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Source:
ECPAT UK
Date:
2011
Format:
Text
Category:
Services
Category:
Awareness
Origin:
International
Summary:
On the Safe Side explores the challenges faced in procuring protection for trafficked children through safe accommodation. The resource provides guidelines for practitioners working with trafficked children or with suspected child victims of trafficking, to enable them to meet the standards of safe accommodation and to adequately address the psychological, emotional and physical needs of trafficked children, namely by placing the best interest of the child at the centre of all decisions.
Also available in:
Only available in English. 
Background and aims (excerpt)
ECPAT UK has identified that there are no commonly agreed safety and protection standards across the UK for the placement of children who are suspected or known to be trafficked. This inconsistency has allowed safeguarding issues to be side-lined and, in some instances, cast aside, leading to further harm to the child.
In 2009, the Home Affairs Select Committee report on human trafficking raised concerns about suspected child victims in local authority care who go missing and are never found. The Committee was particularly alarmed by accounts that traffickers may be using the “care home system for vulnerable children as holding pens for their victims until they are ready to pick them up”.
In the same year, the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, described the situation of potential child victims of trafficking going missing as “completely unacceptable”. Recent research conducted by the Child Exploitation & Online Protection centre (CEOP has also confirmed that the number of child victims of trafficking who go missing from local authority care is significant.
In August 2009, in the light of these findings and to help support efforts to find safe accommodation options for child victims of trafficking, ECPAT UK relaunched its Three Small Steps campaign to protect child victims of trafficking. The campaign calls on the government and local authorities to ensure that these children are provided with safe and supported accommodation, preferably in the form of foster carers who have been trained in caring for child victims of trafficking.
As part of this campaign, ECPAT UK explored the issues around what makes accommodation safe for child victims of trafficking by undertaking structured face-to-face interviews and a roundtable discussion with a range of professionals, including local authority children’s services, the police, NGOs and organisations accommodating child victims of trafficking, as well as ascertaining the views of the young people themselves.
This led to the formulation of 10 child-centred principles concerning the provision of safe accommodation for child victims and/or suspected child victims of trafficking.