I’ve spent 20 years working with trafficking victims – there is a way to protect them

Unregulated children’s homes are something I imagine most people in the country would be horrified to hear existed

The story that emerged last summer of one of our most beloved athletes, Sir Mo Farah, being a victim of child trafficking, was not met with vitriol or talk of “swarm” or “invasion”; words that have been used about those fleeing war and danger.

Sir Mo was instead met with plaudits for his bravery and strength, and universal horror at the idea of a child arriving in our country unaccompanied by his family and then trafficked in to domestic slavery. I guess when those trafficked children end up winning a bag load of gold medals for their country, it’s more likely that we’ll feel sympathy for them.

The story this week of 136 unaccompanied asylum seeking children going missing from a Brighton hotel (of which 79 are still unaccounted for) tells us just how little our government agencies and the home secretary herself was moved by the story of a young Mo Farah forced in to domestic servitude.

A whistleblower from the security company managing the safety of the hotels spoke to The Guardian about seeing children being grabbed and put into the back of cars. While that may appear far-fetched to some, it doesn’t to me.

For years, I have worked with children who have been trafficked by criminal gangs for both sex and criminal activity. I have met children who have been forced into servitude like Sir Mo. I have met girls who were trafficked for sex, put online, and forced to have sex with 20 men a day. I have met kids who have been implicated in heinous crimes in order to further the level of control their captor holds over them. These children were mostly British-born children, but I have also met plenty of children like Mo Farah who were either trafficked to this country or trafficked in this country in the process of fleeing.

Various child grooming and trafficking enquiries have been written in the past decade. While all talk about the individual nature of the crimes that they were set up to look in to – usually geographical – their conclusions are often the same.

Agencies are still failing to end the child trafficking trade. Children’s services are overstretched, justice agencies and other agencies fail to see patterns. Pretty much all have concluded that children under the age of 18 must not be housed in unregulated accommodation.

This isn’t just an asylum seeker hotel problem; this is a problem across the board, where children can be placed in accommodation that is completely unregulated. You could, if you so wished, set up such accommodation in your own home today. I have, for example, met 17-year-old rape victims housed alongside people coming out of prison. Unregulated children’s homes are something I imagine most people in the country would be horrified to hear existed.

And yet they do. Recommendation after recommendation has called for the end of the process. The Labour Party have tried to amend legislation in this space a number of times, and the government has repeatedly pushed it back.

How can 79 children still be missing from one hotel, and the home secretary (who will have arranged the contract with that hotel) has absolutely no idea where they are? I have run accommodation that housed children; the very idea that we would just lose one, let alone 79, children is unimaginable.

The government cannot simply say that they don’t have anywhere to put these kids. Councils have steadily lost funding over the past 12 years, leading to a reduction in social care places for adults and children; so the government shouldn’t be surprised when the number of social care places for both adults and children end up being reduced. In the case of the Brighton hotel, the local Labour MP Peter Kyle raised the alarm, the police repeatedly tried to raise the issue with the home office, as did the local authority.

Suella Braverman has said she wants to be tough on traffickers, but in 2020/21 the highest number ever of children identified as trafficking victims in the UK was recorded – the majority of which were British children.

Meanwhile in the same period, just two charges were brought forward for child trafficking (no you didn’t misread that – two!) which led to only one conviction. Thousands of children are trafficked for sex, slavery and crime every year, and every year since 2017 the number of trafficking convictions has fallen to terrifying levels.

The government must take responsibility for their years of failure to handle backlogs that leave people in expensive and unsafe hotels, and they should get tough on child trafficking – starting with immediately ending the process of allocating children to any kind of unregulated accommodation.