Skip to main content

Children for sale: UK's new slave trade - Telegraph

Popularity Report

Total Popularity Score: 0

Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...

Rank

Bookmark History

Saved by 1 people (1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-01-27


Public Sticky notes

Children for sale: UK's new slave trade


By David Harrison
Last Updated: 10:26am GMT 27/01/2008

Highlighted by visigoth

Hundreds of young children are being sold and "trafficked" to Britain from Africa to be exploited as modern-day slaves, it can be revealed.

Highlighted by visigoth

The illicit trade in children - sold by their parents, some while still babies, to criminal gangs and people traffickers - has been uncovered by a Sunday Telegraph investigation.

Highlighted by visigoth

An undercover reporter was offered several children for sale by their parents in Nigeria

Highlighted by visigoth

two boys aged three and five for £5,000, or £2,500 for one, and a 10-month-old baby for £2,000.

Highlighted by visigoth

Teenage girls - including some still pregnant - were willing to sell their babies for less than £1,000

Highlighted by visigoth

One international trafficker, tracked down in Lagos, claimed to be buying up to 500 children a year.

Highlighted by visigoth

Impoverished African parents are being lured by the traffickers' promises of "a better life" for their children, thousands of miles away in cities including London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Highlighted by visigoth

But, once brought to Britain, the children are used as a fraudulent means to obtain illicit housing and other welfare benefits, totalling tens of thousands of pounds each a year.

Highlighted by visigoth

From the age of seven, rather than being sent to school, they are exploited as domestic slaves, forced to work for up to 18 hours a day, cleaning, cooking and looking after other younger children, or put to work in restaurants and shops.

Highlighted by visigoth

Some of the children are also subjected to physical and sexual abuse, while others even find themselves accused of being witches and become victims of exorcism rites in "traditional" African churches in Britain.

Highlighted by visigoth

"These children are being abused under our noses in our own country," said Chris Beddoe, the director of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking, a British-based coalition of international charities.

Highlighted by visigoth

"It is totally unacceptable. We need urgent action to identify these children as they enter the UK, find those who are being abused and offer proper protection to those who escape or are freed from their abusers."

Highlighted by visigoth

But David Davis, the Conservative shadow home secretary, said: "The Government has utterly failed to take decisive action to tackle human trafficking.

Highlighted by visigoth

"A Conservative government would take a range of practical measures - developed in detail over the last two years - to curb all aspects of this evil trade, which threatens Britain and the most vulnerable in our society."

Highlighted by visigoth

A recent survey by the Government's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre claimed that 330 children, including 14 aged under 12, many of them from Africa, had been trafficked to Britain over the past year.

Highlighted by visigoth

The police and campaigners believe, however, that this is just the "tip of the iceberg" and that the true figure is likely to be in the thousands.

Highlighted by visigoth

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal how the trade starts more than three thousand miles away in Africa where babies are sold to predatory traffickers, able to persuade desperately poor and often illiterate parents to hand over their children.

Highlighted by visigoth

The children are then sold, at high profit, as "home helps" to African families in Britain and in other European and North American cities.

Highlighted by visigoth

The traffickers use a network of corrupt officials and co-traffickers to obtain passports and visas, often giving the children new names.

Highlighted by visigoth

Many of the young victims are flown directly from Lagos in Nigeria to London's airports.

Highlighted by visigoth

Others are taken, via other west African states such as Ghana and Benin, to "transit" cities, including Paris.

Highlighted by visigoth

A growing number of the African slave children arrives in Britain unaccompanied, as asylum-seekers, or with "private foster parents".

Highlighted by visigoth

"They are being cynically used by adults as slave labour and to defraud the state and then when they get older and have served their purpose and no longer attract entitled to benefits they are thrown out on to the streets with no papers even to prove who they are.

Highlighted by visigoth

Campaigners said that many of the slave children - psychologically and often physically damaged at 18 - were thrown out of the houses of their "owners".

Highlighted by visigoth

They are left to fend for themselves, usually with no papers or documents to prove who they are. With nowhere to turn, many fall into crime and the sex trade.

Highlighted by visigoth

Those that come to the attention of the authorities when they commit a crime or go to social services for help are usually brusquely deported as illegal immigrants.

Highlighted by visigoth

Mr Coaker said: "We have tightened our visa requirements and our ports of entry and we are gathering intelligence to help us stop this horrific trade."

Highlighted by visigoth

A senior Scotland Yard officer said: "The traffickers and the people who buy the children and use them as domestic slaves have no regard for their wellbeing and we are determined to catch those involved in this vile business.

Highlighted by visigoth

"But this is a hidden crime, going on largely in Britain's African communities and we would urge people in those communities to contact us if they suspect that any child in their area is being abused. We need their co-operation. They must not turn a blind eye."

Highlighted by visigoth

Godwin Morka, the executive director of Lagos's anti-trafficking unit, Nathip, admitted that child trafficking was "rampant" in many Nigerian states. "We know these children are not going to happy homes and we are doing what we can on limited resources."

Highlighted by visigoth

Readers (0)