Demand for child trafficking advocates higher than expected
Nina Jacobs
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Referrals to a government-funded scheme to provide independent advocates to child trafficking victims were higher than expected in the first year, requiring more staff to be employed.
The Home Office-commissioned independent child trafficking advocates (ICTAs) service, which was introduced in three early adopter sites in January 2017, received a total of 215 referrals within the first year.
The level of demand was so high that the Home Office funded the recruitment of two additional ICTAs to support the existing six ICTAs.
The figures are included in an interim report on the scheme published this week.
The report states that from May 2017, children began to exit the service "resulting in a more stable caseload compared to the early months of service". Between May 2017 and January 2018, a total of 87 children exited the service.
According to the report, the high number of referrals to the ICTA service could have been due to awareness raising of the service itself and the rising number of victims of modern slavery - there was a 66 per cent rise in children referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) - system by which the government identifies and provides support to victims of modern slavery - between 2016 and 2017.
"The National Crime Agency has explained this recent increase due partly by the emergence of criminal exploitation, for example ‘county lines', referrals among UK children, as well as unaccompanied asylum seeking children being referred into the NRM," the report said
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The study, based on data collected by the ICTA's service provider Barnardo's as well as interviews conducted with stakeholders interacting with ICTAs in local areas, found a number of differences in the way ECTA's worked with different groups of children, including:
- Children from non-European Economic Area (EEA) countries had more face-to-face contact with ICTAs than UK children
- Non-EEA children were also more likely to go missing upon referral to the service
- UK children were more likely to go missing while in service but then to come back into contact with the ICTA service
- More than half of the children referred to the service were aged 16 or 17 and the most common nationality was British (80), followed by Vietnamese (39) and Sudanese (28
- The majority of children referred were male (124 compared to 91 female)
- Criminal exploitation was the primary form of exploitation for boys and sexual exploitation the primary form of exploitation for girl.
The early adopter ICTA service sites were in Greater Manchester, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and throughout Wales.
The Home Office has confirmed it will provide an additional £2 million to extend the scheme to a third of councils by April 2019, starting with those in the West Midlands region.