NSPCC centre boosts trafficking awareness

By its very nature, child trafficking is a covert crime. As a result, professionals working with children and young people face the double challenge of identifying potential victims and providing appropriate support and interventions.

For the past five years, a dedicated centre, manned by police, social workers and staff with different experiences of child protection work, has been on hand to offer advice to professionals who come across suspected cases of trafficking to the UK.

Commissioned by the Home Office in 2007, the NSPCC’s Child Trafficking Advice Centre provides training, raises awareness, offers one-to-one support to professionals and gives expert witness accounts in court proceedings.

Mandy John-Baptiste, manager of the advice centre, says that a growing list of referrals suggests that understanding of child trafficking among professionals is gradually increasing.

“People know what trafficking is now, whereas they wouldn’t have necessarily five years ago,” she explains. “However, people still often think victims of child trafficking are an immigration issue rather than simply children who need protection. So the message we are trying to get out now is that all children are entitled to protection under the Children Act 1989.”

Seedling project
The centre was expected to last only three years as a “seedling project” to raise awareness and bring the issue of child trafficking into the mainstream business of all professionals who come into contact with potential victims.

“We are trying everything we can to get professionals to engage and deepen their understanding and awareness of trafficking,” John-Baptiste says. “We thought people wouldn’t need us because trafficking would become part of mainstream work.

“If it became part of the core child protection training of social workers, police, nurses and all professionals in contact with children, there would be no need for us. But we keep having to challenge discrimination, racism, ignorance; if it was children coming from this country, we wouldn’t have to keep explaining the same things.”

John-Baptiste’s concerns are echoed by the charity Ecpat UK. Director Christine Beddoe says prejudice is still common. “I have concerns that there are remnants of discrimination against children who have uncertain immigration status or there is a sense that these children aren’t as important as others,” she says.

“Specific child protection training on trafficking is usually only optional and there are real barriers as to why training isn’t taken up – both political and institutional. Historically, we know that when resources are very short, they will be used in places of greater priority. Because there isn’t a political appetite for this work – as much at a central level as at the local level – there is inconsistent practice in the area of child trafficking.”

Beddoe warns that such inconsistency is unlikely to be eradicated, because of proposals to drastically reduce government guidelines on child protection as part of a bid to cut bureaucracy, from 700 pages to just 68.

“We have great concern about the reforms being proposed by the Department for Education, which will reduce the guidance for professionals, particularly surrounding children in need,” she explains. “The identification of child trafficking victims often comes before they disclose the situation, so we need practitioners from all areas to be proactive. The government’s move away from being more prescriptive around protection means we are going backwards.”

National agenda
Beddoe adds that a lack of robust guidance could leave the door open to opportunistic criminals. “The crime of trafficking is very fluid and responsive to what is happening on the ground,” she says. “We are seeing some really good initiatives locally. But if we are not careful, we will have pockets of very good practice across the UK, from where traffickers will move away, and into areas where local authorities haven’t been putting any attention on the area, so it has to be a national agenda.”

Helen Johnson, operations manager of the children’s section at the Refugee Council, reiterates that child victims must be treated as children and be afforded the same protection as children resident in this country. “Time after time when working with victims of trafficking, you come across a complete lack of understanding of what is involved and what to do,” she says. “Some police understand the issues well, but some can’t even believe that a child from abroad would be able to enter the country with a false passport.”

Johnson says that the Refugee Council’s project that works with girls and young women who have been trafficked is constantly dealing with a high number of cases. She adds they show that social care support for young victims is still “very mixed”.

“There is a lack of acknowledgment of trafficking as a child protection issue and a lack of understanding of the procedures that girls have to go through to get support and how they might struggle within that,” she says. “Children from abroad are not always treated as children first. That is obviously wrong.”


In numbers

758
number of referrals the Child Trafficking Advice Centre has worked on with other agencies over the past five years

2 months
age of the youngest child’s case ?referred to the centre

100
number of cases the centre has dealt with regarding Vietnamese boys trafficked for cannabis ?cultivation

Source: Child Trafficking Advice Centre