Some official data on child trafficking into UK

A short note on a report for the Home Office by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a government funded body which tries to do what it says on the tin. It’s a scoping report which tries to get a handle on the scale and type of child trafficking into the UK, which I think may be the first time there’s been an official assessment. The report is available here, and it’s not pleasant reading.

The report is available here (as a PDF), and it’s not pleasant reading.

• They identified 330 children believed to have been trafficked, while acknowledging that this was probably only the visible tip of the trade
• There’s an assessment of the strength of the evidence – the strongest being categorised as ‘level 4′
• Of level 4 cases, five-sixths were girls – of whom 65% were trafficked for sexual exploitation, and 29% for “domestic servitude” (as they put it)
• Traffickers from China and Albania appear to be most sophisticated
• Traffickers were effective at using child protection and asylum processes to get children into the country while keeping control of them
• More than half of the children identified in the data were missing – some may have been ‘re-trafficked’ to other jurisdictions.

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