A new report from the UK reveals the hid­den crimes of human traf­fick­ing that exists in the coun­try. The report says that social work­ers fail the chil­dren by not res­cu­ing them their slav­ery. The study could put more pres­sure on Britain’s gov­ern­ment to pass human slav­ery laws.

From the Inde­pen­dent reporter Robert Verkaik unpacks the study’s details.

The find­ings sug­gest that when traf­ficked chil­dren
try to escape from impris­on­ment in Britain, their cries for help are ignored or neg­li­gently han­dled by UK agen­cies. The report, by the Children’s Soci­ety char­ity, found that those who man­aged to escape their cap­tors were often returned to domes­tic impris­on­ment, where they were forced to work as pros­ti­tutes in broth­els or as slaves in British homes. Chil­dren who were allowed to leave their guardian’s home were usu­ally too fright­ened to dis­close what was hap­pen­ing to them.

One young girl traf­ficked to Britain was groomed and sex­u­ally exploited while in the care of children’s ser­vices. She did not know that what was hap­pen­ing was ille­gal, or that it was con­sid­ered abuse.

The United King­dom Human Traf­fick­ing Cen­tre (UKHTC) is aware of 325 chil­dren from 52 coun­tries who may have been traf­ficked in 2008. But the Children’s Soci­ety, which looked closely at 46 cases in the UK, said these fig­ures did not account for young peo­ple who feel they have no choice but to keep their ordeals a secret.

More than half of the young peo­ple in these ini­tial case stud­ies had attended school while in Britain, but when they asked for sup­port from var­i­ous agen­cies, the front­line work­ers did not know how to help or refer them. The char­ity said that some who had reported their sit­u­a­tion found front­line work­ers unwill­ing to help, dis­be­liev­ing the seri­ous­ness of their claims or unaware of where to refer them.

Even when a child is iden­ti­fied as being at risk of exploita­tion and taken into care, they still face kid­nap­ping by traf­fick­ers. In May this year, it was dis­cov­ered that 77 chil­dren had gone miss­ing from a sin­gle children’s home near Heathrow since March 2006. It is esti­mated that 1.2 mil­lion chil­dren world­wide are traf­ficked each year, in a trade worth £16bn annually.

“Whilst recent media reports have claimed that the prob­lem of traf­fick­ing has been over­stated, this new research brings into star­tling per­spec­tive the very real prob­lems faced by chil­dren sep­a­rated from their car­ers and exploited and mis­treated by those respon­si­ble for them in the UK,” said the authors of the report.

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