There’s no way to understand an impossible choice for these parents - Karyn McCluskey

Organised Crime Groups can maintain a vice-like grip over families and communities

Parenting seems to be a term that we consider around children and young people. It takes over our lives, our bank accounts, our social lives and everything else. We would of course do anything for them; donate an organ, go without essentials in life, lay down our lives to protect them. The sacrifices are endless.

What if your child was 25, in substance use and in debt to organised crime groups over drugs? What if these people were threatening to harm your child, break their legs, torture them to get the money? What if the threats were extended to other people in your family – what would you do? Most of us won’t ever have to encounter this extreme, although many of us will have bailed out our kids at some point – when things are tight, and they are struggling. You never stop being a parent.

For some parents in Scotland the plight of their adult children in the grip of substances and the surrounding chaos has led to different choices. But it won’t have felt like they had a choice.

I had the chance to meet a group of formidable women last week who spoke candidly about the drug debt incurred by their sons and daughters. This isn’t a tale about how they got into debt – for as long as there has been a drug trade, there has been drug debt. It’s how Organised Crime Groups (OCG) maintain a vice-like grip over families and communities. There was a sense of shame around the conversation because they had paid the money to the organised crime groups who made the threats. If you are shaking your head and lamenting their actions, it’s because there’s no way to understand an impossible choice.

We are not talking about a few hundred pounds, we are talking thousands, tens of thousands. One woman said she could have bought a house and estimated she had paid around £140,000 to escape the jaws of the drug dealers. These are not people with endless resources, these are ordinary people, who took out loans, begged and borrowed. Because they love their children.

There is a darker side if that is possible. Threats from OCGs to rape family members, threats of extreme violence and threats to kill for there is a ‘no stopping rule’ for those involved. Bricks through windows, threats to firebomb houses. The pursuit is money – and they will get it by any means possible. There were unspoken conversations of the threats that had been carried out, sexual assault the spectre in the conversation – there is no morality on the part of the OCG.

There is the temptation to call the police, but there will be the pleas of their son or daughter that this will lead to additional threats and the fear these will be ramped up. Parents who pay off the money often find that they’ve never quite paid enough. Who knew.

Some of the mothers in the group had children in rehab or in recovery – they could see light at the end of the tunnel and a sense of hope had returned. For others, the journey was one of mourning, and not for monetary reasons.

Karyn McCluskey is chief executive of Community Justice Scotland