In one year, nearly 30 per cent of all UK child trafficking victims disappeared from foster and care homes [Image: Veryan Dale/Alamy Stock Photo].

Would they have mentioned the fact that a confirmed 760 young people have gone missing from their care at some time, if they had not been forced to do so by a Freedom of Information request?

Would they have told anybody that 207 of these children have never been found and are presumed to be back in the hands of their exploiters?

And these figures aren’t even accurate!

Less than a quarter (45) of the 217 local authorities from whom information was requested have bothered to reply.

This is a bitter indictment of a care system that, quite clearly, doesn’t.

Child trafficking victims and unaccompanied children are going missing from local authority care at an “alarming” rate according to a new report, which reveals that in one year, nearly 30% of all UK child trafficking victims and 13% of unaccompanied children disappeared from care services.

New research by child trafficking NGO Ecpat UK and the charity Missing People has found that 167 of the 590 children suspected or identified as child trafficking victims in the year from September 2014 to 2015 vanished from foster and care homes across the country.

An additional 593 of the 4,744 unaccompanied children placed under the protection of local authorities also went missing at least once in the same time period. Of the 760 trafficked or unaccompanied children who disappeared from care, 207 have never been found.

The new data, drawn largely from freedom of information requests to 217 local authorities across the UK, shows that Thurrock, Hillingdon, Croydon, Kent County Council and Surrey had the highest numbers of trafficked and unaccompanied children who were unaccounted for. One local authority reported that 22 child trafficking victims had gone missing in the recorded time period.

Despite the high numbers, Ecpat says that the real scale of the UK’s missing child trafficking victims is still not accurately reflected in the data.

Source: Child trafficking victims disappearing from UK care at ‘alarming’ rate | Global development | The Guardian

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