A short note on a report for the Home Office by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a government funded body which tries to do what it says on the tin. It’s a scoping report which tries to get a handle on the scale and type of child trafficking into the UK, which I think may be the first time there’s been an official assessment. The report is available here, and it’s not pleasant reading.

The report is available here (as a PDF), and it’s not pleasant reading.

  • They identified 330 children believed to have been trafficked, while acknowledging that this was probably only the visible tip of the trade
  • There’s an assessment of the strength of the evidence – the strongest being categorised as ‘level 4’
  • Of level 4 cases, five-sixths were girls – of whom 65% were trafficked for sexual exploitation, and 29% for “domestic servitude” (as they put it)
  • Traffickers from China and Albania appear to be most sophisticated
  • Traffickers were effective at using child protection and asylum processes to get children into the country while keeping control of them
  • More than half of the children identified in the data were missing – some may have been ‘re-trafficked’ to other jurisdictions.