Dozens of children have been abducted by gangs in Brighton, the Observer reveals today. A whistleblower and child protection sources told the newspaper that the children have been taken off the street and “bundled into cars”.
The source said that the children have disappeared and have not been found. “They’re being taken from the street by traffickers.”
Why isn’t this front-page news everywhere? Why isn’t there a national outcry?
I will tell you why. And I hope it both infuriates and saddens you as much as it does me.
You see, these are not British school children being abducted in Brighton, never to be seen again.
These are vulnerable, child refugees who arrived in the UK unaccompanied, thinking they had reached a safe country after escaping terrible perils.
Only to discover that they face terrible perils, right here in the UK.
The children, reports the Observer, have been
‘kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton hotel run by the Home Office’
This is happening not just in Brighton, but it’s being ‘repeated across the south coast.’
Sources told the newspaper that the children are being ‘abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars.’
The Observer added, ‘It has also emerged that the Home Office was warned repeatedly by police that the vulnerable occupants of the hotel – asylum-seeking children who had recently arrived in the UK without parents or carers – would be targeted by criminal networks.’
It’s reported that about 600 unaccompanied children have passed through the Sussex hotel in the past 18 months, with 136 reported missing. More than half of these – 79 – remain unaccounted for.
Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, described today’s revelations as, “truly appalling and scandalous”.
She called on the government to reveal how many children had disappeared and what was being done to find them.
She added:
“Suella Braverman [the home secretary] has failed to act on the repeated warnings she has been given about totally inadequate safeguards for children in their care.
“It is a total dereliction of duty for the Home Office to so badly fail to protect child safety or crack down on the dangerous gangs putting them in terrible risk. Ministers must urgently put new protection arrangements in place.”
The Mitie whistleblower also told the newspaper about witnessing children being in effect trafficked from a similar hotel run by the Home Office in Hythe, Kent, estimating that 10 per centof its youngsters disappeared each week.
The child protection source said some of the children missing from the Brighton hotel may have been trafficked as far away as Manchester and Scotland.
I say, what’s happened to Britain? Children are children, wherever they are from.
No child, simply no child, should be at risk of abduction by traffickers in this country (or of course, in any country).
The fact that dozens of children have been trafficked and disappeared, right here in this country, is shocking. These vulnerable child-refugees need protecting, and not carelessly allowed by our authorities to be taken by traffickers
The Home Office has much answering to do.
Link to Observer report: https://www.theguardian.com/…/revealed-scores-of-child…
