OMFG Children being kidnapped from Home Office Hotel

[MorelloKisses]

Children kidnapped from Home Office hotel

"A whistleblower, who works for Home Office, describes children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars".

How is this not top news story?? Those poor children.

This. The more that are successful in getting here, the more will be trafficked and abused.

I wonder how the slave masters know where the trafficked children are housed? Is the child the one ringing the number thay have been given before arriving in the UK, to facilitate the pick up?

The issue of human trafficking and modern slavery by international crime organisations is too big for one nation to solve. The only way we can keep trafficked people out of the hands of the gangs trafficking them is to treat victims like criminals and imprison them. This is unacceptable. We can send these victims back to their home country, where the gangs will scoop them up and traffick them again; perhaps to a different country. This is also unacceptable. We can use the victims as witnesses to catch and put the gang members in the U.K. in prison, but then the gangs members in the home country will carry out their threats and likely murder their families. So to pressure the victims to go states evidence is also unacceptable.

What needs to happen is we should be using our ambassadors/diplomats & create a special U.K. police task force plus INTERPOL to work with other nations to target and dismantle these international crime organisations one by one. If an entire gang is being arrested in the U.K., Albania, Romania, Serbia, Italy, Ireland and France all in the same week- then we will make progress. It’s a massive undertaking but the current situation of arresting local cells of international criminal gangs and deporting the victims to be trafficked again is letting slavery persist.

I agree the underlying issue is too big to solve alone and we need proper global cooperation/efforts.

Cutting aid etc. is a false economy too - where we support countries and support refugees in neighbouring countries we prevent more people becoming so desperate to leave.

We do need some realism now, just saying 'send the boats back' is not going to change anything, the stupid Rwanda policy is not going to change anything, taking so long to process claims is making things worse too. All of it is worse due to current government policies, because they can not face up to the complicated realities having lied for so long that it is easy to fix.

100% this - I dont know where people think their cannabis is coming from.

It is grown by trafficked child slaves, of which there are thousands in the UK

And hence it is so cheap - the children dont get properly fed, clothed educated or given medical care, and making this industry "legal" would just make this abuse easier

The cannabis industry is a great evil. Anyone who supports this industry is actively supporting this slavery and child abuse

Without their parents?

Yes @Forever42, same near me, and near relatives too.

It’s sad and really it’s state-sponsored abuse.

They disappear from foster care too.

The child believes they are in the UK to work, they run away from foster care back to the trafficker because they know a parent has paid a fortune to the smugglers and they have to work to pay that money back and in time send money to their family.

www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jul/26/vietnamese-cannabis-farms-children-enslaved

www.communitycare.co.uk/2007/12/12/child-trafficking-and-slavery-in-the-uk-debbie-ariyo-reports/

The second link is to an article published in 2007. This has been going on for a long time.

It's not just children, although they are the most vulnerable. Domestic servants who come tot he UK with often Arabic families can be treated like slaves.

Under the last labour government legislation was introduced that allowed a maid to leave her sponsors and seek the same work with another family.

One of the first things our current government did was remove this law.

So a Filipeno maid who comes to this country with an Arab family and who is treated dreadfully has the option to stay with her abusers or to go to the police (if she can get out of the house) and make herself an illegal immigrant.

Already happens. There have been multiple arrests across EU with agencies collaborating for drugs and trafficking offences. But it is a HUGE global task and goes beyond the EU to the middle East and South America as well.

The majority of these children probably don't consider themselves children...they are according to our law though. I've seen plenty in my city. There is a lot of cash swilling around too.

www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/44-arrested-in-europe-wide-crackdown-against-high-risk-criminal-netwo

FGS.

Primary school aged children are NOT being put into asylum hotels by themselves. They are with their families who are also being housed there. Hence it is likely that if you live near an asylum hotel, there will be children of asylum seekers at your local primary school. There are also plenty of British children who live in hotels with their families whilst they wait for the ever elusive council house. Asylum seeking families and children are fully supported by Home Office officials and social services so save your outrage.

Unaccompanied asylum seeking children who are under the age of 16 will be housed with foster families or in social services funded approved accommodation (I.e shared housing with carers like Tracey Beaker lived in). However they will still abscond. And short of locking them up or providing 24 hour police surveillance and following them, there is nothing that the Home Office or the Government can do to stop it.

I would legalise cannabis personally so that illegal grow houses would not be a thing and give mandatory life sentences for anyone found guilty of trafficking.

But in the same way that top drug dealers get away with it, top people smugglers get away with it too as it's difficult to get evidence against them as the trafficked victims will not talk as they are frightened of retribution against their families.

If people on here are so outraged, you can always apply to be foster carers for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers or invite a family from Afghanistan or Iran into your home. No I thought not.

This is extremely common all over the country. In Manchester foster parents regularly lose their foster children this way. It is terrifying and the Police seemed very unbothered when I discussed it with them

Agree, we just need to make it more of a priority.

Legalising cannabis will have zero impact on modern slavery and human trafficking. Modern slaves are working in just as many legal industries as illegal from car washes to farms to nail bars to construction sites.

Half the trafficked slave children in the U.K. are British children. So organised crime isn’t just affecting children being trafficked here from outside the U.K.

Exactly and we hardly have the resources to take care of them. Even if they were taken into care there is nothing to stop them leaving or being abducted from foster parents. Local authorities are totally overwhelmed and half have run out of money without even trying to deal with problems on this scale.

Presumably with their families though. No way is a nine-year-old
living alone in a hostel

Social services are thinly stretched so what chance is there of solving this, especially as it’s so entrenched.

On the other hand, a number of unaccompanied arrivals at the school I’m at are clearly in their 20s but we have to accept them and the independent age assessment that’s given. Coincidentally, all have birthdays on 1.1. Their presence is a safeguarding issue for the rest of the school community but we have to deal with it as best we can.

I used to work in a very posh private hospital, lots of out patients flew in from Arab countries, lots of them also had Jan first as their date of birth.

It's a quite common in a lot of countries to use Jan 1st. Vietnam, Sudan, Afghanistan - places where asylum seekers often come from.

We do have the resources, they’re just deliberately mis-spent - either on thing they shouldn’t have been spent on in the first place, like contracts for useless PPE from a company that happens to be friendly with an MP, or in deliberately slow processes. Do you know how long people are waiting to have their asylum claim processed? Speed up the process and suddenly it all becomes cheaper because you don’t have to outsource the accommodation to hotel etc.

The issue isn’t that we don’t have the resources, the issue is that the Tory government don’t even try to pretend they’re looking out for anyone but them and their mates.

It will take more than just foster carers to help these children. And also the lack of foster carers is again down to government incompetence.

How many people can afford to care for, and have the space to care for, a foster child during a cost of living crisis AND a housing crisis? You can’t just say you’ll foster a child and one turns up on your door the next day.

Not every single one of the governments problems can just be handed over to the population

Where do you wanted them housed and how would you stop gang leaders picking them up?

Labour / left voters seem to post a lot re how bad this is but short on what they’d actually do.

Why on earth would you assume I don’t have zero tolerance for irregular entry? You’ve obviously had the pleasure of not having to sit through the countless asylum seeker threads where I repeatedly advocate for safe routes - lucky you!

Trafficking gangs need to be tackled, but the UK’s independent modern slavery commissioner left the position in April 2022 and the position remains unfilled. It’s a legal requirement for the government to fill this position, for reasons that have now become very clear.

The government were warned that housing children in hotels would leave them at risk of trafficking. They were warned that housing children in hotels was unlawful. But they did it anyway and these and the consequences.

The government is given clear, regular advice about the need for safe routes and processing asylum claims safely overseas to reduce deaths in the channel and reliance on trafficking gangs. But they ignore this.

Any comment on any of that? Because that’s where the real problem lies, not with me making a post criticising the dehumanisation of children.

Well again, it’s not for the population to solve the governments problems or failings.

It sounds like they need a more caring environment with a high staff ratio. More done to target the reason they’re trafficked into the country in the first place - weed. Quicker processing of claims. Official routes for claiming asylum and transport to the UK so you don’t have to risk your life on the channel and/or depend on traffickers.

Im sure an expert paid by the government would have even better ideas than me.

While none of this would entirely solve the problem that doesn’t mean it can all just be left not fit for purpose.

A high staff ratio will not stop a 16 / 17 year old male whose family is at threat of harm meeting with the gang leader outside.

The reason people are picked up soon after arriving is due to a previous trafficking arrangement.

Some of these posts are a bit wishful. It’s organised gang crime. Not a staff ratio issue.

The pp is right about zero tolerance on it as it cuts business. I do get how hard that is though. I think Sweden (and maybe other countries) have cut down using changes in country status but I’d have to read more.