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“Back from the dead”
By summer 2017 Yarmouth was flooded with crack and heroin, brought in from London and dealt via the Deano county line.
A “county line”, is the police term for a phone number known to addicts, which is run by a criminal gang who source drugs in a major city and import them into regional towns and cities.
The dealers send bulk texts to their contacts over the phone line, and recruit vulnerable addicts and children to work as street level dealers and runners.
Into the gap in the market stepped Shaun Ellis, who ran the Chase line. His gang’s exploitation of teenagers was so egregious it led to the region’s first conviction for modern slavery in a county lines case.
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A dispassionate application of the law to the facts will only get you so far in the field of social justice law. To be truly effective, you must dig deep, listen, probe and bear witness to clients’ trauma.
But what effect does this have on the lawyers involved, and what can we do to protect ourselves and colleagues from the impact of vicarious trauma? These are the issues addressed in this book.
If you manage staff who represent traumatised clients, you may not be surprised to learn that lawyers exposed to vicarious trauma experience significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress; but you should at least be concerned to learn that a small pilot study of UK asylum lawyers found that 34.3% met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.