Staatliche legitimierte Kinderentführung um die Community der Roma-Migranten zu disziplinieren oder um vermeintlichen Kinderhandel aufzuklären?
The Guardian: "From brilliant coup to cock-up. How the story of Fagin's urchins fell apart
High profile raid and lurid claims, but no one is to face child trafficking charges"
Helen Pidd and Vikram Dodd
Saturday February 2, 2008
The Guardian
When police made a series of dawn raids on houses across
Slough [35 km westlich von London] last week, it was hailed as a blow against modern-day Fagins who were parting poor Roma children from their families and forcing them into a life of crime.
The media was invited along as officers wearing body armour smashed down doors and carried children away - apparently to safety. The face of one of these children appeared on a tabloid front page the next day under the headline: "Fagin's heirs".
The police officer in charge of the operation, Commander Steve Allen, told reporters: "We have evidence that organised crime networks are exploiting and driving the most vulnerable members of their own community."
But within days what seemed a spectacular success had begun to unravel.
In the nine days since the raid all but one child has been returned to the Roma community in Slough, according to a Romanian diplomat, and none of the 24 adults arrested at the scene has been charged with child trafficking offences.
Now a senior diplomat at the Romanian embassy has told the Guardian that
the raid which claimed to have cracked a child trafficking ring was a "fiasco" and "a failure". The high-ranking official said he feared the operation, which involved 400 police officers breaking into 17 addresses simultaneously at dawn on January 24 and resulted in 10 children briefly being taken into care, was
part of an anti-Romanian trend in Britain.
Fifteen adults have since appeared in court: nine were charged with minor immigration offences dating back seven years or more. Three were charged with theft of mobile phones, two with handling stolen mobile phones and the last with breach of a deportation order. So far just one man, Gheorge Mazarache, 25, has been jailed: he received an eight-week sentence after he
admitted handling a stolen mobile phone worth £430.
Explaining the anticlimactic charges, 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."
Now the Romanian embassy wants the Metropolitan police to explain what went wrong. The senior diplomat said: "The main aim of the operation, as far as I have understood from the official declaration from the police and in the newspapers, was to disrupt Romanian traffickers and Romanian trafficked children. At the end of it all I can say, based on concrete statistics and concrete data provided by the British authorities, is there is no one accused of trafficking, but a few people accused of stealing mobile phones and some ancient immigration offences. How did the exaggeration of the gravity of offences happen? It is not the same to be involved in trafficking or child slavery as the attempted theft of a mobile phone."
Staff from the Romanian embassy claim they have not been allowed access to 15 Romanian nationals in police custody. "If a British citizen is arrested in Romania they are seen by someone from the British embassy within 24 hours, but it is not the case for us here," said the diplomatic source.
He criticised the Metropolitan police for tipping off the media. "They must do big operations all the time, but why publicise this raid involving Romanians?" he asked.
"Unfortunately for our image, bad news about Romanians sells well. The media reports so rarely about good things that Romanians do." Too often
Romanians were scapegoats for society's problems, he added. Initial reports gave the impression that the 10 children taken in the raid - one of whom was less than a year old - had been living with gangmasters rather than their families.
But the diplomat said that six were back in the Roma community in Slough within 48 hours. Some of these were returned to their parents and some to other adults social services deemed "responsible". Just one girl, who sources say is around 14 years old, is yet to be reunited with her parents because social services have so far been unable to trace any of her family members.
No one has yet been charged with trafficking offences, although two sources involved in the operation told the Guardian it would be wrong to conclude no child trafficking was involved just because no one has been charged with that offence. They say mounting such prosecutions are complex and would put the children involved in distress, and so it is better to prosecute adults for other offences. Police say they believe children were trafficked. But the diplomat said it was "hard not to conclude that the operation was a failure - it did not achieve its objectives. It seems to have been a fiasco."
Whatever the truth is in this case, it has certainly given national prominence to the
Roma community in Slough, where huge extended families have moved into multiple properties on a cluster of streets within five minutes walk of each other since Romania joined the EU in January 2007.
Slough has long been a favourite destination for Roma. Before Romania's accession to the EU the district had a famously liberal approach to asylum seekers, and many
Roma arrived in the town claiming political persecution after the collapse of communism. Many families involved in last week's raid had lived in Slough in the late 90s.
They were deported when the UK tightened up its immigration rules, but they returned when the borders were opened.
The Roma's very visible presence has caused consternation in the local community. They complain that the high density of Roma living in nearby properties has led to problems with antisocial behaviour and crime.
Azeem Khan, 40, who lives next door to one of the raided flats in the Chalvey area of Slough, said the noise from the "18 to 20" Roma living in the adjacent one-bedroom flat was so unbearable that his wife, Saima, 34, developed
eclampsia while pregnant with their daughter, now six months old.
He said the Roma were noisy, dumped their rubbish everywhere and hung around in "intimidating" gangs on the street. He said
he was not surprised to hear they had allegedly been involved in criminal activity. "None of them ever go out to work, yet they have nice cars and you see them eating takeaway food every night," he said.
Suspicion around how the Roma pay for their lives and extensive families was rife this week, when the Guardian spent two days in Chalvey. Residents claimed to have seen the Roma women wrapping up dolls in shawls to use as "baby" begging tools, and said the children often stole sweets from the shops.
A shopkeeper told the Guardian he was always having to tell the children off for
shoplifting. His wife said the children, as young as four, came into the shop "all the time", often with no shoes on. "There was a little girl in last week with no trousers or pants on, even in this weather," she said. Many residents complained that they were always seeing
Roma going to the toilet on the street, and that house prices had plummeted in the area as a result.
Last night
Scotland Yard would not comment directly on the diplomat's criticism, but stood by its actions. In a statement, police said: "We worked in close partnership and cooperation with the Romanian embassy and the Romanian government. Romanian police officers from the embassy were with us on the day of the operation.
We have received no formal complaint from the Romanian embassy."
But the Roma believe they are being persecuted and are angry at their treatment. On Alexander Road, where two houses were raided, a large crowd of Roma gathered and shouted, in Romanian with bursts of broken English, how angry they were at the police and the "lies" in the media.
One young man in his early 20s said:
"They came into our houses early in the morning, they broke down our doors, took away the children and told the world that the children - our own children - were not ours and that we had stolen them and trained them to commit crime. But now the children are back with us and we are very, very angry," he said. A Roma woman drew a young boy close to her and shouted across the road, "Would you send your child out to commit crime? I wouldn't."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article ... 53,00.html
Trafficking: return of the ‘white slavery’ scare?
The Metropolitan Police’s legalised kidnapping of 10 Roma children suggests the anti-trafficking industry is the greatest threat to migrants.
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 [Sturmhauben] 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’ (1).
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.
In recent years, a motley crew of government and police forces in America and Europe, feminist activists, fundamentalist Christian outfits and celebrity campaigners has turned human trafficking into one of the biggest issues of our time. They claim there is a new ‘slave trade’, that tens of thousands of people – especially women and children – are being sold across borders and into bondage every year. Salacious [anzügliche] newspaper reports (in respectable broadsheets as well as the tabloids) tell us of ‘the teenagers traded for slave labour and sex’; of African children that are ‘nothing but a commodity… traded for tawdry [billig] sex and living under the fear of
voodoo’; of Eastern European women moved across Europe ‘like cattle’ to service sex-hungry kerb-crawlers in Britain, Spain, France and Germany (7). The anti-traffickers paint a picture of uber-Dickensian global squalor [Elend], of Conradian darkness, where women and children are bought and sold by evil gangs, and then forced into labour and kept in their place by threats of murder or voodoo vengeance [Vergeltung].
The evidence for these sinister claims is murky indeed. No one doubts that illegal immigration is a messy business.
Migrants from some Eastern European countries and from Africa are denied free movement around Europe. Thus they frequently have little choice but to pay middlemen for fake passports, risky forms of transportation and other favours. Those who do make it into Britain, France or Germany have to live beneath officialdom’s radar or risk being deported back to their country of origin: this means they can easily be exploited, becoming beholden to dodgy employers who pay them shockingly low wages and provide them with shoddy housing. But enslaved? Victims of voodoo? Little more than ‘cattle’ or ‘commodities’ driven and shipped around Europe like animals? Such claims seem to spring from the anti-traffickers’ fevered and borderline-xenophobic mindset, rather than being based in reality.
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. In 2006, a transatlantic network of anti-traffickers claimed that 40,000 women from Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America would be trafficked to Germany during the World Cup tournament to service drunken or drug-fuelled horny football fans. A few months after the World Cup, EU documents revealed that five women, not 40,000, had been forced against their will to work as prostitutes in Germany (11).
The
anti-trafficking industry’s figures frequently don’t add up. In 2003, UNICEF published a report titled Stop the Traffic!. It claimed that up to a million young people and children are trafficked around the world every year – a claim that hit the front pages in 2003 and which still pops up in reports about trafficked women and children today. Yet UNICEF admits there is ‘little hard statistical information’ on trafficking. ‘Since trafficking can be a complex series of events… it can be difficult to identify a single case of trafficking’, it said. What’s more, for the purposes of its shrill report, UNICEF lumped very different forms of population movement under the category of ‘trafficking’, including instances where African parents ‘send their children to work in other households, sometimes entrusting them to better-off relatives’ and where large numbers of children or young people (which can include 17- and 18-year-olds) move around Africa or Asia in search of work. Here, the everyday African practice of sending children to live with wealthier family members, and the migration of young people in Asia and Africa in search of employment, are stuck alongside claims about voodoo-enabled tawdry sex slavery as part of an overall wicked ‘trafficking industry’ (12).
The US State Department claims that 800,000 people are trafficked around the world every year. Yet according to
Laura Maria Agustin, who interrogated the idea that a ‘trafficking industry’ exists for her new book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, this is a ‘fantasy number’. ‘Numbers like this are fabricated by defining trafficking in an extremely broad way to take in enormous numbers of people’, says Agustin. For example, the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons uses ‘the widest possible definition [of trafficking]’, says Agustin, including describing nearly all foreign prostitutes in the West as victims of trafficking on the basis that ‘any woman who sells sex could not really want to, and, if she crossed a national border, she was forced’ (13).
The crusade against trafficking looks less and less like a real-world attempt to assist migrants and increase their freedom of movement and choices, and more like a super-moralistic fantasy campaign against evil and perverted Johnny Foreigners. In some ways, today’s trafficking hysteria is similar to the
‘white slavery’ scare of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; indeed, one academic study points out that the term ‘trafficking’ first emerged during the white slavery panic (14). Back then, there were widespread concerns that foreign men – in particular Arabs and the Chinese – might kidnap respectable white Western women and force them to work as prostitutes.
In 1910, the US passed the White-Slave Traffic Act which banned the ‘interstate transport of females for immoral purposes’ (15). This moral panic had very little foundation in fact. Rather, as various studies have discussed,
it was driven by fin de siècle fears about foreigners polluting and corrupting Western civilisation, as represented by the virginal white woman allegedly at risk of being violated by brown-skinned outsiders. In America in the very early twentieth century there were numerous high-profile raids on Chinese gambling halls in search of enslaved white women; most of the raids turned up nothing (16).
Today, too, there is a feverish obsession amongst officials and activists with the alleged ‘transport of females for immoral purposes’. Only today the wicked foreigners tend to be Eastern Europeans and Africans, and their alleged victims are women from their own countries rather than white women from the West. Yesterday’s ‘white slavery’ scaremongers and today’s anti-trafficking campaigners share much in common. Both viewed foreign men as brutal and untrustworthy. Both depicted women as pathetic victims easily trapped into a life of tawdry sex slavery. Both made hysterical claims about women and children being chained up for the pleasure of men. Both gave rise to high-profile raids that often turned up very little. And both seemed to be underpinned, energised, by a culture of fear, by apocalyptic doubts and uncertainties about the standing of Western society and the threat from brown, yellow and black foreigners who might pass unnoticed across porous borders.
Now, as then, the discussion of migration as ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’ reveals much about the fearful and besieged Western mentality, the desire to raise the drawbridge and keep at bay the coming collapse of moral values.
The anti-trafficking crusade strikingly captures the degraded view many people take of agency and choice today. Anti-traffickers patronisingly describe foreign women, especially those who end up working in prostitution, as objects rather than as active subjects. Apparently these women do not move around the world; rather they are trafficked across borders, smuggled and shifted like pieces on a chess board. Apparently they do not make hard decisions about where to go and what work to carry out; instead they are bought and sold and forced into ‘slave labour’. And worst of all, apparently they do not require our solidarity or support as they move around the globe and work often long hours for little pay; instead they must be rescued by the police, social workers and feminists and sent back to their country of origin as if they were children escaped from a nursery. Once migrants were demonised as potential criminals; today they are looked upon as flotsam and jetsam, who must be guided home by caring Western officials.
Yet as Laura Maria Agustin argues, people who migrate are not pathetic victims; they might have to make hard choices in circumstances that are not of their making, but they are often possessed of gumption and ambition: ‘It is not the most desperate, like famine sufferers, who manage to undertake a migration. In order to go abroad you have to be healthy and you have to have social capital, including a network that will get you information on how to travel and work. You need some money and some names and addresses; you have to have at least some official papers, even if they’re false. You need at least a minimal safety net.’ (17)
Migration remains an inspiring expression of human agency and desire, as people take great risks and travel great distances to improve their lives. In labelling such movement as ‘trafficking’ and ‘slavery’, and demanding tougher border restrictions and police-led ‘rescues’ of trafficking’s alleged victims, the anti-trafficking lobby has grossly betrayed the very people it is claiming to help.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.
www.brendanONeill.net
Endnotes:
(1) Children feared used by crime gangs, BBC News, 25 January 2008
(2) Romanian parents help gang probe, BBC News, 28 January 2008
(3) Report on Today, BBC Radio 4, 28 January 2008
(4) Romanian parents help gang probe, BBC News, 28 January 2008
(5) Report on Today, BBC Radio 4, 28 January 2008
(6) Press-ganged, Comment Is Free, 29 January 2008
(7) For example, see The teenagers traded for slave labour and sex, Guardian, 30 July 2003
(8) Home Office defers expulsion of women held in brothel raid, Guardian, 5 October 2005
(9) Home Office defers expulsion of women held in brothel raid, Guardian, 5 October 2005
(10) See How looking for work turns you into a victim, Brendan O’Neill, New Statesman, 22 November 2004
(11) See What if the figures don’t add up?, Brendan O’Neill, Press Gazette, 23 March 2007
(12) See Trafficking in dubious numbers, by Brendan O’Neill
(13) The Myth of the Migrant, Reason, 26 December 2007
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124093.html
(14) See this interesting study on trafficking and white slavery
http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/hcpp/david.pdf 
(7 pages)
(15) See this interesting study on trafficking and white slavery
(16) See this interesting study on trafficking and white slavery
(17) The Myth of the Migrant, Reason, 26 December 2007
Original mit allen verlinkten Fußnoten:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php? ... icle/4389/
Historische Parallele?
Fall von William Thomas Stead und der 13 jährigen Eliza Armstrong 1886:
viewtopic.php?p=9415#9415
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Armstrong_case
.
