Page 22 - Getting it Right for Vulnerable Children and Young People in North Ayrshire

Traffickers recruit children by false promises of work and by exploiting children and their families’ desire for a better life. Often, families are aware of the initial arrangements for another adult to look after their child; thereafter they may lose contact with their child and have no knowledge of what has really happened to them. Traffickers recruiting children will use deception, coercion, violence or may negotiate via a third party. In the majority of cases, children’s families do not know that their children will be exploited but believe that their child will be offered a better life. While they might be aware of some of the risks, parents or elders see it as a survival strategy which offers the promise of a better future for both the child and their family. In some cases the child’s parents will have met the traffickers and will have been duped by the apparently genuine offers of employment that are made. In other cases children might act quite independently from their parents; they might want to escape an unhappy situation in the home environment, or may see no future for themselves at home. On occasion, a child’s family is complicit in the trafficking of their child. Some families have been known to sell their children and children have reported the involvement of a family member who knowingly passes them onto someone else to abuse or exploit them. Therefore, the role of the family must be established before any attempt is made to reunite a child with them. Many children who are trafficked are brought into the UK from other countries, both legally and illegally. There are also children who are UK citizens who are trafficked within the country. This means that children who are moved around the UK for the purposes of exploitation, whether they are children from abroad or citizen children, can be considered a victim of trafficking. Child trafficking is often associated with unaccompanied asylum seeking children, but case-based evidence and research by ECPAT UK shows a more complex picture. Children are trafficked to the UK from the European Union so no asylum claim is needed and children can also be travelling on a valid visa. While the common perception of trafficking is of children being brought into the UK from abroad, practitioners must remain alert to “internal trafficking” which involves children and young people being exploited within and across Scotland. These children may be UK citizens or they may originally have come into the country from abroad a number of years previously. In the UK children are trafficked for sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, forced labour, including restaurant and catering work, manual labour, drug trafficking, begging, petty theft, benefit fraud, cultivation of cannabis and selling counterfeit goods such as DVDs. Getting It Right For Vulnerable Children and Young People in North Ayrshire Live V1.2 April 2014 Page No:22