Trafficking in Human Beings

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to be here this evening to welcome the Government’s proposals. I know that we are going through the European scrutiny process and that we have a right to our debate, but there might be a small tinge or last flourish of Euroscepticism in the forcing of a debate after the date on which the Government had hoped to sign up to the directive. I have seen the letter to the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, so I know that the Government have respected the scrutiny process and the Committee’s wish to have a debate on these issues. That is to be commended for scrutiny purposes and I do not think it will take anything from the eventual signing up to the directive.

I once asked the Prime Minister about his moral compass in relation to this issue, and it seems that our collective moral compass has come through the magnetic storm of Euroscepticism and out the other side pointing in the right direction. I welcome that greatly. I do not think that the probing questions asked by those who perhaps did not want us to do things on the basis of an EU directive, but wanted us to set up 27 arrangements with other countries, were unhelpful because they made the Government think hard about what was in the directive. Some of the issues that I pressed hard on, such as extraterritorial jurisdiction, are very important and I hope that the Government might join the European Parliament in getting the same clause on extraterritorial jurisdiction into the directive on sexual exploitation and the abuse of children, as that is currently being resisted.

We have done this just in time. The ECPAT and Body Shop petition has been running for some months and when I looked after it had been closed on 5 May it had 887,575 signatures calling for guardianships to be set up as part of our response to the trafficking of children. I believe that the petition will be presented on Thursday at No. 10 Downing street on behalf of those organisations. ECPAT has also been supported by the Body Shop financially in its work.

A month ago, the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland reported on his research into the trafficking of children. From the evidence he had collected, he said there were at least 80 cases he could verify and possibly 200 of which he had had notice. For a small country such as Scotland, that is a lot. If the figure were extrapolated for the UK, the number would be massive—much higher than the figure of 1,000 mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), and that is just for children. It worries me that there is a massive amount of trafficking going on—perhaps for the purposes mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who talked about what he had seen in Romania. Clearly, there is a lot of trafficking going on that we have yet to find out about—much more than some estimates. Some of it might be just to reunite families; some of it might be for benefit fraud; some of it might be for exploitation through cheap labour or begging, as I have seen in other European countries; and some of it might be for other, more nasty, reasons, including sexual exploitation and abuse.

We have a long way to go. According to the reports I have seen, there were only eight successful prosecutions for people trafficking in England last year. What seems to happen, according to the data that I have, is that the accused plead guilty to a lesser charge. There is not supposed to be plea bargaining in this country, but we know that it happens. The number of proper cases and final prosecutions is very low. There was one well publicised case of a woman police officer who pressed for research into human trafficking, because she had seen it going on, and was told by her senior officer, “We’re not interested in human trafficking. In this force we’re interested in burglaries.” In a case reported today by Barnardo’s, a judge commented to a 14-year-old who had been trafficked and used in a sex ring that it was just a lifestyle choice that she had made. That is frightening in this day and age.

We have much to do about the scale of the problem. I sent the Minister a number of parliamentary questions. I was told that the trafficking toolkit from 2003 was available to all law enforcement agencies. That was the answer to my question about how many people had been trained by the police forces in this country to handle human trafficking. It was confirmed today by the people from Barnardo’s that only a quarter of police forces have proper child protection units running, so we have a long, long way to go.

I have received information from contacts throughout the EU. The Human Trafficking Foundation run by Anthony Steen is keen that we should reach out and form organisations such as the one run by the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) in all the countries of Europe. For example, when I went to Hungary, I met representatives of three organisations who could give me lists of 400 women trafficked and re-trafficked—turned over, new women brought into Switzerland by one organisation, and children trafficked from Kosovo to Albania and elsewhere in that part of the world for begging, theft and possibly sexual abuse. It is important that we get round Europe, make contacts, recognise the scale of the problem and see it as a European problem and one that is much wider than the EU.

We need a new approach to victims, as was said from the Front Bench and supported by the hon. Member for Wellingborough. We should realise that, if we can separate the victims from the traffickers, we can deal with the traffickers better, but when they are mixed up and it is suggested that those involved in prostitution rings are somehow accepting of it, we blur the images and people start to think that those in the brothels are the trouble and the problem. It is a massive money-making operation exploiting women as they have been exploited for generations, but now that is transnational and we must do something about it.

We should take a new approach to the many active organisations. I do not know how the Salvation Army bid will work and who it will work with, but following the debates that we have had here on slavery and trafficking, I have been contacted by organisations that work with Moldova, for example, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) mentioned. One organisation in London works with an organisation in Moldova trying to stop the young girls coming out of care homes being picked up immediately and offered work which ends up as prostitution in other European countries. We must break the cycle in the country of origin, as was said from the Government Back Benches. There are many organisations actively working in this field that we must pull together and see as a great force.

Barnardo’s commented that sometimes the authorities think that people who act as guardians—that was not the term used, but the role is similar—looking after the women and children coming out of those rings are treated as though they are amateurs, because they are not professionally paid and they are not formal social workers. In fact, they are more highly skilled and have done more sensitivity training and skill training than many receive in their wide curriculum as social workers. We must start treating such volunteers as part of the force that we can turn to the advantage of those children.

I will finish by making one further point, as the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt) is present. We have had a debate on the EU directive on combating the sexual abuse of children. I hope that our Government, who do not have a statute of limitations on sexual abuse crimes, will persuade the EU that in its directive there should be no statute of limitations on those crimes. The current bid from the European Parliament is for a 15-year statute of limitations, which would expand provision in many countries. We need that to be taken out, so that when we catch a person involved in such crimes, at any time, they will be prosecuted and jailed.

I have been made a UK representative of the Council of Europe’s ONE in FIVE campaign, which is intended to promote the Council of Europe convention on the protection of children against sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, which the UK has signed up to but not yet ratified. I think that we should ratify that convention. I hope that Members who are listening to the debate do not see this problem just as something that happens on their streets and that they have to worry about only in the context of their constituencies. Every time Anthony Steen went abroad with the European Scrutiny Committee, he took the chance to reach out by making contacts, talking about the issue and convincing people that they should join in and act as the all-party group does here, and I will do the same every time I go abroad. When Members who are listening to the debate are in contact with parliamentarians in other parts of Europe and beyond, they should talk not just about the positive things, but about the need to come together to shut down that network and protect the people who are exploited from country to country, for whatever reason. That will defend the people on our streets and in our communities much more than thinking that we can do it alone.