Third World Child Trafficking Increases Along with Immigration

Sex and domestic slavery is on the increase amongst the Third World population living in Britain, driven by a dramatic increase in child trafficking from their home countries, new figures released by the Home Office show.

A total of 957 children, including more than 400 from Afghanistan and 200 from Africa, were found by local authorities in the final eight months of last year alone.

The figures represent a ninety percent increase compared to the annual rate of arrivals over the previous three years.

Police have said that this only represents the “tip of the iceberg.”

A Sunday Telegraph investigation last year showed how the trade starts in Africa where babies are sold as “home helps” to African families in Britain and in other European and North American cities.

The traffickers use a network of corrupt officials and co-traffickers in these Third World countries to obtain passports and visas, often giving the children new names.

Many of the young victims are flown directly from Lagos in Nigeria to London’s airports. Others are taken, via other West African states such as Ghana and Benin, to “transit” cities, including Paris.

A growing number of the African slave children arrive in Britain unaccompanied, as asylum-seekers, or with “private foster parents.”

Once brought to Britain, the children are used as a fraudulent means by Nigerians already present in this country to obtain illicit housing and other welfare benefits, totalling tens of thousands of pounds each a year.

They are used as domestic slaves, cleaning, cooking and looking after other younger children, or put to work in restaurants and shops. Some of the children are also subjected to physical and sexual abuse, while others even find themselves accused of being witches and become victims of exorcism rites in “traditional” African churches in Britain.

A 2004 report by a nine-charity coalition–including Unicef, Save the Children, Barnardo’s and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children–identified suspected child trafficking victims in all but one of 33 London boroughs. They included a 10-year-old Ghanaian girl and an 11-year-old Nigerian who were subjected to domestic slavery, and a 13-year-old Vietnamese girl forced into prostitution.

Christine Beddoe, the director of the nine-charity coalition End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking (Ecpat), says that Vietnamese children have been locked in cannabis factories set up in boarded-up suburban houses, their job to switch the lights on and off over the plants, and control the temperature.

Chinese children, meanwhile, have been discovered working long hours in restaurants and other Asian sweatshops.

“It is hard to believe that this is going on in Britain and other Western countries in the 21st century,” one senior Scotland Yard detective who specialises in trafficking cases was quoted as saying. “But it is.”

And who was it who said that immigration was good for Britain?

The time has come for change.