, 103, Borough
Road, London SE1 0AA, UK.
Email: havardt@lsbu.ac.uk
1051513CRJ0010.1177/17488958211051513Criminology & Criminal JusticeHavard et al.
research-article2021
Article
314 Criminology & Criminal Justice 23(3)
Keywords
Abuse, coercive control, county lines, exploitation, gangs, violence against women
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 ser-
vice 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 vic-
timisation 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, thus foregrounding the vio-
lence and abuse girls and young women experience and contextualising the roles and
functions they play in gangs.
Young women and girls in gangs and county lines
The precise gender makeup of UK gangs is unclear (Centre for Social Justice, 2014;
Haymoz and Gatti, 2010). London’s database of purported gang members (see Densley
and Pyrooz, 2020) records females as only 0.6% of the population, perhaps because
gangs are perceived by police as a mostly male preserve (London Assembly, 2019). Yet
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).
The fact that gang research focuses mainly on men (and is written by men) means
young women’s experiences in gangs have historically remained ‘hidden’ (Medina et al.,
2012). Most of what we know about gender and gangs comes from the United States (see
Decker et al., 2022; Panfil and Peterson, 2015), where research finds women tend to be
involved in less serious violent offending than their male counterparts (Miller and
Decker, 2001). However, women in gangs still face an increased risk of violent victimi-
sation and intimate partner violence, including rape (Quinn et al., 2019; Wesche and
Dickson-Gomez, 2019). This is partly because ‘street culture . . . promotes hyper mas-
culinity, sexual conquest, sexual aggression, and sexual objectification of women’
(Valdez, 2007: 111).
Women in gangs were more likely to have experienced familial neglect or abuse than
their male counterparts, or females not involved with gangs (De La Rue and Espelage,
2014). A recent study comparing and contrasting the experiences of female gang mem-
bers in Los Angeles, the United States, and Glasgow, Scotland, found that women
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