Vietnamese child trafficking victims vanishing from councils’ care

Scores of Vietnamese children rescued from traffickers and placed in local authority care in the UK have gone missing and are feared to have fallen back into the hands of slave masters.

Crime gangs are re-trafficking victims and local authorities are failing in their duty to safeguard children, figures obtained through freedom of information requests suggest.

More than 150 Vietnamese minors have disappeared from care and foster homes since 2015, with almost 90 others going missing

BRITAIN:

temporarily. Most go missing within two days of entering care.

At least 21 have vanished in recent months, including 12 from Rochdale, Greater Manchester. That council’s child protection record is already under scrutiny after the child grooming scandal and the public inquiry into the Cyril Smith case [long-serving MP for Rochdale, the subject of numerous allegations of child sexual abuse since his death in 2010].

Young trafficking victims of other nationalities have suffered a similar plight, with growing concern about the number of missing Albanian children.

Baroness Butler-Sloss, chairwoman of the all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking and modern slavery, described the figures as ‘‘very disturbing’’ but said she believed there were far more at risk.

The former president of the family division of the High Court added: ‘‘The Home Office should explore the possibility of identifying that Vietnamese children present a particular, special problem and are most likely to leave immediately or quickly after coming to care. Some special arrangement should be made for them.’’

Kevin Hyland, the independent anti-slavery commissioner, has expressed concern at the ‘‘frequency and speed’’ with which Vietnamese minors go missing. He said the case of a teenager taken from care twice showed ‘‘a lack of professionalism in the response to the plight of trafficking victims’’.

Official figures show that 8670 children were recorded missing at least once while in local authority care in 2016. The majority of incidents were shortlived – from a few hours to two days.

Information from 430 local authorities reveal 152 Vietnamese children have permanently disappeared from 2015 to date, with 88 others going missing temporarily. The secretive nature of trafficking and the poor quality of official records suggest the true scale is much higher.

There is a recognised issue of young Vietnamese claiming to be minors so they can avoid immigration detention and be placed instead in local council care, from which it is easier to abscond.

Vietnamese children or their families pay traffickers up to £30,000 (NZ$56,000) to reach Britain, which can bind them into forced labour for years. The victims, most of whom are male, are given mobiles or told to memorise phone numbers so that they can contact their traffickers, who then force them to work in cannabis farms, nail bars and brothels.

James Simmonds-Read, of the Children’s Society, said victims did not feel secure after being rescued. ‘‘Children freak out and go missing and back to the people that trafficked and abused them.’’

Helen Johnson, head of children’s services at the Refugee Council, said almost every Vietnamese child smuggled into the UK was in debt bondage and while ‘‘local authorities should be alert to that, some are not’’.

‘‘If children are treated with hostility, they’ll believe what traffickers tell them: that they won’t be helped or believed and that they are in debt.’’ – The Times