Understanding and Preventing Cuckooing? Victimisation : County Lines and Beyond

Providing a comprehensive and contemporary understanding of the phenomenon of cuckooing, this volume is a timely insight into this longstanding practice whereby individuals or groups take over a person’s home and use the property to facilitate exploitation.

Adopting a variety of methodological approaches and empirical data, this collection brings together the existing research base on cuckooing activity that occurs both within and beyond County Lines drug distribution. Drawing attention to the array of cuckooing scenarios that do not involve County Lines operatives, as well as those that do, the book reclaims a space for habitually overlooked victims. The circumstances and structures that facilitate home takeovers are also discussed, alongside recommendations for prevention and intervention initiatives.

Bringing together contributions by researchers from a variety of disciplines, Understanding and Preventing ‘Cuckooing’ Victimisation is an essential read for scholars and students in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, social policy, social work, housing, health, and education. It is also a valuable resource for professionals and practitioners involved in policy design, adult safeguarding, and crime control.

Laura Bainbridge is an Associate Professor in Criminal Justice in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the founder and chair of the Cuckooing Research & Prevention Network and the UK Compulsory Sobriety Network. Laura’s scholarly interests lie at the nexus of social policy, criminology, and political science. She specialises in violence reduction and innovative qualitative research methods. Her recent research has explored cuckooing victimisation, child criminal exploitation in county lines and local drug markets, enforced alcohol abstinence, and cross-national policy imitation.

Rose Broad is a Professor of Criminology and is currently Head of the Department for Criminology at the University of Manchester, UK. Rose’s research interests include human trafficking, modern slavery, responses to violence, organised crime, the management of offenders, and prison education. Her recent research has explored consent, coercion, and fraud in human trafficking relationships and temporal measures of modern slavery victimisation. Rose’s background prior to academia was as a practitioner in criminal justice institutions, and she continues to maintain links with practitioners and policymakers, developing research into practice and research impact.

Amy Loughery is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre, University of Leeds, UK. Her research primarily focuses on criminal justice interventions that comprise both care and control of marginalised populations with dependence on drugs and/or alcohol. Amy is an active member of the Cuckooing Research & Prevention Network and was formerly a Research Fellow on an N8 Policing Research Partnership study and two Research England-funded projects dedicated to understanding, preventing, and disrupting cuckooing victimisation.