In the Dock

However, many children are not referred to the NRM by law enforcement or local authorities, despiteidentification as potential victims of trafficking. This can occur for a number of reasons, including: alack of awareness of the NRM; authorities failing to see the benefits for children; or a fear thatnegative NRM decisions will impact on the children’s immigration status. In addition, this researchsuggests that there is reluctance to utilise the London Safeguarding Children Board’s (LSCB)Trafficking Toolkit 343 and Practice Guidance, 344 which encourages frontline staff to refer traffickedchildren to the NRM. 345IdentificationEarly and effective identification of child victims of trafficking is critical to securing an investigation andprosecution. However, there are many barriers to identifying trafficked children on the frontline aschildren generally do not report crime to the authorities, especially against family members who mayhave been complicit in their trafficking. This is a particular issue where children have experience oflaw enforcement corruption with bias towards children. Children may also be more trusting andcontrollable, thus trafficked children may not see themselves as victims in need of assistance. 346 It isfor these reasons that the Convention obliges frontline competent authorities to be proactive inidentifying trafficked children.However, such proactivity appears to be lacking. This is demonstrated by the account of a youngperson interviewed for this research who was trafficked into domestic servitude at the age of 12. Shedescribes her experience of the police:“[The police] came but it was my madam’s husband that open the door ... he was telling the police that sheis my eldest daughter. I was crying and I said ‘take me with you, don’t leave me with him.’ They said theycouldn’t because he was my father. They said ‘what is her date of birth?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, it’s my wifethat do those sort of things, we men are rubbish’. So they still leave me with him. I was thinking that madamwas doing some juju [see Chapter 1] because this man was lying and they still leave me. I think that I amfinished.”She added in relation to the social workers who also visited her:“The social worker came about the [other] kids. He [the trafficker] said I should tell woman I am wife’syounger sister. But they didn’t ask for me. They checked all around the house but didn’t come to my room. Isaw her leaving from my window. You can’t open my room, they seal it like a cage …. My madam comeback and she says no one will ever ask for me again.”Good practice - R v Lucy Adeniji 347Traffickers may seek to conceal the exploitative relationship with the trafficked child bymisrepresenting the child as a family member. Children may be trained to refer to the trafficker as“mum”, “dad”, “auntie” etc. which may be accepted without question by identifying agencies. One ofthe most important lessons learnt from specialised police agencies is that of utilising techniques, suchas DNA profiling and the examination of birth certificates, to ascertain familial relationships betweenthe child and suspect. This can lead to significant corroborative evidence to prove the trafficker’sexploitative relationship with the child. The case of R v Lucy Adeniji involved a Nigerian pastor whobrought two girls and one boy to the UK for the purposes of domestic servitude. The defendantclaimed that she and all of her dependents were British nationals. Once the birth certificates were343London Safeguarding Children Board, London Safeguarding Trafficked Children Guidance (March 2011)344London Safeguarding Children Board, London Safeguarding Trafficked Children Toolkit 2011 (March 2011)345Other individual counties have also since implemented their own toolkits.346See ECPAT UK Child Trafficking: A Snapshot (2010).347Adeniji, supra note 275.105