Trafficked child vows to continue fight for justice

Four young women from Nigeria have been awarded damages totalling £20,000 after a High Court judge ruled that the police failed to properly investigate their complaints that they were being subjected to slavery here in the UK.

The women, who were all aged 15 or less when they were illegally trafficked to the UK from Nigeria, were each awarded £5,000 after a High Court judge concluded that the Metropolitan Police had breached their human rights by failing to investigate their allegations.

The traffickers, who brought the women to England between 1997 and 2002 told their parents that the move would help them to complete their studies.

But they ended up looking after the children of African families living in the UK. Some of them were forbidden to talk to anyone and prevented from leaving the house. Several were spied on by their guardians and physically abused.

Each tried unsuccessfully to seek help from social services and police from 2004 onwards, including the specialist child trafficking unit Operation Paladin. In 2007 they received help from the charity Africans Unite Against Child Abuse (Afruca) which led to their claim against the police.

The women, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, complained that the Metropolitan Police had infringed their rights under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms by failing to investigate over a “significant” period of time.

‘Failure to investigate’

Police had denied, during a hearing at the High Court in London in March, that any officer had breached the women’s human rights “as a consequence of a failure to investigate” their complaints.

But in a written judgement, Mr Justice Wyn Williams found there had been a “failure to investigate” over a significant period of time, the women had been “directly affected” by that failure and each needed damages to “afford just satisfaction”.

Three of the victims spoke to Channel 4 News’s Simon Israel about their experiences. They told him that they felt let down by the way they had been treated by the police and other authorities.

One said that she tried to kill herself twice adding that her isolation over five years as a domestic slave had made it difficult to approach the police for help in the first place:

“It took me everything in my power for me to approach the authorities in the country… I was really shocked when they actually said no.”

Landmark judgement

Debbie Ariyo, AFRUCA Executive Director/Founder said at the time the victims approached the police trafficking for the purposes of domestic slavery was not seen on a par with sexual trafficking.

She added that there is still limited awareness awareness on how domestic slavery can impact on its victims.

Ariyo said described the ruling as a landmark judgement. “It shows that in the African community people now know when children are being abused and when they make efforts to do something about it their efforts will pay off.

“For victims it simply means that when they do run away and they seek help and support something will be done to protect them and for practitioners it also means they have to sit up now and when they hear cases they actually take you seriously rather than brush it away.”

The women claimed that there are many others who have experienced the same problems. Four others are mentioned in the written judgement including a fifth claimant who was no longer involved in the case at the time of the judgement.

One of the victims had a warning for the families that keep trafficked children as domestic slaves. “If they don’t stop, we won’t stop,” she said.

“We will try our best to find the rest of the people, to investigate by ourselves and get the rest of the girls out and make sure they pay for what they did. They have to pay for what they did.”