Thousands of child slaves sold into UK

LONDON: Hundreds of children from Asia, Africa and eastern Europe are being brought into Britain each year for use as “slave labour” in sweatshops, private homes and cannabis factories, a media report said on Sunday.

In many case, the parents of these children pay gangs of traffickers to take them into the UK, believing that their offspring would be able to lead better lives there and would be able to send money home, The Sunday Telegraph said.

The children are smuggled into Britain or brought in on false passports by adults posing as relatives and are put to work immediately, live in appaling conditions and are often subjected to physical and sexual abuse, it said.

The extent of the child trafficking malaise was revealed in a consultation paper presented to the UK Home Office by a coalition of nine charities including Unicef and Save the Children.

The charities accused the British government of failing to tackle the problem and called for urgent action to end the “cruel and shocking exploitation of children.” “This is modern child slavery,” the report quoted Christine Beddoe, director of the ‘End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking’ coalition of charities, as saying. Another senior charity official described the traffickers as “21st-century Fagins — only much crueller,” a reference to the character who ran teams of child pickpockets in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

In the document, obtained by the newspaper, the charities say there are “no specific support services” for victims of child trafficking and blame the government for treating the children as illegal immigrants rather than victims.