Children have been trafficked into the Irish state for the purposes of sexual exploitation according to a report by Extra.ie
The report states that criminal gangs are targeting children in state care with one child from West Africa being tracked by a gang within “minutes” of her entering the care of Tusla.
The 14 year old who was abducted from Niger was picked up from state care only 30 minutes after arriving there and was not seen until a year later when she was found “locked in a brothel” in Limerick.
The report states that over the course of her abuse whereby she was used as a “sex slave” the girl developed a “severe infection” and was made to sit in a bucket of salt.
A young boy from Vietnam also went missing with a source saying that those responsible for his disappearance likely know how to make sure the child is never found.
Victims of trafficking often suffer fear and intimidation in the form of threats that their relatives back in Africa or they themselves will be harmed by ‘Voodoo’ and as such getting information from victims is difficult according to a source quoted in the piece.
The targeting of vulnerable children is not limited to those trafficked from abroad as illustrated by the case of an Irish child living in residential care who was groomed by a Dublin based gang before being kidnapped. This child was later found ‘working’ out of a toilet at a fast food restaurant.
According to the report 17 of 38 minors who went missing from state care having arrived unaccompanied this year are unaccounted for. This number is coupled with Department of Justice figures which show 136 unaccompanied minors of which 116 are boys and 20 are girls arrived in the state between January and September this year.
Lead Researcher of Sexual Exploitation Research Programme at UCD, Ruth Breslin told the Mail on Sunday that traffickers “use a route like that and would know what to do. They would know what happens to unaccompanied minors and where they might end up.”
“They may well have sent her deliberately through so that they would roughly know where to pick her up from, some sort of residential care place and that was the intention all along.” she said
Explaining the sophisticated nature of the trafficking operations she said, ‘They [the traffickers] will have looked into how things operate in the state they are trafficking victims into or might have people on the ground who know the system.”
Breslin said that although the traffickers involved in the exploitation of the child from Niger may not have known her exact location, they may have used a phone in order to track her whereabouts.