Daily roundup 31 October: Child refugees, family drug courts, and anxiety

Adam Offord
Monday, October 31, 2016

Theresa May declines to make any extra commitments on receiving child refugees affected by the Calais camp demolition; a judge calls for more investment and new court services in Wales; and ChildLine warns of increase in calls seeking help for anxiety, all in the news today.

Theresa May has turned down calls from France to take more child refugees from the Calais "jungle" camp. Picture: Home Office
Theresa May has turned down calls from France to take more child refugees from the Calais "jungle" camp. Picture: Home Office

Prime Minister Theresa May has declined to make any extra commitments on receiving child refugees affected by the demolition of the Calais "jungle" refugee camp, after French president Francois Hollande phoned her to ask for Britain to consider its "moral duty". The Guardian reports that Downing Street said the UK has already taken a "considerable number of unaccompanied minors", and several hundred more children and young people would arrive soon.


More investment and new court services are needed in Wales to break the cycle of families having multiple children taken into care, a judge has said. The BBC reports that Nicholas Crichton said that Wales should adopt Family Drug and Alcohol Courts, which he helped to establish in England, in order to break the cycle of children being taken into care.?


Numbers of children seeking help for anxiety are on the rise, data from the NSPCC's ChildLine has shown. The Independent reports that the charity answered 11,706 calls that mentioned anxiety in 2015/16 compared with 8,642 the previous year - an increase of 35 per cent.


Tory MP Michael Gove has come in for criticism after left his son alone in a bed and breakfast for six hours in order to go to a party. The BBC reports that the Brexit campaigner attended an event with his wife Sarah Vine while his 11-year-old child was unsupervised at a hotel.?


A campaign urging passengers on public transport to be alert for potential victims of sexual exploitation has been launched in Greater Manchester. The Manchester Evening News reports that police want to recruit commuters in the fight against child grooming and are now urging people to flag any suspicious activity.


More than 5,000 children were strip-searched by police between 2013 and 2015, figures have shown. The Telegraph reports the figures released by 13 police forces in England and Wales show that more than 4,000 of the searches were carried out in London by the Metropolitan Police.?

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