If there is prize for investigative journalism, writers of this article, Cathy Scott-Clark, Adrian Levy and Hsiao-Hung Pai deserve it. I absolutely recommend it to read it whole.
Information they have given and found are fundamental basis what all organized international traffickers who bring children to UK and others who are exploiting them here are using to their advantage and vehemently exploiting to this day, while making millions on work slavery, prostitution and drugs. Little Chinese sisters are mentioned there too.
Published Oct 2008
People trafficking: 'It is down your street and in your lane'
(part quotes of the article, some parts bolded in black or red by me for relevance)
'It is down your street and in your lane'
Fujian is the centre of Chinese people trafficking - the immigrants who suffocated in the back of a lorry and drowned picking cockles in Morecambe Bay all came from there. Now, Fujianese girls are being recruited into brothels across the UK
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Young girls are lured to the UK with the promise of lucrative, respectable careers. Some as young as 11, they arrive without passports or visas, some claiming asylum at British airports, having paid traffickers thousands of pounds for their transit. Once here, they vanish from the hostels or foster care to which they have been assigned by the immigration authorities, often ending up in brothels run from suburban flats and houses.
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It is a criminal enterprise that blurs the boundaries between trafficking and smuggling, ensnaring girls and women who in many cases leave China of their own free will. Often sent with the best wishes of their community, which has clubbed together to pay the exorbitant fees, the victims cannot bear to tell their families what they have been compelled to do on arrival. None would consider turning witness against their controllers: their heads are filled with horror stories of how they will be raped and imprisoned by the British police, and what would happen to those back home. Girls who attempt to run away are often hunted down, abducted from local authority care or hospitals. Frequently, victims emerge only when, injured, sick or pregnant, they have been abandoned on a street corner.
It is evident there are incredible profits to be made. Last year, police discovered £93m transferred back to China via one bank account held by a Chinese restaurant in Kent - money suspected to have been earned through trafficking and brothel-keeping.
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Five foot nothing and wearing a white T-shirt, Lingshan Lin, 15, and her 11-year-old sister Lingran disappeared on September 28 2006 from a social services hostel in Hove, East Sussex, where they were staying pending their asylum hearing. On August 24 2007, Li Juan He, 16, ran away from a hostel in Worthing, West Sussex. Xi Wang, 16, disappeared from the same hostel two months later, on October 7 2007. Jing Jing Lu, 16, vanished from a hostel in Sevenoaks, Kent, on December 15 2007.
All had entered the UK just days before their disappearance; the only evidence they had ever been here is the photographs taken of them by police, immigration officials or social services. The authorities fear they may have been dragged into the brothel network which, our findings suggest, has more than 4,000 Chinese teenagers and young adults in its grip. Police and social services know from missing person reports that more than 1,000 have disappeared, almost all of whom have been trafficked through or were born in the
Chinese province of Fujian.
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He is one of Ai Hwa's oldest friends and asks if we have heard her sister's story. He says her parents paid criminals to smuggle her to Britain in 1997; she had an excruciating six-month journey via Russia, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Holland, and ended up earning slave wages in British garment and poultry factories.
Everyone has been touched by smuggling, but no one has mentioned the missing. We bring out a sheaf of reports from the UK, including ones about Fujianese girls as young as 11 who might have been swallowed up by the sex trade. "They're just working," one woman mutters as she rises and leaves.
"You'll never find their families," says Xian, pointing out that Fujian has a population of almost 40 million: the names we have are so common, it would be like looking for a Jane Smith in London.
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Fujian province has had a criminal tradition since the 70s, when gangs smuggling luxury goods from Taiwan began transporting people, too. They first smuggled them to the UK in the 90s, mostly to work in restaurant kitchens for the long-established Hong Kong Chinese community. It was only when 58 Fujianese men and women were found broiled in the back of a lorry transporting tomatoes through Dover in June 2000 that the province became known in Britain as a haven for snakehead gangs who could evade whatever obstacles our immigration services threw up. Four years later, 23 paperless Fujianese workers who earned pennies picking cockles in Morecambe Bay were drowned. And alongside the illegal workers and gangmasters who made the headlines, a hidden parallel trade was emerging - in girls recruited into the nascent Chinese brothel network creeping across the UK.
But no one in Fuzhou will talk details: names, methods, routes. Some clearly fear reprisals, while to others it is commercially sensitive information.
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We call in on one, the True Jesus Church, and ask the pastor, Chen Jin Yun, if she will help us find families whose children have gone missing in Britain. She laughs. "Many have got children working in the UK. They love it there, but keeping in contact is always a struggle."
She introduces us to duck farmer Mr Liang. All three of his brothers have gone to the UK, he says. We ask about methods, money, how they're doing. Liang sidesteps most of the questions: "Oh, one of them is a millionaire. Everyone who goes from here to there, young or old, does very well."
Liang's neighbours crowd into the room and confirm they all have children in the UK, some as young as 13.
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"If your family can raise £15,000, my cousin will get you over to UK." Our researcher adds a level of difficulty. "I have a young cousin, too, 12, who would like to come along." Liang shrugs. "Great. Don't worry. We send plenty of kids. It's 100% safe."
Eventually, he explains how it works. His cousin is just one of a hundred people offering similar services.
All can procure forged passports redesignating the travellers as Japanese or South Korean citizens, nationalities that raise fewer suspicions with immigration officials in Britain. Our researcher would be first flown or driven to Russia, where Chinese people require no visa. Then they might fly on directly to the UK, probably avoiding Heathrow. "Few bother with trucks and boats any more," Liang says. Another preferred option is flying to a European city, then on to the UK with easyJet, the Madrid-London route being a current favourite.
Our researcher will be given a UK sim card to hide in her luggage, and a phone number to write on her bra strap. She is to activate her phone and make the call on landing, and meet a Fujianese contact. "Hang around the airport before going through immigration," Liang says, "so they have no idea which flight you came in on, otherwise they could send you back.
Then go to immigration and say you're a teenage asylum seeker. They have to let you in, and Britain will allow you to stay until you are 18."
"When can I go?" our researcher asks.
"The next trip will be in November. We need sufficient passengers to make it worth our while. Eight or nine on a flight."
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The first warning that Chinese children were being abused came in 1995 when dozens began arriving, unaccompanied, at Gatwick UK airport, claiming asylum, but the signs were ignored by everyone except the social workers called to deal with them.
What those sending the children to Britain appeared to have hit upon, as the duck farmer Liang explained, was the specifics of
British law, and in particular the breadth of the 1989 Children Act, whereby foreign teenagers travelling alone who claimed asylum had to be allowed into the country and cared for by a local authority as a "child in need" until they were 18.
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Sussex social workers had so many demands on them, they fought to find funding for a young asylum seekers team. The team's trafficking caseworker was Lynne Chitty, whose house in Portsmouth is filled with a jumble of files, photographs and incident reports relating to missing Chinese girls. She tells us, "We would get the call, go up to the airport and find these kids in a holding room. They all had little bits of rolled-up paper with UK numbers on them and were desperate to make a call. Within hours of us taking them into care, they had vanished."
From the brief interviews Chitty managed to conduct, she became convinced that all had been trafficked and many were ending up in brothels or worse. "No one wanted to hear or was overly concerned about the kids going missing. The only calls I got were from the Met police in London saying they had fished the body of an Asian child out of the river and asking if it was one of mine. And I had to say: 'I have no idea.'"
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It did not take long for the traffickers to evolve new methods. Instead of arriving with a telephone number, the children began presenting addresses and names of relatives in the UK, hoping to bypass the local authority's hostels. In 2000, Chitty took a call from one immigration official who, reviewing case files, discovered that his Gatwick team had released more than 100 Chinese children to the same "uncle". Unable to interest the police, Chitty eventually traced the man to a north London Chinese takeaway. The intelligence she gleaned went nowhere. Immigration officials conducted no inquiry. The phone numbers were never followed up and Chitty continued to see children vanishing.
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It was not until early 2006 that the British government signed, and established Soca, which made targeting traffickers one of its priorities.
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Victims rarely receive any compassion, says Lucy Kralj of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a London-based human rights organisation which works with trafficked women and children. "Most of those we get to see entered the country as children and emerge from the brothels as adults, only to be consigned to Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre, in Bedfordshire, pending deportation. They are delivered to us for counselling by Group 4 Securicor in caged vans, often surrounded by their own vomit. Recently, two Chinese girls, who had escaped prostitution, were so weak they had to be carried up our stairs by security guards, who then stood behind them throughout the counselling sessions, sealing the exits."
People trafficking: 'It is down your street and in your lane'
