African child trafficking victims are ‘invisible’

Hundreds of African children are being trafficked into the UK for a life of servitude, according to human rights campaigners.

Non Government Organisations (NGOs) and human rights lawyers have sounded the alarm over the “invisible children”, illegally smuggled into Britain using false visas and documents.

“The first recognised case of child trafficking in the UK was a Nigerian girl more than 10 years ago in 1995. Here we are in 2007 and there have been no prosecutions made in cases of children trafficked into domestic labour from Africa. Not one,” said Dragan Nastic, Unicef UK’s policy and parliamentary officer.

According to a report in the Guardian, since 2003, 62 cases of child trafficking have been prosecuted, and there are 59 pending. The police do not break the statistics down in terms of ethnicity, but experts told the newspaper that “no prosecution has ever been made relating to African children”.

Recent studies suggest that hundreds of children are brought over from African countries, such as Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda, by highly-organised traffickers.

Nigeria is believed to be the main source country on the continent, where destitute families are either paid for their children or persuaded to give them away believing that they will receive an education and a better life in the UK.

Debbie Ariyo, director of Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, said: “It’s a scandal that nobody has been convicted when we know so many people who have been trafficked and have lost their childhood.

“We’re making a serious mistake in not convicting people, because it won`t stop. How long can we go on for before someone is arrested and convicted? So many lives will be destroyed if urgent action is not taken.”

One expert who carries out unaccompanied asylum seeking assessments for an Oxfordshire asylum team told Police Professional that gaining a cultural understanding of African child trafficking victims is crucial to policing this problem.

“A number of cases have involved witchcraft practices in Nigeria being administered on children, tricking them into traveling to Europe where they believe they can be freed from the spell,” said Maria Rahimi, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.

“One practice we are familiar with is a ritual that takes the child’s soul away. The child is told they must go to Europe where when they have paid their traffickers in full and have worked in the sex industry for a number of years they will be reacquainted with their soul following their return to Nigeria.

“These children are very vulnerable and their spiritual beliefs make them targets for trafficking gangs.”

Ms Rahimi said UK police officers should consider traveling to countries such as Nigeria to gain a deeper awareness of the cultural condition within trafficking source countries.

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker acknowledged that the government still had a long way to go in tackling the issue of trafficked children from Africa. He said: “Research suggests that trafficking is not reducing in either scale or reach. It’s a sad sign of our times that children are still being trafficked to the UK as modern slaves.”

The first scoping exercise of child trafficking into the UK, carried out by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) and published in June, showed that over a 10-month period, 102 West and East African girls were discovered to have been trafficked into the country and enslaved.

Christine Beddoe, director of ECPAT (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children) UK, said the charity had found “a culture of disbelief in the offices looking at asylum claims”, that caused escaped child slaves to be treated as illegal immigrants as opposed to victims of crime.

“They are often here without a legal basis to stay, then are treated within the system as undeserving of help.”