The number of children identified as being trafficked, chiefly for labour but also for sexual exploitation, increased by 46% last year, according to data published by the National Crime Agency.

Barnardo’s, which runs projects in London and Hampshire to support trafficked children and young people, said the youngest child among 200 in its care last year was aged five. The charity said the majority of the children had arrived unaccompanied from Europe, and many had come from the camp at Calais.

The NCA’s national referral mechanism (NRM), used to flag up potential trafficking cases to the authorities, identified 982 cases in 2015, compared with 671 in 2014.

The reason for the rise in children being lured away for financial gain is unclear and it could be the result of increased reporting and awareness of the issue. The NCA’s figures represent the total number of potential child victims of trafficking and, while broken down by nationality, does not include a breakdown of asylum status. However, children’s charities say there is a clear crossover between rising numbers of vulnerable refugee children coming to Britain via Europe and those being trafficked.



Albanian, Vietnamese and British were identified as the most common nationalities of children trafficked or at risk of being trafficked, a similar pattern to last year. The NRM identifies potential victims, considered provisional until cases are concluded. But a sharp increase in the number of referrals of children from Eritrea, up 133% to 46 cases, in addition to anecdotal evidence of where referrals are coming from, has raised further concerns over child protection failures of refugees in Europe.



The vulnerability of child refugees to traffickers has been highlighted recently due to a proposal by Lord Dubs calling for Britain to take in 3,000 lone child refugees stranded in Europe. A weaker version of the amendment, which was passed by the House of Lords, but narrowly defeated in the Commons last week, is due to be debated again in parliament this month.

Children’s charities said the rise in children being lured into work, sexual exploitation or criminal activities was likely to be an underestimate.

Hannah Stott, Barnardo’s trafficking, advice and support manager, said the majority of the 200 trafficked children looked after by the charity in 2015 were unaccompanied, aged between 13 and 16, and came via Europe. Most had been subjected to sexual exploitation or labour exploitation, including forced criminality, and some both. One of the children in its care had been forced to transport firearms, according to the charity.



The reason for the rise in children being lured away for financial gain remains unclear. Photograph: Alamy

“A lot have come through the ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais and others have flown to airports around the country,” Stott said. The NCA’s referral figure of 982 was likely to be the tip of the iceberg, she said, due to poor, although increasing, reporting.

“The point is, we don’t know, the government don’t know, across the EU how many have been trafficked,” she said. “Children who are unaccompanied asylum seekers are incredibly vulnerable, they are alone, often traumatised by what has happened to them, they often have no money and need to find ways to get by, they are moving through places they don’t know and have left behind everything they do know. They can fall prey to all sorts of unscrupulous people.”

An estimated 95,000 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in Europe last year, 3,043 in the UK. At least 10,000 have disappeared, feared to have fallen prey to traffickers, according to Europol.

The Home Office, which gathers statistics on lone child asylum seekers, could not supply data on how many of them have been smuggled or trafficked, it told the Guardian.

Chloe Setter, head of advocacy at Ecpat UK, said the reason behind the overall rise in NRMs was difficult to pinpoint, but the rise in numbers of Eritrean children was likely to be due to migration routes.

“I do think that the numbers in Eritrea are because of the migration routes that have sprung up,” said Setter. “We are seeing more children trafficked from Eritrea – that is a fact.”

Eritreans made up the third largest group of migrants to cross the Mediterranean in 2015.

Ecpat UK supports the efforts of Dubs and others to allow more lone child refugees stranded in Europe into Britain.

Setter described the main argument put forward by David Cameron not to accept those already in Europe – that they would act as a “pull factor” for more to come and thus for traffickers to exploit them – as nonsense.

“Traffickers are operating across Europe,” said Setter. “Children are coming here anyway. It is the failure of Europe’s child protection system that allows traffickers to flourish.”

Cameron’s spokeswoman said last week: “What we have looked at very carefully here is how do we best protect vulnerable people and how can we best help refugees, how do we not fuel a system that is incentivising people to be exploited by trafficking gangs and make perilous journeys.”

An international migration expert who is leading a study on the reasons people come to Europe said the pull factor argument did not bear scrutiny.



Prof Heaven Crawley, of the University of Coventry, said: “What is evident from our project, and impacts on the situation with unaccompanied children, is that the story is more complicated than has been made out.”

Prof Heaven Crawley. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Crawley, who has interviewed 500 adult migrants and refugees in Turkey, Italy, Greece and Malta and gave evidence to MPs in a hearing on unaccompanied children last month, said: “Many of these kids don’t know where their families are, or their parents are dead. Who are they bringing? Politicians assume people understand the complexities of asylum policies. But it’s not like they are saying: ‘If the UK sign up to the family reunion directive, we’ll go.’

“I can’t keep up with asylum policy changes and it’s my full-time job. This idea that if you take people from the camps [in the region] it will stop these dangerous journeys … What smugglers and traffickers are selling is an idea of how to rebuild your life to people who are desperate and have lost hope.”