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Kobe was in his last year of elementary school when a drug gang recruited him. By then, she had been through seven different foster locations and had met so many social workers that she had lost track of their names. Kobe, 17, was identified by the UK government as a child victim of trafficking.
When Theresa May became prime minister, she tried to make the modern day fight against slavery a legacy of her prime minister position. The current government has also been interested in pointing out its credentials. Earlier this year, Home Office Minister Victoria Atkins declared that she was committed to “protecting the victims of this horrible crime.”
But Kobe has been told that he will be sent back to Ghana, a West African country he has not remembered since arriving in London at the age of five. He is one of thousands of trafficked children at risk of deportation as a result of the “hostile” immigration policies of the Home Office.
Data released today on the 10th anniversary of the UK’s Day Against Slavery, introduced to mark the government’s commitment to ending exploitation, reveals that out of nearly 4,700 confirmed foreign victims of trafficking, only 28 children received permission to remain. in the UK for a four-year-period. The figures have shocked anti-slavery activists.
The data, the first time that immigration outcomes for trafficked children have been so fully disclosed, indicates the considerable number of vulnerable victims that the Home Office puts at risk of deportation upon their 18th birthday.
Between 2016 and 2019, 4,695 people were recognized as foreign victims of modern slavery in the UK. Of these, 549 adults and only 0.6% of the total (28) children received discretionary permission to remain trafficked, an immigration status that gives people a temporary right to stay in the UK if they have experienced hardship extreme.
The Interior Ministry has refused to reveal how many of the 4,695 victims were children, but based on recent references to the government’s system for identifying trafficking victims, experts believe it could be as many as half.
However, the data, obtained under freedom of information, challenges the claim that Britain is a world leader in the fight against modern slavery, with significant numbers of people trafficked as children at risk of deportation and facing the threat of traffickers in their home countries.
Patricia Durr, Executive Director of the campaign charity Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (Ecpat UK), said: “We were surprised to find that, in a four-year period, only 28 trafficked children were allowed to remain at their discretion. of the secretary of the interior. The organization said the data took months to obtain, adding that the Interior Ministry had previously denied that it had even collected detailed information linking victims of trafficking to immigration decisions.
“It is equally shocking that we only know this through Freedom of Information requests, and we still only have a partial picture of immigration outcomes for children,” Durr added.
Among the gaps in the data is the actual duration of discretionary leave granted to the 28 children, although the figures show the “extremely limited” duration granted to both adults and child victims of trafficking.
For almost three-quarters (74%) of all trafficking victims who were granted discretionary leave, the period lasted between seven months and one year. Another 7.8% were given even less, between zero and six months.
An Ecpat UK spokesperson said such short periods appeared to contravene international law which says governments must offer children discretionary leave in accordance with the “best interests of the child” and a “durable solution”.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said: “The government is determined to put an end to the abominable exploitation of children and youth and to confront the criminal gangs that put them in danger. In the year to August 2020, 65% of confirmed victims of modern slavery who were found to have discretionary permission to remain were granted, or already had, or were granted a superior form of permission. ”
