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The trafficking of young people into the UK represents a tough challenge for police, local authorities and the judiciary. Things would be made easier if it was actually made illegal. Rachel Downey reports.

Every week an unknown number of young people arrive at entry ports to the UK, bewildered, terrified, confused and alone. They hand their forged documents to immigration officials, ask to make a call and wait. Within hours an adult claiming to be a relative or a lawyer picks them up.

These young people are victims of people traffickers. They are brought to the UK to be used in prostitution or domestic exploitation. Others are trafficked through the UK to other European destinations.

The majority of young women trafficked to be used in prostitution come from West Africa. An established trafficking route exists to bring young women to northern Italy, via the UK, while others come to the UK along the same routes used by Eastern European women working in the sex industry. Still more are trafficked alongside adults by Chinese traffickers.

Most are tricked into coming. The West African victims are often initiated into cults and magic ceremonies are used to tie them to traffickers. "Curses" are placed on them and the only way for the curse to be lifted is for them to repay the cost of the journey out of Africa. Sometimes their family takes out a loan, which the young woman has to repay. The debt is often a myth: either the young woman or her family are not told how much they owe; the sum is given in another currency; or the debt grows because of "expenses". Sometimes the young women are forced to work as prostitutes by men they thought were their boyfriends.

According to police, trafficking people can be as lucrative as trafficking drugs, but its risks are far smaller. Successful prosecutions are rare, as traumatised young people make unreliable witnesses. Their stories are inconsistent - they have been told to lie and become confused. Defence barristers find it all too easy to tear their testimonies apart.

And the traffickers are ruthless. Plans to try and stop trafficked young people boarding planes in West Africa have been scuppered. Two British immigration officials had been based at Lagos airport, Nigeria, but last year the LandRover in which they were travelling was riddled with bullets from automatic shotguns. They escaped serious injury but returned to the UK.

Detailed statistics on the number of trafficked children coming into the UK are unavailable. But agencies provide anecdotal evidence that it does occur and that there is no sign of it abating. So what are care agencies doing to protect these extremely vulnerable young people - and is it enough?

The task of protecting young people who have been, or are at risk of being, trafficked has fallen largely to two social services departments that cover the UK's two main airports - West Sussex and Hillingdon.

In 1995, West Sussex social services's child asylum team realised that many of the West African young women it was picking up at Gatwick were being trafficked. After a few days in care, the young women - primarily from Nigeria and Sierra Leone - would make contact with their trafficker and leave. The team began monitoring the numbers, set up a structure for joint working with the police and immigration, and drew up a profile of those at risk. Three years ago it contracted a private company to run a safe house for the young women.

The team works closely with police and immigration services, and alongside a project for unaccompanied asylum seeking children run by the Family Welfare Association. "The girls are very quiet. They will not make eye contact and it's very difficult to form any relaxed relationship with them," says team leader Mary Benton. "They have a different agenda. They are very withdrawn because they are terrified, with very good reason, of everything. It takes social workers and support staff in the safe house a long, long time to make inroads."

Initially, staff were reluctant to outline in detail what life awaited the girls if they contacted their traffickers. Now they are upfront. "I do not know whether they know what future has been planned for them - they probably have an idea already," Benton adds. "But simply acknowledging why we want to put a circle of protection around them has a therapeutic effect.

The young women stay about three months at the safe house and they are closely supervised. One-to-one work is not successful with this group of young women, she explains. "The activity-based approach is the way to engage with these young women and to forge relationships." A worker was once threatened but there has never been any direct confrontation between the staff and the traffickers. As Benton puts it, the traffickers' methods are "more subtle and more clever".

The strategy worked. Some of the young women still try and contact their traffickers, but the number is now far smaller. Between September 1995 and August 2001, 66 young people who were believed to be trafficked went missing from West Sussex's care. Last year, 20 were profiled as at risk and three went missing.

However, the social workers must remain on their guard. Benton explains that some of the young people who arrive unaccompanied at Gatwick are in fact plants for the traffickers. They work as links in the chain and warn the young women of their "debts".

"It's not about good and bad - it's about shades," she says. "Many young women may be able to stay with us but not to sever the links totally. Or they retain their links so there may still be dialogue between them and the traffickers. It's about us reducing the risk and keeping them in this country so they can lead more normal lives."

At Hillingdon, the area child protection committee has established a sub-group on child trafficking, which is developing its own profile of those at risk. Head of children's services Steve Liddicott estimates that in nine out of 10 cases when social services pick up young people at Heathrow, they come into care. Social workers use a local in-house residential unit or foster carers to place them. They do not have the numbers to justify setting up a specific safe house.

The social services department does not monitor the numbers it suspects are at risk of trafficking. A few years ago, up to four young people went missing from care and it is suspected they ran to traffickers. According to Liddicot there are currently about six or seven children in care who could have been at risk of being used for benefit fraud or domestic exploitation.

The current system is inadequate. Social services departments are already struggling to provide for the number of unaccompanied refugee young people they are responsible for. Hillingdon has almost 600 in its care, 200 of whom are under 18, while West Sussex has just fewer than 300. On top of the central government grant for asylum seeking children - currently £575 a week for those under 16 - West Sussex has to spend an additional £700,000 a year from its children's services budget of £36m to fund its child asylum team.

End Child Prostitution, Pornography, Trafficking (Ecpat) is a coalition of children's charities and non-government organisations that recently published research into child trafficking.¹ The research suggests that councils should not be left to provide the services needed.

"Trafficking is not a core activity for any agency," says Elizabeth Little, chief executive of the Refugee Arrivals Project, who wants a new specialist agency to co-ordinate existing services. An inter-agency protocol is needed, she argues, as individual organisations often do not talk to each other, particularly women's refuges, HIV clinics and the immigration service.

"The only way that anyone is going to make any progress is if we all hold hands and do it together," she adds. "We need a proper way of identifying the kids and a proper protection system. Otherwise the law will sit on the statute book."

But Steve Liddicott claims it would be very difficult for a national specialist agency to provide the protection needed. "It's a very complicated issue. While we accept there are voluntary organisations with knowledge in this area that we do not have, what we have is knowledge and experience in child protection and the looked-after system." He is looking to the proposed new reception centres for asylum seekers for a solution and says informal discussions are under way to examine how they could be used for children.

Meanwhile, trafficked children are slipping through because social services cannot provide the round-the-clock support that immigration officers need. John Tincey, deputy general secretary of the Immigration Service Union, says officers are often forced to allow a child about whom they have concerns to take off with someone purporting to be a relative. Flights from West Africa rarely arrive when due. "We cannot predict when they might come - often it is the middle of the night or early in the morning. Then we struggle to find someone."

Outside office hours, if Heathrow immigration officers suspect a young person is being trafficked they have to contact the one emergency duty social worker, who covers all crises in Hillingdon throughout the night. Liddicott says his department cannot afford to employ additional staff.

Unfortunately, even if immigration officers do succeed in detaining traffickers, there is only a small chance that they will face a prosecution. There is no law against trafficking per se. Laws against sexual offences - currently under review - can be used but sentences are short: for encouraging a child under 16 into prostitution the maximum sentence is just two years. And prosecutions often rely on testimonies, which trafficked girls are usually too frightened to provide.

So judges' hands are tied. And they are not happy about it. Mr Justice Peter Singer, a high court judge in the family division, last month called for specific laws to tackle human trafficking.

But Elizabeth Little received a letter from Home Office minister Jeff Rooker last month claiming the numbers of trafficked people entering Britain had fallen. "Absolute rubbish," she says, explaining that the minister used the fact that the only police investigation in the UK into the trafficking of children - Operation Newbridge - was ended after the Crown Prosecution Service ruled a prosecution would fail because of lack of evidence. Not one of the young women in the care of West Sussex has ever testified against their trafficker. "That is why a change to the legal system is so essential," says Little. "It would lead to an increase in resources for the police to tackle traffickers."

However, it is only a matter of time before the trafficking of adults and children is outlawed in the UK. At the end of 2000 the government signed the UN convention against transnational organised crime, which requires the specific criminalisation of human trafficking. And the UK is currently negotiating the details of a recent European Commission communication that requires EU member states to introduce legislation to outlaw human trafficking and child sexual exploitation, which it has two years to implement.

Social workers, voluntary workers, immigration officials, police officers and judges are all waiting.

¹ End Child Prostitution, Pornography, Trafficking, What the Professionals Know: The Trafficking of Children into, and through, the UK for Sexual Purposes, ECPAT, November 2001

- For more information see Ayotte W, Williamson L, Separated Children in the UK: An Overview of the Current Situation, Refugee Council and Save the Children, 2001. Also Family Law Working Group, Report on the Cross-border Movement of Children, Society of Advanced Legal Studies, 1999.

Steps to combat trafficking

- Services for children who have been trafficked, including safe houses, counselling, independent legal advice and permanent residency for all at risk.

- Unaccompanied minors thought to be at risk should be placed under care orders.

- Unaccompanied minors should have their travel documents looked after by a member of the airline staff and should be escorted to immigration.

- Children arriving with a suspicious "relative" should be interviewed separately by immigration officials and appointed a solicitor.

- Awareness-raising campaigns should be run both here and in countries of origin.

- Protocols between social services and immigration.

- Trafficking is often related to conditions of poverty, poor employment opportunities and unstable countries - these areas should be addressed.

Source: End Child Prostitution, Pornography, Trafficking (Ecpat)