Call for more border police to stop human trafficking in Britain

A leading think tank has called for more border police to stop sophisticated human traffickers targeting Britain.

The Center for Social Justice has claimed that the gangs are always ahead of the police forces and it is time to implement different tactics and a heavier presence to combat them.

The government have insisted that the recent changes to human trafficking laws have made it far more difficult for predatory gangs to target vulnerable humans in Britain. But former Home Office adviser Fiona Cunningham, who also co-wrote the Center for Social Justice’s report, has said that "organised criminality that lies behind this modern form of slavery is pretty much endemic now.”

Fiona Cunningham also believes that the European Union’s open door policy has made it easier for traffickers to prey on people. She said “organised crime groups find the trafficking of victims to be a highly lucrative and accessible crime to pursue and as such have become highly sophisticated in developing illegal business models."

For years, many analysts and commentators have highlighted the growing trend of human trafficking across the European Union. Exploitative and opportunistic gangs are able to use the free movement of people in order to facilitate their illegal activities. Human trafficking gangs are able to smuggle in people from other parts of the E.U. into the UK with relative ease.

Defense secretary Philip Hammond has said that a "comprehensive, European-level response" was needed in order to “manage this traffic in human suffering.”

The wide availability of the Internet is another weapon used by the gangs. They are able to organise their tactics and plans whist also monitoring their victims through the use of webcams. The government believe there are approximately 13,000 human trafficking victims in the UK. But many others believe this is a very conservative estimate, with the real figure being far higher.

LM/SKL

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