British police kidnap Gypsy children for no good reason

There is no longer any protection against arbitrary search and seizure in Britain

They were ‘twenty-first century Artful Dodgers’, we were told, a gang of ‘Fagin’s children’ from Romania, who had been trafficked to Slough, England, in order to work like slaves in a ‘pickpocketing and begging crimewave’. The Metropolitan Police launched dawn raids on various ‘slavery dens’ in Slough last Friday; some of the police reportedly wore balaclavas and riot gear and were closely followed by film crews invited along to witness the moment the ‘child slaves’ were liberated. Footage of officers carrying kids from terraced houses was beamed across the news bulletins, as various newspapers declared: ‘Romanian child slaves freed in Slough.’ A Met officer said his team was committed to ‘dismantling crime networks’ and to the ‘rescue of [trafficked] children’

There was only one problem with this story: it was as fictional as the original Dickensian tale of artful dodgers. The Roma children were not child slaves; of the 10 kids ‘rescued’ in Slough on Friday (one of whom was less than a year old: hardly pickpocketing material), all but one were reunited with their natural parents or guardians the following day (2). No evidence has been discovered to show that the Roma adults in Slough were involved in a ‘criminal gang’ or a ‘child slave ring’ or any other form of serious criminality. Of the 24 adults arrested, 14 have been charged: nine with immigration offences, three with the theft of mobile phones, and two with handling stolen mobile phones… hardly the kind of crimes that require a heavy-handed, camera-flashing raid at five in the morning.

Officials later admitted that the children appeared ‘healthy and well cared for’, though they had been ‘distressed’ by their forced removal from their family homes by police officers (3). In a spluttering effort to explain why a high-profile raid had been carried out against what appear to be normal families of poor immigrants – living in crowded conditions; in possession of dodgy immigration papers; involved in a bit of petty crime – Metropolitan Police commander Steve Allen said: ‘I’m not able to see into the future. I didn’t know exactly who and what we were going to find in those addresses.’ (4) According to the grandfather of some of the children who were ‘rescued’, the police entered the house at 5am, ransacked it, forbade the grandparents from feeding the children, and finally – finding no hard evidence of ‘slavery’ – took the children away only to return them 24 hours later (5).

The Met’s raids in Slough were effectively legalised kidnapping, the snatching of children as a media stunt designed to show that the police are serious about tackling ‘human trafficking’. According to one account, the police were accompanied not only by social workers, but also by a ‘small army of cameramen, photographers and journalists’, who unquestioningly, one might even say slavishly, reported the cops’ apparently brave efforts to liberate enslaved children from bondage (6). Yet hardly anyone in this army of reporters has bothered to write a follow-up about what happened next. This degenerate episode highlights the dangers in today’s hysteria about human trafficking. The Metropolitan Police found little evidence that Roma children in Slough are being harmed by ‘evil traffickers’ – yet its own high-profile raid shows very clearly that the anti-trafficking industry can cause harm and distress to migrant families, undermine global freedom of movement, and warp the public’s perception of immigration.

The Slough incident is not the first time that a high-profile raid against ‘modern-day slavery’ has turned out to be something quite different. In late 2005, police in Birmingham carried out a media splash of a raid against a brothel and claimed to have ‘rescued’ 19 women who had been trafficked to the UK and enslaved as prostitutes (8). A few days later, 13 of the women were released when it turned out that they were ‘voluntarily working in the sex industry’; the remaining six, who also denied having been trafficked, were imprisoned at Yarlswood detention centre in Bedfordshire and threatened with deportation back to their countries of origin (9). The 19 women refuted police and media claims that they had been ‘locked up’ in the brothel: then, thanks to what some refer to as the ‘rescue industry’ of the anti-trafficking lobby, some of them were locked up for real in a detention centre.

In 2004, the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Paladin Child at Heathrow airport. In the wake of the publication of various reports that said ‘there may well be hundreds, if not thousands, of children in Britain who have been brought here for exploitation’, the Met monitored the arrival of ‘unaccompanied minors from non-EU countries’ (a PC phrase for young blacks and Eastern Europeans) into Heathrow over a three-month period (10). During this time, 1,738 unaccompanied minors arrived at Heathrow and all but 12 of them were ‘accounted for’: that is, they moved in with family relations or guardians. The outstanding 12 are believed either to have left the UK soon after or to have started work in Britain outside of the authorities’ watch.

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