Modern Slavery Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Doocey]

9: After Clause 1, insert the following new Clause—
“Offence of child exploitation
(1) A person who exploits a child commits an offence.
(2) Where the exact age of the child cannot be determined, it shall nonetheless be an offence under subsection (1) to exploit a person if the accused believed, or had reasonable grounds for believing, that the person exploited was under 18.
(3) It shall be an offence even if there was no threat or use of violence, or other form of coercion, deception or any abuse of a position of vulnerability.
(4) Exploitation means the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, including begging, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the exploitation of criminal activities, or the removal of organs.
(5) A child may be in a situation of exploitation whether or not—
(a) escape from the situation is practically possible for the child; or(b) the child has attempted to escape from the situation.(6) Where the person exploited is a child, the consent or apparent consent to the exploitation of the child, or of any person having lawful authority over the child, is irrelevant.”

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, the amendment introduces a new, separate child exploitation clause aimed at filling the gaps which, despite the Government’s amendments, still exist in the Bill. Clause 1 requires evidence of slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour. However, force or compulsion should not be required in the case of children because a child can be controlled far more easily than an adult, and in many cases without direct force or compulsion. That is one of the reasons why we need a separate child exploitation clause. Clause 2 does not require just evidence of trafficking; it also requires proof that the trafficking took place with a view to exploitation. Proving that somebody was trafficked is difficult enough, but proving that they were trafficked with a view to exploitation is almost impossible, and proving both in the case of children, who are moved at the behest of adults, sets the bar far too high for the CPS to be able to prosecute.

There are a number of circumstances in which children are being exploited that would not be deemed offences under the Bill: children who had not been trafficked but had been sent out to the streets by family members to beg or to steal; children used to make multiple claims for benefit; children brought in from baby farms overseas to be illegally adopted. I shall give two examples of what is actually happening. When I was serving on the Metropolitan Police Authority, the police went into a house and found a young girl of about 12 years of age who was looking after three children under six. She was working from dawn to dusk: cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, looking after the children. The bed was a mat by the fire. She had never been to school. The police removed her from the house and took her to social services. However, social services brought her back to the same house the next day, saying that compared to some of the children that they had pulled out of crack joints, she was living in the lap of luxury. The only thing the police could prosecute for was the fact that she had not been to school and they could not home-school her. Once the aunt and uncle—so-called—had promised to send her to school, they basically got off scot free, because there was no way the police could prove that she had been trafficked with a view to being exploited.

In another case, a girl of 12 was sold by her mother in west Africa to a woman who brought her to London to exploit her in domestic servitude. After about a year the woman’s next door neighbour started to ask questions about the girl: where she had come from, what she was doing. The woman immediately sold her on to another man, who also exploited her in domestic servitude. When the police were finally contacted, they said that they could not prosecute this man because he had not trafficked the girl into the country.

If either of these cases of exploitation happens after the Bill becomes law the authorities would still be unable to prosecute, because they would be unable to prove the trafficking element required under Clause 2. I am not alone in believing that a separate child exploitation clause is essential. The Joint Committee on which I sat, which scrutinised the Bill, recommended such a clause. The 41 NGOs which form the Refugee Council’s consortium, including ECPAT, the NSPCC, UNICEF and the Children’s Society, believe that such a clause is necessary. Leading barristers whose daily work is to prosecute these cases, several of whom gave evidence to the Joint Committee, also believe that the clause is necessary. The amendment that I propose makes it an offence to exploit a child, but it also defines that exploitation using the exact words of article 2 of the EU directive on human trafficking, by which our courts are already bound.

This amendment makes explicit the fact that a child cannot consent to their own exploitation and it removes the need to prove any threat, coercion or deception. The Government have tabled an amendment that says that consent is irrelevant for the offences in Clause 1. That is very welcome because it brings Clause 1 into line with the trafficking offence in Clause 2. However, it does not change the fact that we still need a separate exploitation clause, because in many cases exploiting a child will simply not meet the threshold required for slavery, servitude or forced or compulsory labour.

I cannot say with any certainty how many children are being trafficked and/or exploited in the United Kingdom today—no one can, because our system of justice has failed properly to recognise that such offences exist, let alone to investigate how often they occur. That is a sadly familiar tale, as we have seen recently in the evidence from the Jay report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. We must take the opportunity afforded by this Bill to provide a legal framework which offers the very highest standards of protection to children, recognising, as we do in so much other legislation, that children need a higher standard of protection than adults and, sadly, sometimes a higher standard of protection from adults. We need a specific offence of child exploitation to tackle the deficiencies in the Bill. If we do not get it, we will fail the many hundreds, if not thousands, of children who are exploited in our country every day. I beg to move.

[Lord Rosser]

My Lords, we have Amendments 24 and 26 in this group, which have a very similar theme to that of the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey.

The recent report on child sexual exploitation in Rotherham shocked a great many people, not least due to the extent of the abuse that had taken place. Approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period from 1997 through to 2013. Victims were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated. This was against a background in May this year of the case load of the specialist child sexual exploitation team being 51.

Many victims were unable to recognise that they had been groomed and exploited, and some blamed themselves for not just their own abuse but for what happened to other victims. Although there have been a small number of prosecutions for offences against individual children, many children refused to give evidence or withdrew statements as a direct result of threats, intimidation and assaults against them or their families. We have had similar cases in Oxford and Rochdale that the authorities concerned did not appear to pick up, perhaps because of a lack of awareness of the offence of child exploitation. That is a reason for wanting to see the specific offence of child exploitation as well as the offence of child trafficking included in the Bill.

Around a third of all known victims of modern slavery in the United Kingdom are children and the number is growing, not least because they are being specifically targeted due to their age and vulnerability. Yet according to Crown Prosecution Service data, there have been no cases where the victim was a child at the time of the prosecution since the introduction of Section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 on slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour. The significance of this point is that the Section 71 offence appears to have been transposed into Clause 1 of the Modern Slavery Bill.

The Joint Committee on the Modern Slavery Bill recommended that an offence of child exploitation should be included in the Bill to make clear that child exploitation is even more serious than that of an adult and that consent elements can never be an issue for children. The Sexual Offences Act, for example, already accepts the principle of separate and more serious offences against those under 18. This Bill as it stands does not contain any explicit criminal offence of child exploitation. Our amendments make clear that children do not have the legal capacity to consent to any form of exploitation as recognised in international law and would increase the likelihood that many more of those who traffic, exploit and abuse children would be brought before the courts.

As has been said, children are also at a disadvantage when it comes to providing evidence since they do not usually understand that they have been trafficked or even understand what it means, let alone be aware of what kind of evidence is needed to pursue a prosecution in relation to being trafficked to a location or situation of exploitation. That will be particularly likely if parents or others close to the children concerned have been involved in the trafficking, with the result that while a child may be able to say what happened when they were exploited—through, for example, domestic servitude or prostitution—they are much less likely to be able to help in terms of the perpetrators of a trafficking offence.

It has already been said that since movement or travel is a key component of exploitation, the reality that children are often unable to explain who brought them to a particular house or location where they have been exploited—our amendments include examples of the many different forms of child exploitation—means that no prosecution happens.

Creating separate offences of child exploitation and child trafficking will help to overcome the significant and crucial problem in respect of children and help to achieve the objectives of the Bill, which are to reduce the incidence of modern slavery in its different forms and bring more perpetrators to justice. The separate offence of child trafficking will ensure that those involved in this equally awful activity can be brought to justice for this offence as well as for exploitation.

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[Lord James of Blackheath]

In view of that, I shall not press my amendment.

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. It is an emotive topic, which absolutely everyone around the Committee wants to get right. We are all on the same side; this is not a question of one person versus another.

I feel strongly that we need a child exploitation clause. I have no doubt about that but will deal with a couple of points. The Minister gave an example of where the CPS had prosecuted somebody who was begging. I can give the Minister a number of examples where the CPS has not prosecuted in the case of begging, because it was advised that it was not possible to do so. The Minister also said that bringing babies into this country from baby farms with a view to illegal adoption would, under our laws, be illegal. I do not think that anyone would disagree with that, but you would have to find the people who had adopted those children illegally, and unless you did, how on earth could you prosecute them? We need to stop it happening. The Minister also said that it would be necessary to encourage the police to prosecute, but I worked with the Metropolitan Police for eight years and do not believe that they need any encouragement to prosecute. What they need are the tools of their trade in order to do so.

I certainly would not consider trying to argue points of law with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and other noble and learned legal eagles, because I do not know the law. However, what I do know is that every single NGO that works on the ground with children says that what we have at the moment is not working. In this Bill, we have a cut-and-paste from lots of other Bills, putting it all in one place. But there is a major gap in the lack of a child exploitation clause, because it is not possible to prosecute somebody for exploiting a child under the Bill unless you can also prove that they were trafficked with a view to exploitation.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness goes any further, I wish to reinforce the point that she made. She referred to the work that she has done with the Metropolitan Police. I suspect that she will have seen the debate in another place that took place on 4 September. I will cite the quotation given during that debate from a chief inspector of the Metropolitan Police who pointed out the flaws of the current proposals from a prosecution perspective. These were his words:

“If I was reading this from a lay perspective, I would not read into this Bill that a child begging, or using children to obtain fraud which is to their detriment, or putting a child out on the street to steal for sometimes 12 to 18 hours a day is trafficking and exploitation”.

Is that not the main thrust of the argument of the noble Baroness and why, between now and Report, we need to take very seriously the amendment that she has moved?

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[Baroness Doocey]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for that interjection, which is very timely and demonstrates clearly the points I am trying to make. The other important point is that almost every senior barrister working on these prosecutions, whether advising the CPS or the police, takes the view that it is absolutely vital to have a separate child exploitation clause. Therefore, I am pleased that the Minister has said that the Government are willing to see more evidence, which we will make sure is provided, and to look again at this, because I have absolutely no doubt that we need it as a matter of urgency. How many times have we heard about a major scandal, where we then have a major investigation and hear lessons have been learnt, only to find a couple of months later that something very similar happens? Lessons are not learnt. Let us legislate to make sure not just that there is the corporate memory that is needed but that we can actually prosecute people for this.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

Is the noble Baroness absolutely convinced—because she sounds as though she is—that simply having a new law on the statute book will change this? We have a plethora of laws on the statute book at the moment and children languish in situations of neglect and exploitation—a range of different situations—simply because there is poor practice, a lack of resources and a total lack of understanding. Does she really believe—she probably does but needs to convince me—that another statute will actually change all that?

[Baroness Doocey]

Yes, the answer is that I do. The reason I do is because everyone who works with children and works in this field on a daily basis, and whose job or life is about trying to deal with child exploitation, believes that it will make an enormous difference. Therefore, I have no need to be convinced because I am utterly convinced. However, having listened to the Minister say that the Government are listening and are perhaps willing to moderate what they are going to do, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 9 withdrawn.