joint ukromanian operation busts

Joint UK/Romanian Operation Busts Romanian Child Trafficking Ring

From the BBC:

Police believe they have smashed a Romanian criminal gang smuggling

children as young as five into the country to beg and steal.

Officers from several forces, including the Metropolitan Police,

raided 17 addresses across the county. At least 25 adults were

held, on suspicion of immigration breaches, deception, fraud, theft

and pick-pocketing.

Police suspect poor families in eastern Europe may be forced into

allowing gangs to take their children into the UK to carry out

offences such as pick-pocketing and thefts near cash machines. They

estimate that each child is worth �100,000 a year to the gangs and

the Romanian authorities estimate there are up to 2,000 children

who have been smuggled into Britain.

The human trafficking trade now generates an estimated �5bn a year

worldwide, making it the second biggest international criminal

industry after the drugs trade.

Figures from the Met showed that before Romania joined the EU, its

nationals were associated with 146 crimes over six months in

Britain. A year after it joined, the figure had leapt to 922 within

the same period. Police believe about 70 people are behind the

majority of the trafficking...

Karl Davis, from education and children services, told BBC News:

"We carried out individual assessments on all these children and

five children remain in our care."

"Five families have come forward and we are satisfied that the

arguments made were sufficient and we were happy for them to return

to their families. We assessed them fully in terms of what the

children and families told us. Some of the families were in the

homes that were raided but some traveled from outside of Slough."

"Some of the children were too young to tell us much. The youngest

is two years old and there are two 14-year-olds. The two-year-old

is still in our care."

The same article has an interview with Christine Beddoe of ECPAT, a

global network of organizations working on eliminating child

exploitation. She speaks a bit more to the areas the UK will need to

improve on in order to help children suffering from exploitation.

According to Reuters, the operation was codenamed "Caddy" and

Commander Steve Allen stated that more arrests are expected. Other

articles seem to confuse trafficking with smuggling, and others yet

call into question whether the children were actually unaware of what

was happening. I'm sure the two-year-old gave consent for the family

to sell him/her and then viciously hit the streets to steal. I

apologize for the sarcasm, but child trafficking targets the most

vulnerable group in society and even if or when the children are

saved, they are faced with the lifelong burden of their experience.

According to a 2005 article on Turkey's efforts to combat human

trafficking, only 30 percent of victims of human trafficking recover

to the point of leading a normal life. This is of course, the

identified victims that organizations and governments are able to

document. I can only hope the children who were returned to their

families in Romania will not be sold again.

This article also details another cost of human trafficking that I

think is striking as I tried to find other articles on the case and

found many had some sort of condescending or doubtful tone to it.

"Another human cost of migrant smuggling is the damage that is done

to the image of migrants, and an increase in xenophobia. Up until

now, unmanaged migration flows in destination countries have

resulted in a perception by the general public that migrants are to

blame for the growth in organized crime. But migration is an issue

that affects us all; it is and always has been a natural human

phenomenon. That is why it cannot be left to criminals to manage

migration for us."

Even the BBC was ready to point out how crimes by people of Romanian

origin was quick to increase in the UK after Romania's accession to

the EU so the article makes an important statement. Human trafficking

is still not a phenomenon we completely understand and until we

realize the extent of the damage it is doing, a complete solution will

not be reached.