SI East London

Anti-Trafficking Meeting

The club made anti-trafficking the focus of their September business meeting and were very happy to welcome Superintendant Bernie Gravett of the Metropolitan Police to the meeting. He spoke about ‘Operation Golf’ which is a joint project between the Metropolitan Police and the Romanian National Police tackling a specific Romanian Roma organised crime network that are trafficking and exploiting children from the Romanian Roma community, one of the poorest and most disadvantaged communities in Europe.

According to the Metropolitan Police many Roma children are trafficked to the UK and forced to beg and steal on the streets by their handlers who send the bulk of the money back to a town in Romania where traffickers have built themselves palatial houses on the proceeds. The children are also used to bolster fraudulent benefit claims to bring in extra tax credits and child support.

‘Operation Golf’ is mainly funded from the EU and was launched shortly after Romania’s accession to the EU when police forces noticed a significant increase in street crime by Romanian children on the streets of London. To date, the UK investigation by ‘Operation Golf’ has led to the arrest of 126 individuals.

The meeting was very well attended with members from SI Southend and SI Colchester and City Gates Church Ilford. There were representatives from the Girl Guides, Rotary Club of Barkingside, the European Medicines Agency and ECPAT. Bernie’s talk generated much discussion particularly about what we as Soroptimists can do. The most important aspect identified was the need to lobby and raise awareness about the fact that the UK has not yet signed up to the EU protocol on trafficking of people. A raffle was held and the proceeds donated to ECPAT.

Since the meeting these events have been brought home to us here in East London where as reported in the Independent on 12th October police have broken open a complex trafficking network run from Romania. In a series of dawn raids on properties in Ilford, East London, officers found 103 children crammed into just 16 addresses. The raid, codenamed Operation Norman, is thought to be one of the largest ever conducted against Roma smuggling networks in Britain.
 

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