Lord Laming
Main Page: Lord Laming (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Laming
My Lords, I, too, add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, on initiating this important debate. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is right to draw a distinction between smuggling and trafficking but, sadly for the victim, the end result is often the same. I say that because if I were to ask each one of us to think about where we were on, say, the evening of 28 October 1998, I suspect that we would struggle to think back. Had Victoria Climbié lived—and she certainly should have lived—she would have been able to say that that was probably one of the most significant dates in her life.
Victoria then lived with her parents and siblings in a small community in the Ivory Coast. She was then eight years old. She was very intelligent and energetic—a very lively child—and her parents worked extremely hard to get her into a local school, where the head teacher judged her to be one of the brightest students whom he had taught. On that October evening, a great aunt visited them. Although from the Ivory Coast, she was in fact a French citizen and she was on her way back to Paris. She pressed Victoria’s parents to allow her to take Victoria back to Paris with her so that she could provide her with a better education and greater life opportunities. A combination of Victoria’s excitement and the numerous reassurances that the parents were given helped to overcome their understandable hesitation and Victoria left with her aunt the following morning.
What the parents could not have known was that the aunt had earlier persuaded the French authorities that she had a daughter in the Ivory Coast and that she had arranged there for that mythical daughter to be registered on her passport. Of course, she did not have a daughter; she had instead selected a girl called Anna for that purpose. Alas, at a very late stage, the arrangements to get Anna back to Paris fell through, so in desperation she put great pressure on Victoria’s parents. Before the aunt and Victoria boarded the flight back to Paris, Victoria had her head shaved and the aunt acquired a wig in order to pass her off as Anna. Victoria was told that from now on she was not Victoria Climbié but Anna Kouao.
Once the two had established themselves in Paris, the French authorities began to ask questions about Anna because they were concerned about her welfare. Kouao did not welcome those questions and her response was quickly to move to London. Once in London, she presented herself and Anna as a homeless family. As in France, the presence of a young child meant that the authorities sought to help with accommodation and financial benefits.
I mention all this because what followed in respect of that child should give us all deep concern about the dangers of what can happen to trafficked children in our country. In the following 10 months, Anna was known to no fewer than four different social services departments, three housing departments and two specialist police child protection teams. Moreover, she was admitted to two different hospitals, because the staff in accident and emergency suspected that she was being deliberately harmed, and she was referred to a specialist children’s centre managed by the NSPCC. Yet despite the involvement of all those key agencies and literally hundreds of staff, Anna was never registered at school and never attended school for one day in those 10 months. Worst of all, nobody asked what a day was like for her in her life.
We need not dwell on the appalling suffering that Anna experienced or her terrible death. Suffice it to say that it was only after she died that the police did some remarkable work and discovered that she was not Anna Kouao but Victoria Climbié and that she was not a French citizen but had parents in the Ivory Coast.
I mention this only because, as we all recognise, millions of children cross international borders every day and it would be terribly naive of any of us to think that within that number there is not a high proportion of children who are potentially seriously at risk. The challenge for us is to ensure that those children who are at risk are recognised and identified and that steps are taken quickly to protect them.
What we do not know is how many children come to this country to meet someone at an airport or a port purporting to be their parent who is not their parent, how many young adults are made to look like children or how many young people have been brought to this country having been promised a wonderful future only then to experience the most ugly and destructive aspects of human behaviour. It is impossible to get accurate figures, but precisely because of that we should do everything to work together across national and international boundaries to ensure that we identify and protect children and young people who are subject to some of the most appalling things.
I hope that the Government will give further thought to opting in to the EU directive.