Child trafficking - speech at the Liberal Democrat conference

Published on Wed 20th Sep 2006

Conference

The number of children brought into Britain as domestic slaves is alarming. Some are put to work as childminders or domestics. Some are forced, Oliver Twist style, into street crime. Others are used for benefit fraud or are sexually exploited.

The children's parents are tricked into sending them to the UK with promises of a good education. But instead, their children are condemned to a life of slavery.

The current system is totally unequipped to deal with the problem.

Three years ago, there was a pilot project between Police and Immigration Officers at Heathrow Airport called Operation Paladin Child. They were set up to investigate the extent of child trafficking. In just three months, 1800 unaccompanied children came through the airport. The team judged that at least one in three were vulnerable, and nearly half were under eleven years old.

In one incident an Eastern European woman admitted that she had been paid to deliver three children, that weren't hers, to a central London address. But before she was caught she had made the same trip three times. Who knows what fate awaited these children?

There's now a small Paladin team working at Heathrow. I spent a day with them recently, and was shocked to hear of what they're uncovering. I'll give you just three examples -

Ø A Vietnamese boy of 14 brought into Britain and put to work to grow cannabis. He was given a mattress, a rice boiler a mobile phone and left completely alone imprisoned in a flat.

Ø Another 14-year old boy this time from South Africa, smuggled here in a container on a ship, repeatedly raped, and put to work in a London factory by his uncle. When he complained he was shown a photo of his mother, dead from gunshot wounds, and told he'd have to carry on working otherwise the rest of his family would suffer the same fate.

Ø And who can forget the tragic case of Victoria Climbie, brought into Britain by her aunt for benefit fraud.

Yet despite the scale of the problem, the Paladin team could be closed down at any time due to a lack of funding.

Three key changes are needed:

1. Independent funding for the Paladin team and resources to allow it to cover other points of entry besides Heathrow.

2. An increase in the minimum age for children to travel alone internationally. On most airlines, children over the age of twelve can travel unaccompanied, with no checks on where they go when they arrive at their destination.

3. And a public awareness campaign to encourage people to report suspected cases of child trafficking.

The way we treat our children defines us as a society. It's totally unacceptable that there's still child slavery in this country. This scandal can and must be stopped.