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This paper aims to present an analysis of a “county lines” safeguarding partnership in a large city region of England. A critical analysis of current literature and practice responses to “county lines” is followed by the presentation of an analytical framework that draws on three contextual and social theories of (child) harm. This framework is applied to the partnership work to ask: are the interconnected conditions of criminal exploitation of children via “county lines” understood?; do interventions target the contexts of harm?; and is social and institutional harm acknowledged and addressed?

The analytical framework is applied to a data set collected by the author throughout a two-year study of the “county lines” partnership. Qualitative data collected by the author and quantitative data published by the partnership are coded and thematically analysed in NVivo against the analytic framework.

Critical tensions are surfaced in the praxis of multi-agency, child welfare responses to “county lines” affected young people. Generalising these findings to the child welfare sector at large, it is proposed that the contextual dynamics of child harm via “county lines” must be understood in a broader sense, including how multi-agency child welfare practices contribute to the harm experienced by young people.

There are limited peer-reviewed analyses of child welfare responses to “county lines”. This paper contributes to that limited scholarship, extending the analysis by adopting a critical analytic framework to a regional county lines partnership at the juncture of future national, child welfare responses to “county lines”.

This chapter explores how children and young people become involved with County Lines gangs, and what issues Educators need to be aware of when working with a child or young person who has been ‘groomed’ into this activity. It begins with an overview of the policies which have framed young peoples' experiences since 2010, the proliferation of vulnerable contexts, and the resultant risk for particular groups of young people. It concludes that schools are one of the key agencies that may be able to identify early signs of young people's involvement in County Lines activities, and to act to ensure young people are given appropriate support.

This research underlines the usefulness of Civil Rights Geographic Information Systems (CR-GIS) for understanding the social struggles and assessing the critical needs of the disempowered population of Alabama’s “Black Belt.” The social struggles have been persistent for decades in the Southern states, particularly in Alabama. Researchers have recognized the political and historical root causes and implications for these social struggles. The geographic region of Alabama’s Black Belt is significant because it became the epicenter of the Civil Rights struggle and still represents the vestiges of the social policy known as “Jim Crow.”

Although GIS has a great potential to explore social and political struggles, currently, it is not profoundly associated with Civil Rights studies. This research employs CR-GIS to illustrate the impact of the disfranchisement caused by biased geopolitics in three selected cases/issues: (1) gerrymandering and voting rights, (2) transportation, and (3) poverty in the State of Alabama. While there has been some progress in overcoming the social struggles in the Black Belt, there is a need for qualitative and quantitative analyses to understand persistent social, economic, and Civil Rights struggles in the region. GIS could be a valuable tool to understand and explore the social struggles in the disempowered communities of the “Black Belt” in Alabama. By incorporating the existing information and conducting ground truth studies, this research will lay the basic foundation for extended research by creating a policy template for empowering the disempowered for better social, economic, and political integration in the “Black Belt region.”

To provide the results of research to evaluate the usability of a University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries digital initiatives project that provides online access to historical Aerial Photographs of Colorado.

This paper describes usability testing conducted as a part of a user‐centered redesign. The three stages of the evaluation – a requirements analysis, a heuristic evaluation, and user testing – are explained and the findings are discussed.

The usability testing revealed the needs of the project's target user group and identified issues with the interface that will be addressed in its redesign. It has also contributed to the larger understanding of how researchers use digital Aerial Photographs and their preferred methods of access and desired functionalities.

Results from the study will be used to guide the redesign of the Aerial Photographs of Colorado digital library and can be generalized to add to a broader understanding of the usability requirements for a digital library of geospatial materials. Libraries providing a digital collection of geospatial materials may use these findings to inform design decisions.

Much research has been done on the use and evaluation of digital libraries, but few articles have reported on usability studies of online collections of cartographic materials similar in structure to Aerial Photographs of Colorado. It is hoped that these findings will be instructive to librarians designing and evaluating similar digital libraries.

THE most important date in current British library affairs was undoubtedly May 6th, 1955, when the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act became law. In five laconic paragraphs it sweeps away the financial shackles which have been the exasperation, almost the despair, of our Scottish colleagues who until now were able to watch their English and Welsh ones, free from rate limits, able to lend library material one to another and able, of course all this with their local authority consent, to borrow money for legitimate library purposes. Now, Scotland is free too in all these necessary matters. The new Aft, of course, will have to be interpreted in conjunction with the existing Scottish Public Libraries Acts, and one clause, 3, which gives authorities power to revoke any decision they have made to adopt the principal Aft, may have repercussions not at present envisaged. However that may be, a new vista is open to a country which was always notable for its high valuation of education, and yet for a century withheld adequate means from its library service.

Child criminal exploitation (CCE) emerges from the complex interplay between potential targets, motivated perpetrators and conducive environments. Drawing on contextual safeguarding and rational choice theory. The purpose of this paper is to explain the relational dynamics that lead to CCE in terms of complex systems.

This paper reviews the existing criminological and public health perspectives on CCE and compare against current assessment protocols used to identify child victims of exploitation.

Findings demonstrate a conceptual and empirical flaw in existing practice. This flaw can be understood in terms of a failure to include both environmental conditions and the perpetrator’s motivation when trying to prevent CCE.

To correct this, this paper develops an original systemic model called circles of analysis. This model builds on contextual safeguarding to overcome this identified flaw by also including perpetrator motivation to develop a Systemic Investigation, Protection and Prosecution Strategy.

It is worth considering as to whether our model can be scaled up to look at trafficking of children and adults for modern slavery, servitude, forced and compulsory labour in different contexts and jurisdictions. Alongside this, is there capacity to build perpetrator behaviours into the contextual safeguarding model?

The potential for further development and alignment with the principles of contextual safeguarding is tantalising, and it is hoped that the contribution to this important special edition will open up new avenues for collaboration with both academics and practitioners who are concerned with protecting children and combatting CCE.

This strategy is uniquely designed to improve how police and social workers identify and investigate CCE and safeguard potential victims and survivors.

Much has been written about the role of information and communications technology (ICTs) as a principled input of the “new economy”. Much has also been written about the demise of older industrial regions and local economies. In a populist narrative about contemporary society it seems that the world of the new entrepreneurial dot.com businesses is in the ascendancy, while the older industries of steel, shipbuilding and general manufacturing reflect some bygone time of mass employment and standardised production. But does the logic of the industrial age necessarily feed into the logic of the new economy? Perhaps, despite the rhetoric of the knowledge driven economy, the informational age and the network society, there is nothing inevitable in such development. However, there is evidence of a concerted effort by local and regional governance agencies to initiate planning and policy for ICTs as a regeneration tool. This is, in fact, an empirical study of how, why and when places pursue strategies for ICTs. The locus of study is the North East region of the UK. This is a region built on the heavy industries of deep coal‐mining, shipbuilding, steel‐making and engineering. In this region manufacturing still makes a greater contribution to regional GDP than the service sector. Yet, here, there are clear examples of attempts to stimulate new types of economic activity based on ICTs. The region, it is argued, must engage with the new knowledge economy if it is to survive the myriad social relations thrown up through the unrelenting processes of globalisation. To do this, so the discussion follows, public and private must come together to enable businesses, large and small, community groups and government to play a full role in the new economy; by becoming more knowledge driven and through raising information processing capabilities. Adopts a critical stance towards the idea of ICTs as a tool for regeneration but shows how efforts to establish the correct enabling mechanisms are in fact grounded in the promise of new technologies held by key local and regional players.

First of all, I must apologise for the interval between this VINE and the last. Unfortunately VINE's production cycle is growing longer as automated library systems become more complex, and consequently more time‐consuming to write up. Moreover, in this issue I have attempted in certain articles, for instance those on COM bureaux and the Telepen, to adopt a thematic approach to the subject, rather than reporting on individual projects. The process of cross‐checking the details of such articles with all the organisations concerned has been partly responsible for the delay in publishing VINE 17. Nevertheless in the long terms I still hope to increase the frequency with which VINE is published, thereby increasing its currency and decreasing the size of each individual issue.