Human trafficking: Britain to act on Vietnamese child slaves

Speaking ahead of a visit to the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, David Cameron said: “It is shocking that of thousands of Vietnamese children in the UK are being used for profit by criminal gangs and that dozens more children are estimated to arrive on our shores every month.”

The 2015 report on Trafficking in Persons (TIP) for the US State Department agreed, saying: “Vietnamese organised crime networks recurit and transport Vietnamese nationals, especially children, to Europe – particularly the United Kingdom and Ireland – and subject them to forced labour on cannabis farms; they are lured with promises of lucrative jobs and compelled into servitude through debt bondage.”

Mr Cameron also promised to make it compulsory for companies with turnovers of over £36m to reveal what action they have taken to ensure that their supply chain does not use child or slave labour.

Anti-slavery campaigners welcomed Mr Cameron’s focus on the issue of modern slavery, but questioned what impact the new measures would have on the situation the UK.

Chloe Setter, of anti-child trafficking charity ECPAT told Channel 4 News “I’m really pleased the prime minister is raising the subject, but tackling supply chain issues is not going to affect the trafficking of children into cannabis factories or nail bars.”

“Our concern is that this has been going on for a long time, but to our knowledge there has never been a conviction of a Vietnamese crime gang for human trafficking despite Vietnam being one of the main source countries for child trafficking.”

Illegal journeys

Typically agents working for traffickers approach families living in poverty in Vietnam, promising them their child could earn good money by working abroad. The familiy then raises money by getting into debt to pay for the child to be smuggled, mostly overland via Russia or the Czech Republic, into the UK.

Child victims have told the NSPCC that they have been passed from Asian gangs, to east European gangs, to end up under the control of Vietnamese or white men in the UK. Some describe seeing people being raped or murdered during the journey.

Read more: Trafficking victim's nightmare journey to UK drugs farm

On arrival, rather than the respectable jobs in restaurants that they were promised, many end up tending illegal cannabis farms or being sexually exploited.

The US State report describes their plight: “upon arrival in destination countries some workers find themselves compelled to work in substandard conditions for little or no pay, with large debts and no credible avenues of legal resource.”

According to the latest National Crime Agency report, in 2014 there was a 34 per cent increase in potential victims of trafficking being referred from the previous year. Of the 2,340 potential victims in 2014, the 216 Vietnamese victims made up 19 per cent of that total.

But these reported cases are believed by charities to be the tip of the iceberg, as many victims are fearful of trusting the authorities when they could end up being dealt with as a criminal when discovered.

Sufficient safeguards?

The Modern Slavery Act 2015 will introduce the possibility of a victim using the fact that they were trafficked as a defence in court, but some campaigners are worried that juries may still fail to understand the level of grooming and mind control that traffickers exert over child victims.

In the past children freed from cannabis farms have often been placed in care only to go missing within a matter of days and – terrified of the threats that have been previously made to them – they return to the traffickers.

Victims have called for “someone they can trust” to break the cycle. A pilot study in 23 local authorities is underway, in which the charity Barnados supplies an independent advocate to act for the child victim and give them the support they need to break away from the traffickers. It is due to report in November 2015.

Mandy John-Baptiste of the NSPCC’s Child Trafficking Advice Centre told Channel 4 News that authorities need to give “a child protection response – it’s child abuse.” However, she added, “You’ve got to get to the adults who are abusing them and making lots of money. There needs to be much more focus on it being organised crime – tackling it needs to be an international effort.”

Root causes

The UK’s first anti-slavery commissioner Kevin Hyland is to travel to Vietnam later in 2015 to investigate ways to stop people traffickers operating there.

Mr Hyland said the focus of his visit would be on “improved efforts to prevent these crimes from ever occurring in the first place” with work in the rural areas of Vietnam where many victims originate, as well as efforts to tackle the gangs already operating in the UK.

“Vietnamese criminal gangs operating across the UK are ruthlessly exploiting Vietnamese children in multiple ways to maximise the profit that can be gained from them,” he said.

“This includes being exploited in forced labour in cannabis factories and nail bars, as well as an increasingly diverse range of exploitative activities, as the gangs move in to other areas of crime.”