Cuckooing

Cuckooing is the police term for taking over the home of a vulnerable person in order to use it as a base to deal, store or take drugs, to facilitate sex work, as a place to live, or to financially abuse the tenant, a practice closely associated with county lines drug trafficking and sometimes carried out as a form of mate crime, in which a person is deliberately befriended with the intent of exploiting them. The name comes from the cuckoo bird's habit of taking over other birds' nests to raise its own young; the term was first applied to this human practice in 1992 by researcher Michael E. Buerger, then largely overlooked before returning to wider use from 2010 onward, and cuckooing became an increasingly common problem in the South of England during the 2010s. Members of Parliament from both major parties called in 2023 for cuckooing to be criminalized as part of a review of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and the Crime and Policing Act 2026 made cuckooing a specific criminal offense in its own right.