UC Ministries: The article although based around a fictional TV drama. There is nothing fictional about what does take place. Today they reckon that the slave trade is more alive in the 21 century that it was ever during the dark days of the slave trade. Modern transportation and communications means that women and children can be sold along a pipe line from one slave trader to another. A human commodity that pays high and where the victims are made to feel worthless.
Pro 14:34 Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin [is] a reproach to any people
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STOLEN was a powerful drama which told the stories of three children trafficked into Britain.
There was Georgy, the exuberant Ukrainian boy; Kim Pak, a Vietnamese youth condemned to a life perpetually indoors working in a cannabis factory; and Rosemary, 11, who was picked up by the police when she arrived alone on a plane from Lagos, Nigeria. She was placed with a foster carer but ran away and ended up being sold as a domestic slave to another African family.
STOLEN, shown on BBC1, was shot in Manchester in the fashionable, edgy style of a documentary. But then it almost was a documentary for the tales of Georgy, Kim Pak and Rosemary are far from untypical. Christine Beddoe, director
of the charity ECPAT UK (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) was one of the experts the scriptwriters consulted. She says: “The characters depicted in the drama are representative of cases we come across all the time. Everything that happened in the fictionalised drama has happened for real at some time to someone.”
According to ECPAT, 2.45 million people a year are victims of trafficking (moving people around with the intention of exploiting them) and half of those are children. It is an industry thought to be worth £20billion. It is one of the fastest growing crimes in the world and it is a global business; trafficked children have been logged arriving in the UK from 120 countries. Chief
perpetrators are West Africa, Vietnam, China, Eastern Europe (particularly Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania) and Bangladesh.
All those countries have signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the only ones that haven’t are the US and Somalia). Children used to arrive with maps and notes with phone numbers and addresses but the traffickers soon wised up and now they are made to memorise the information they need. Home Office estimates put the number of youngsters trafficked into Britain at around 287 per year but no one knows for sure how many come here this way.
Christine Beddoe of ECPAT says: “Let’s not get too fixated on numbers; one trafficked child is one too many. The key point about the numbers is that they’re going up. What every agency working in this field agrees on is that child trafficking is on the increase.
The even bigger concern is the children we don’t even know about. The real picture is never uncovered but it’s worse than anything we do know.”
One of the problems with collating intelligence is that the victims don’t know they are being trafficked or if they do they are too frightened to say. In the TV drama, the Vietnamese boy knows he will be killed for escaping from the cannabis farm and Rosemary has scars on her arm where she has been cut. Before leaving their homeland African children are routinely subjected to “juju”
witchcraft rituals which by most definitions would be classed as torture.
Only two days ago Anthony Harrison, 32, a caretaker with Newham Council in East London, was sentenced to 20 years
for trafficking, conspiracy to traffic into the UK for sexual exploitation and false imprisonment. During his trial at
Woolwich Crown Court the jury heard of the horrific ordeal endured by two teenage girls from very poor backgrounds in the Edo region of Nigeria who were brought into Britain in 2009 when they were aged 16 and 14.
Before leaving Nigeria, the 16-year-old was stripped and slashed “dozens of times” with a razor so that her blood could be collected and her body hair was shaved off. Her arms were then tied behind her back and she was made to lie naked and soaked in her own blood in a closed coffin for several hours. She was also made to eat a raw chicken heart. The juju priest who officiated over the
ceremony told her that he could access her soul and that he would haunt her dreams and “kill her from within” if she disobeyed him. The younger girl was forced to eat white clay and a raw chicken heart and to swear an oath of loyalty to a juju medicine man.
The girls arrived in Britain with false passports, a cover story for their asylum claim (they said they were forced to flee as they were lesbians) and instructions to link up with Harrison. The 16-year-old ran away from a children’s home to meet Harrison who starved and raped her before putting her to work as a prostitute. Harrison – who has been in Britain since 2003 and was
granted indefinite leave to remain despite several failed asylum bids – was caught when he sold the girls on. The older one was picked up in Spain because she had false papers but co-operated with the authorities. This enabled police to intercept the younger girl as she was about to board a flight to Greece.
Children are brought into the country for three purposes: forced labour, prostitution and criminality. In March,
Nigerian Lucy Adeniji, 44, became the first person to be jailed for trafficking children into the UK for domestic servitude. Adeniji, who is an illegal immigrant and, incredibly, a church pastor, brought in two children and a 21-year-old woman on false passports and used them as slaves at her home in Barking, Essex. She was sentenced to 11½ years at Isleworth Crown Court.
Last October police smashed a ring that controlled 103 Romanian children living at 16 addresses in East London. The youngsters, aged from three to 17, “worked” as pickpockets and beggars for their captors. A 12-year-old girl was found to be pregnant.
The rise of Fagin-like gang masters has come about in the past 10 to 15 years, says Beddoe. “If a seven-yearold gets
caught pickpocketing the police can’t even prosecute. The real criminals are using children to do their dirty work because they can get away with it, in every sense.”
There are believed to be 6,000 cannabis factories in Britain, mostly located in houses on unremarkable residential estates, with hundreds of Vietnamese minors working in them. Yet of the trafficked Vietnamese children who are picked up by the
authorities and put into care, around 90 per cent abscond because they fear that they or their families will be hurt.
ECPAT estimates that 60 per cent of all trafficked children disappear from care, presumably back into the hands of traffickers. So-called private adoptions are another minefield. Children can be passed off as a niece or a cousin brought to the UK for schooling. That’s how Adeniji explained the two youngsters, aged 11 and 15, who lived with her. It is also how eight-year- old Victoria Climbie from Ivory Coast came to be living in Britain with her “aunt” Marie Therese Kouao and her lover Carl Manning who beat the little girl with bike chains and hammers, tied her up, burnt her with cigarettes and eventually killed her.
Disasters and emergencies are fertile breeding grounds for traffickers. According to Stephen Pattison of Unicef,
Afghanistan is emerging as a source of boys used for slave labour while Save The Children warns of the East African drought causing parents to allow children to be taken away “for a better life”.
Yet there is only one specialist team (comprising police, Border Agency and child-protection social workers) to cover the airports, main coach stations and St Pancras International railway station in London. ECPAT’s campaign to set up a guardianship scheme in this country for trafficked children appears to have fallen on deaf ears. If that is the case we’re about to see many more real-life
versions of the youngsters portrayed in Stolen.
The horrifying statistics:
About 1.2 million children are trafficked annually.
Most children who seek asylum in this country come from Nigeria.
Child trafficking is the world’s third largest criminal enterprise after drugs
and arms dealing.
In the US, 2.8 million children run away each year. A third of these will be
lured into the sex trade within 48 hours and will be transported around the
country.
Unicef estimates 5.7 million youngsters are trapped in forced and bonded labour
and that children represent half of slave labourers.
About 80 per cent of trafficked children are forced to work in the sex
industry.
A 15-year-old female virgin can be sold for £8,000.
Adam, the name given to the African boy whose torso was found floating in the
Thames in 2001, was almost certainly trafficked into Britain.
Earlier this year he was finally identified as Ikpomwosa, from Nigeria. He was
killed during a ritual sacrifice ceremony and his body was dumped in the river.
Original source http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/257607/Scandal-of-the-sold-children
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