Child trafficking: ‘law must be changed’

TEN out of every 100 children coming into Ireland require serious investigation for possible child trafficking, a leading expert said yesterday.

But Dr Pauline Conroy said that because these cases are so difficult to prove, only one out of every 10 child trafficking cases will lead to a prosecution.

“If accused of trafficking a perpetrator will claim ‘sure I was only smuggling her in as a favour to her parents - I never meant to harm her’,” Dr Conroy added.

The law depends on the perpetrator’s intent, and when questioned they switch themselves from demonised traffickers to benevolent smugglers.

“For this reason there have only been five successful prosecutions for child trafficking in Ireland since 1998,” Dr Conroy told a conference entitled, Guests of the Nation, in UCC.

It is also difficult to secure prosecutions as very often the children have been coached, or are too frightened, or too young to articulate what has happened to them, said Dr Conroy.

“Children as young as four and up to 17 have been taken into the care of health boards, and at any one time there can be up to 800 children passing through the services of the Health Service Executive Eastern Region.” The big problem is that responsibility for child trafficking falls between two government departments - justice and health.

While the Department of Justices takes responsibility for securing a prosecution, the Department of Health is responsible for the care of the children while their cases are being investigated.

Suspected victims of child trafficking are housed in hostels, privately rented houses or apartments which are not staffed by childcare workers or open to inspection by the Social Service Inspectorate. “Child traffickers know this and what has been happening increasingly is that they get the children into the country and then snatch them from the hostels that are often very poorly supervised, particularly at weekends,” Dr Conroy added.

There has been a major increase in the numbers of children disappearing from hostels in the past two years and the system must be changed to provide more protection for the child, Dr Conroy said. “The law must be changed to ensure that suspected victims of child trafficking are put into residential children’s homes where there are qualified childcare workers and social workers visit regularly, or into a foster home.”

Dr Conroy produced the definitive paper, Trafficking in Unaccompanied Minors, in 2003, which outlined the problem here. That is the last year for which there are official figures for the number of unaccompanied minors arriving here, when the figure was 1,151.

She was extremely critical of the latest, 100-page discussion document on immigration, produced by Justice Minister Michael McDowell.

“Only three lines in it were devoted to children - I believe it is up to social workers to ensure that suspected victims of child trafficking are put the top of the agenda on the debate on our future immigration laws,” said Dr Conroy.