Betty was nine when her mother told her she would have to leave Nigeria and live with a family friend in the United Kingdom. The girl was sad to leave her five sisters and two brothers, but the family was poor, living in one room, taking turns to sleep on the only bed. In Britain, it seemed, Betty’s life would at least be easier.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Once here, Betty was passed from stranger to stranger and treated as a domestic slave. Did her mother deliberately traffic her to reduce the economic burden on the family? Was she threatened into giving her up? Betty doesn’t know. Ten years later, she is not even sure what her surname is.
Betty’s days in England with the family to whom she had been entrusted began at 6am and ended at 2am. She had to cook, clean and look after the family’s children and others too. She was prevented from going to school until she was 11, when she finally learned to read and write. “The family told me I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone. They said the police would take me back to Nigeria. They made threats. The woman beat me with wooden sticks, she slapped me, scratched me, used shoes.”
She is still so afraid of the family that she will not give her real name, or say where she lived. When teachers asked Betty about her bruises, she told them she had fallen over playing.
Jenny (also a pseudonym) tells a similar story. She was 16 when she arrived in the UK in 2000. Her widowed mother told her she would be paid to look after the children of the son of a friend of hers in London, and go to school. She was never paid, was denied schooling for two years and worked “seven days a week, 16 hours a day”.
Her tormentor, like Betty’s, was the woman of the household. “She swore, she cursed and threatened me with being knocked down by a car in the street or being returned to Nigeria. She was physically violent. I felt that she might kill me, she made so many threats.” When the wife went away, the man sexually assaulted her.
Both girls were forbidden to have friends. But Betty discovered she was not alone. At a local Pentecostal church, she was left to look after the children in a creche while the parents worshipped. There she met several other terrified girls in similar situations. The adults in the church, aware of what was going on, did nothing to challenge it.
This, in a way, is the traffickers’ secret: traffickers and the networks into which they sell people are not necessarily sinister in an obvious way. They are lawyers, businessmen and preachers — apparently decent human beings going about their business.
Nobody knows how many children there are like Betty and Jenny in the UK. There is no centrally collected data. According to the British Home Office, 4 000 women and children were trafficked into the UK into prostitution in 2003, and police and immigration recorded 250 cases of known child trafficking in the UK between 1998-2003, most of whom are thought to be girls. Unicef, however, says the figure is likely to be far higher. In January, anti-slavery and trafficking group Ecpat published research revealing that, in three regions in the UK, 80 children were known or suspected to have been trafficked in for sex, employment exploitation or forced marriage. More than half of them have gone missing from social services care and have never been found.
At 14, Betty was kicked out and sent to another family, who told her to return to her abusers. A schoolfriend’s mother smuggled her out and she stayed with them temporarily, but then became homeless. She met a woman in the street who was leafleting for a charity and took her in. Now aged 19, she is being housed by social services.
Children coming into the UK seeking asylum, or who — like Jenny and Betty — are the victims of traffickers, have the same rights to protection as indigenous children. They are taken into care, looked after by social services and given leave to remain until they are 18. After that, however, they are at risk of deportation — and the government is determined to make it easier to process the 3 000 unaccompanied children who arrive in Britain every year.
Under the New Asylum Model, an overhaul of the asylum system introduced this year, such children must now reapply for leave to remain at 17 and a half. This was done to “alleviate problems of post-18 leaving care costs caused by delays in determining the young person’s immigration status”, according to the Home Office.
For those who, like Jenny, arrive at 16 or 17, the Home Office says “shorter periods of leave or no granting of leave at all might be appropriate”. This seems to raise the prospect of deportations of under-18s, although that would require another change in the law.
Lynn Chitty, a social worker specialising in protecting trafficked children, says forcible return often results in retrafficking, citing three girls she knew who were sent back to Nigeria. One vanished on arrival at Lagos airport; the others were sold back into the trade.
Betty and Jenny have no family ties in Nigeria or any understanding of Nigerian society; they have made lives in the UK against the odds and need the sanctuary the UK can offer. “What family is there for me to start a new life with in Nigeria?” Betty asks. — Â