A scorching new documentary has revealed how thousands of UK children are being sexually abused by gangs to smuggle drugs.
The Channel 4 production, Britain's Child Drug Runners, exposes how children as young as seven have drugs inserted inside them to traffic and sell Class A drugs like cocaine.
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"If a person is putting drug wraps up a child's anal cavity, that's sexual abuse," Katy Harris, lead analyst at the South East Regional Crime Unit, says in an interview in the doco.
"Usually, it does require an additional person to do it. They will put multiple wraps into that anal cavity, and it's not something that's easy to do. And you have to be shown how to do it and taught how to do it."
Experts say the drugs are inserted inside the children's body cavities to avoid detection - which can have deadly effects for the youths.
Custody Sergeant Steve Clark at Thames Valley Police took one young girl into custody after she was caught carrying drugs.
"Her first words were, 'There's a Kinder Egg inside me that's burst'… Because that's a medical emergency she was sent to the search room and we called an ambulance. She still had another Kinder Egg which she said she could feel was opening," he says.
"If the drugs burst, they've got very little time to live. It's really high risk, really dangerous."
Last month, Phil Brewer, the ex-head of the Metropolitan Police's anti-slavery squad, said thousands of children in Britain are estimated to be used by gangs to carry drugs from cities to rural areas.
The number of suspected British child slaves referred to the government last year for support more than doubled to 1421 - from 676 in 2017 - amid rising concern from police about the growing so-called 'county lines' drug trade.
And police are blasting middle-class cocaine users for fueling the use of children by drug-trafficking gangs.
"I think a lot of people just don't want to think about that. You might have someone who buys Fairtrade bananas and works really hard to buy organic... but at the same time could be buying powder or crack cocaine from a county line which has involved the plugging of a child," Harris says in the documentary.
And she has a blunt warning to drug users - remember how the drugs they're doing got to them.
"It's something that we would encourage users to think about," she says. "Over 90 percent of the drugs that people are consuming has got faecal matter on it."
Newshub.
