The government has announced the launch of a scheme piloting local decision making on children’s status as victims of trafficking. ECPAT UK welcomes the launch of the pilot, which has incorporated a number of our key recommendations. Read more
We're delighted to share the entries to our #HopefulFutures competition and announce our winner, Layla Carruthers, who has won an Instax camera! The competition was launched following a very challenging year for all of us, particularly for young people affected by trafficking. But with an improving picture, hope is on the horizon. While we're all excited to get much of our old lives back, we don’t have to return to how things were. We can call for all young people to have stable futures. Read more
ECPAT UK is delighted to announce the appointment of four new trustees, including new Chair of the Board, Liz Barratt - Joint Head of Immigration at Bindmans. Liz is joined by new trustees Deveena Sahota, Renata de Groot and Geoff Corre and existing trustees Annabel Mullin and Nicky Guy. Read more
This week, the government announced that the Independent Child Trafficking Guardians (ICTG) service has expanded to several new areas and is now accepting referrals in London (in addition to the Borough of Croydon where the service was already available), Essex, West Yorkshire, Merseyside, Kent, Surrey, Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, North Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and Bristol, and Lancashire. However, many young people still lack access to this essential support. Read more
Today’s Queen’s Speech confirmed that in the new parliamentary session, the government will legislate to bring forward the proposals in the New Plan for Immigration as well as the new Online Safety Bill. While we welcome measures to make children safer online, we are extremely concerned about the impact of the immigration proposals on trafficked and unaccompanied children. Read more
The government’s New Plan for Immigration includes proposals which will impact all child victims of trafficking as well as all children and young people subject to immigration control. We're concerned about a range of measures proposed which, taken together, will affect all child victims of trafficking, including British national children. Have your say — respond to the government's public consultation using our guide. Read more
The Home Office has published their ‘New Plan for Immigration’ which includes a significant number of proposals to reform modern slavery legislation which will affect survivors of child exploitation. Wider measures relating to asylum policy will also be detrimental to survivors who also apply for asylum, a procedure which is already very challenging for many child victims to navigate. Read more
Maria Demosthenous, a senior child care solicitor with Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, has been awarded ECPAT UK’s Children’s Champion Award for 2020. The award is made in recognition of Maria’s outstanding commitment to child victims of trafficking in her local authority over the last 13 years. Read more
ECPAT UK has today released new resources informing Vietnamese migrants in the UK about their rights in the UK criminal justice system. Produced in partnership with World Vision Vietnam (WVV) for its Home Office-funded Tackling Modern Slavery project, the resources comprise a child friendly film and digital information resource, and a film and information resource for adults. Read more
ECPAT UK is alarmed at today’s news from the Home Office claiming there is widescale abuse of the National Referral Mechanism and announcing an overhaul of the Modern Slavery Act alongside the announcement of immigration reforms. While we are waiting to see details of the proposals this week and what it may mean for survivors of child trafficking and exploitation, we are very concerned about inaccuracies in the reporting of today’s statement. Read more
The Home Office has today released official statistics showing more children than ever before were identified as potential victims of trafficking in 2020. ECPAT UK is concerned that more children than ever need specialist support while resourcing for this support continues to fall, responses to child victims are inconsistent across the country and children face unnecessary delays to decisions about their cases. Read more
The government has announced that the Independent Child Trafficking Guardians service will be expanded to more parts of England in late Spring. The service is currently operational in one third of local authority areas in England and Wales. ECPAT UK welcomes the expansion of the scheme, which will provide more trafficked children with vital specialist support across the country but is concerned that there is still no timescale for full rollout of the service nationally. Read more
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has included the key concerns raised by ECPAT UK in its List of issues prior to reporting (LOIPR) of the combined sixth and seventh reports of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – part of the Committee’s examination of how well the UK is meeting its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Read more
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that the UK Government failed to protect victims of child trafficking and breached two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, in a landmark case. The Court ordered the UK Government to pay €90,000 EUR (£78,590 GBP) in compensation to two Vietnamese young people involved who had been convicted of crimes as children despite signs they had been trafficked. Read more
ECPAT UK has joined the Refugee Council and other leading national children's charities calling for the government to urgently provide every unaccompanied child with the specialist care they need, in a letter to the Children's Minister Vicky Ford MP. Read more
Members of AIESEC, a not-for-profit organisation run by students and recent graduates, have completed an around the world relay race to raise money for ECPAT UK - running a staggering total of 276.92km over 31 hours, 5 minutes and 15 seconds. Read more
The government has released its new strategy to tackle child sexual abuse. We welcome the government’s commitment to making sure all children, within and outside of the UK, are protected from sexual abuse and exploitation by UK nationals. Read more
This week, two more men were found guilty of manslaughter following the deaths of 39 Vietnamese men, women and children in a lorry in Essex last October. Our thoughts remain with the families and friends of all the victims. The case highlights the precarious journeys people are compelled to make due to a lack of safe and legal routes, which pushes desperate people into the hands of smugglers and traffickers. Read more
As we come to the end of 2020, I want to say a big thank you to for all for your continued support in what has been the most challenging of years for all of us. You’ve stuck with us when we needed it the most and for that we will be endlessly grateful. Read more
Following a fantastic response to our winter appeal, the ECPAT UK team is delivering festive hampers to members of our youth groups for young people affected by trafficking. Each hamper contains ‘something to read, something you need and something you want’ along with festive messages from our supporters who are responding generously to our appeal. Here’s a sneak peak at what's inside the hampers and our team of ECPAT elves doing the deliveries! Read more
The government has today published its response to the Online Harms White Paper consultation which is expected to be followed by an Online Harms Bill in early 2020. ECPAT UK welcomes this landmark proposal to keep children safe online. ECPAT UK welcomes the cross-party commitment to regulation of tech companies, recognition that this is a global problem requiring close collaboration with international partners and the proposed legal duty of care on tech companies to keep users safe. Read more
The Court of Appeal has ruled that the Secretary of State for Education unlawfully removed safeguards for children in care during the Coronavirus pandemic. Led by the charity Article 39, ECPAT UK and over 60 other child rights organisations publicly campaigned against the changes, introduced overnight under Statutory Instrument 445 without public consultation or parliamentary debate. Read more
The National Crime Agency (NCA) has successfully brought one of the most prolific child sexual abuse offenders to justice for crimes committed online against children in the UK and abroad, highlighting the central role of evidence from social media companies and joining a growing number of children’s charities, child rights advocates and public officials calling for Facebook to urgently halt plans to implement end-to-end encryption which leaves children at significant risk. Read more
The Home Office has released its evaluation of its Child Trafficking Protection Fund including our Partnership Against Child Trafficking (PACT) project, finding the project provided an “important pathway” to change the ways in which social care can reduce children’s vulnerability to trafficking and re-trafficking and contribute to improving local authority practice. Read more
A new assessment of the Independent Child Trafficking Guardians (ICTG) service’s Regional Practice Coordinators (RPC) role has been released. ECPAT UK welcomes the report’s findings, including the positive impact of RPCs on child victims of exploitation and the professionals supporting them. However, we urge the government to immediately roll out the ICTG service across the country so that it is available to all who need this essential support. Read more
October is Black History Month and this year, our youth group members have led a series of workshops celebrating some of their favourite Black leaders, cultures, traditions and events. Over the past two weeks, members of our youth groups have each presented a part of Black history that is meaningful and inspiring to them, drawing on people and events from their own backgrounds and cultures as well as Black history in the UK and USA. Read more