04/12/2007

Breaking news from Ireland

328 refugee kids go missing from Garda run "care homes"

Senator David Norris confirms that serving and former Garda run "Care" Homes for refugees in Republic of Ireland

 

 

"The health services and the Garda are indifferent to missing non-national children!".

Report by Emma Browne, Hilary Curley and Colin Murphy for Village Magazine

The scandal of missing children

Village Magazine Dublin

The scandal of missing children

Contributed by Emma Browne Hilary Curley Colin Murphy Friday, 28 January 2005

Forty eight children went missing from the Eastern HSE region (formerly the East Coast Area Health Board (ECAHB)) last year, and of these 40 are still missing. The Director of Childcare in the Eastern Region, Marian Quinn, told us on 13 January she was unable to tell say how many of the children were still missing. She referred us to the Garda for this information. We were later informed by the Eastern region that 40 were still missing. They are the body with statutory responsibility for the care and welfare of these children. In 2004, 174 unaccompanied minor asylum seekers came into the care of the ECAHB. Marian Quinn says that normally about half are reunited with family members in Ireland. The remaining half stay in Dublin and a majority of them are placed in hostels. If the child is under 12 the health board tries to place the children in foster care. But the arrangement is such that a 13 year old child is frequently placed in a hostel that does not have full time health board staff. In Dublin there are 10 such hostels. Each child is allocated to the care of a social worker and a project worker. The children meet their project worker at least once a week, according to the board. But for the remainder of the week, aside from this encounter with the project worker, the children are in the care of the private hostel staff. The board says that they have "provided basic child protection training to the staff of each of the contracted hostels". The details of this training were not available to us prior to going to press. These private hostels do not come within the remit of the Social Services Inspectorate, which has responsibility for overseeing the conditions of institutions in which Irish children are accommodated. Neither do these private hostels have to comply with the standards prescribed for the residences of Irish children. The Social Services Inspectorate Report, 2003 recommended that these hostels, "should comply with inspection requirements and should be inspected and registered as are all other children's residential centres". However that has not happened. Only 17 unaccompanied non-national children came into Southern Health Board (SHB), now the Southern region of the HSE, in 2004. However, two of these children went missing, and are still missing. In the Southern region, unaccompanied non-national children are placed in emergency hostel accommodation and then later placed in supported accommodation, with families in the community. Birgette Mintern, a principal social worker in charge of separated children seeking asylum in the Southern region said that the children do "very well in these situations" and they "integrate well" into the local community. The two children that went missing were a Bangladeshi boy and a Moldovan boy. Neither are on the Garda missing children website. They both went missing from emergency accommodation. The Bangladeshi went missing after three weeks in care and the Moldovan was in care for a matter of days. Birgette Mintern said that when children do go missing this occurs usually within a short space of time of them coming into the care of the health board. In the Southern region the children normally spend six to eight weeks in emergency accommodation. Then they are placed in more permanent settled accommodation until they are relocated to families. Birgette Mintern said that the cases of the two missing children are now in the hands of the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB). She said she would have "no problem" with these children being listed on the missing persons website, if the Garda felt it was necessary. In the last five years 3,000 unaccompanied children seeking asylum have come to the attention of the authorities in Ireland. A majority of these go into the care of the Eastern region, a small number are in the care of the Southern region. Pauline Conroy, who has worked on research on separated children seeking asylum in Ireland says that it was an "unexpected situation", nobody anticipated the volume of such children arriving in Ireland. Grace Kelly of the ISPCC said she wasn't surprised that the system is inadequate and that these children go missing in our care. She said that "our childcare system can't cope already with Irish children". Marian Quinn from the Eastern region said there are alwaysissues about more resources and they "are currently in negotiation with the Department of Health for additional resources". Village - Ireland's Current Affairs Website http://www.village.ie Powered by Joomla! Generated: 28 August, 2007, 09:57 \par There has been some improvement in the accommodation for unaccompanied children in private hostels. Up until 2001 they were being placed in hostels which also catered for adult asylum seekers. In addition, these hostels they stayed in were self-catering. Now children are fully catered for in these hostels, which do not cater for adults as well. However Pauline Conroy says that "child protection principles require a higher level of daily supervision and care than currently prevails". Another issue is the incomplete or missing records on children in health board care units. A report in 2003 by Pauline Conroy, Trafficking in Unaccompanied Minors in Ireland, states: "the absence of records in accommodation where children are housed is a core flaw in the protection of unaccompanied children. As a consequence children who 'disappear' from such accommodation... cannot be systematically and promptly traced." Cabrini Gibbons of the Irish Refugee Council feels that there appears to be "no concern" and a "lack of investigation" of cases concerning the children who have already gone missing. Evidence Village obtained from hostel sources reveals an inadequate investigation by the Garda when children in the hostels go missing. And also a lack of follow up on the part of the health board to check with the Garda about the outcome of the investigations. Sources who had worked with children that went missing from these hostels, told Village that the Garda on occasion had not come to question children or staff after children were reported missing. If they did come it was often days or weeks later, and in one case was four months after the reported disappearance. It seems that there is no regular communication between the Garda, the health services and hostels once the cases have been referred to the Garda. Cabrini Gibbons said that "much stronger inter-agency support and communications" is needed when these children go missing, between immigration official/authorities, social workers and the health board. Marian Quinn from the Eastern region said that she feels inter agency support is "working well". However, when Village asked Marian Quinn about the cases of the outcome of the 48 children missing under the ECAHB care on the 13 January, she could not give us any figures. Even when an investigation is launched, in the cases of these missing children, no publicity is generated concerning their absences. There is a professed concern about the privacy rights of these children, which seems at odds with the massive publicity generated in the case of Irish children who go missing. The Garda said it was difficult to release information to the public regarding children in care. There is also the problem that these missing children have no family advocates to promote their cases and the health boards, who have effective parental responsibility for them, do very little. The Garda press office said that it is the responsibility of the local superintendent to ask the Garda press office to publicise the case. Over the last two weeks, Village has sought further information on the 11 non national children listed on the Garda website of missing children. However, the Garda were unable to give us further information on these children. They said they are still in the process of compiling the information, as the information needed to be gathered from the individual local superintendents in charge of the cases. Village tried to contact the relevant local superintendents, but we were referred back to the Garda press office. Out of the 11 non-national missing children, five went missing from accommodation in west Dublin, and four went missing from a city centre hostel. From the west Dublin accommodation a 16-year-old South African girl, Sive Yanta, and three Moldovan boys, Serghei Tudorache and Vasile Cichistu (both aged 15), and 13-year-old Ion Ernu, all went missing last October; and a Russian girl, Erna Isayeva (15) went missing last August. We contacted the Russian embassy to ask if they had been notified by the Garda about the missing girl, Erna Isayeva. They had not heard about her and expressed concern at not having been informed. They asked Village to fax them her details. We also contacted the Eastern European Information Centre in Dublin, and they had no knowledge of her case and had not been contacted by the Garda. The Russian newspaper in Dublin, Gazetta also had no knowledge of her, or had any contact from the Garda. Village - Ireland's Current Affairs Website http://www.village.ie\par We also contacted the South African embassy about Sive Yanta. They had never been contacted by the Garda about her case. The Chairperson of the South African Club in Ireland, Dee Hulse, also said she was unaware of her disappearance and was never contacted by the Garda. The South African Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, in Pretoria, South Africa said they had never heard about her case. (There is no Moldovan embassy or consulate in Ireland.) From the city centre hostel, a 17-year-old Somali boy, Adbi Ali, a 17-year-old Estonian boy,Valentin Vorobyov, a 17-year- old Georgian girl, Salome Samadashvili and an 18-year-old Georgian, Ion Spinu all went missing in 2004. Village contacted the Estonian embassy in Ireland to enquire if they knew of Valentin Vorobyov. They had not been informed that he was missing. They said that it was not protocol that they be informed of missing persons. However, following investigation by the embassy, we were informed that Interpol had not been informed about this boy's case either. Within 24 hours the embassy discovered that his passport had expired in March of 2004, and in May he had made a new application for a passport, with an address given in the United Kingdom. (Although the date of birth given for the new passport is different from the previous one, but the other details are the same.) (There is no Somalia or Georgian consulate in Ireland.) There were no "missing person" posters placed or leaflets distributed in the city centre area where these children went missing. All of these children have gone missing since January 2004. 16-year-old Lisa Nwole, a Nigerian, went missing from her home in Celbridge in October 2002. She is described as a "Black African" on the missing persons website, not Nigerian. Katie Ridge, a Fine Gael councillor who lives in the same estate in Celbridge, St Raphael's Manor, said she was not aware of any leaflet drop or local information session with the Garda subsequent to Lisa's disappearance. The editor of the Nigerian Dublin newspaper, Street Journal said he had not been informed by the Garda about the girl's disappearance and offered to place an article in his newspaper requesting information from the public about her. The editor of Metro Eireann, who is Nigerian, similarly had never been asked for information or help by the Garda. The Nigerian Embassy had not been informed of her disappearance either, but was interested and asked us to pass on any information if we got any. The spokesperson said that in the normal course of events, they would be informed, but usually by the social workers and never by the Garda. Superintendent Tom Neville in Naas said "there has been a full investigation carried out" and that it was ongoing, but declined to give details of that investigation. Other Garda sources said that Lisa Nwole's mobile phone records had been checked but had drawn a blank. The remaining missing non-national is a 17-year-old Eritrean girl, Tigsti Zeray, who went missing from an address on the North Circular Road, Dublin in 2004. It is likely that nine of these 11 children who are on the missing persons list went missing from the Eastern region hostels. When asked about the problems with supervision in these hostels, Marian Quinn said that the only way to guarantee the safety of these children was to lock them up; "this is not an option desired by the health board", she said. A major concern about these missing children is their vulnerability once they do go missing. Pauline Conroy said that "when they go missing we could assume that they are probably drifting into an underworld". They are "very vulnerable and exposed to the risk of being exploited for sex or labour". Cabrini Gibbons said "there is a concern in Ireland about trafficking and that some people might be using these missing children for trafficking. And (there is) some evidence that Ireland has been used as a first destination in the trafficking cycle." She added that we have a "lack of awareness and knowledge about trafficking in Ireland".

Village - Ireland's Current Affairs Website http://www.village.ie

 

 

The Irish Refugee Council

The issue of migrant children missing in Ireland must be tackled urgently

Last year the HSE reported that 328 migrant children had gone missing from care in the period 2001&ndash2005.  Disturbingly, this figure is likely to have greatly increased since then, as, on average, one migrant child a week goes missing in Ireland.

Cases of missing children later found being exploited in brothels are an urgent call for better child protection measures to be put in place. These missing children are among the many &ldquoseparated children&rdquo or &ldquounaccompanied minors&rdquo who are under 18 years of age and who have arrived in Ireland in recent years without the company of their parents or legal / customary primary caregiver. Many have fled persecution and violence in their home countries and come to Ireland seeking safety and asylum.

The Irish Refugee Council urges that more concerted efforts be made in the identification and registration of separated children upon their arrival in Ireland. &lsquoMore training and better inter-agency co-operation are needed as well as a 24-hour social work service to be present at points of entry for migrants arriving in Ireland' stated Jyothi Kanics, Separated Children's Officer at the Irish Refugee Council and former Programme Manager of the Separated Children in Europe Programme.

While early identification and registration systems may assist once a child has gone missing, providing suitable accommodation, care and guardianship are essential to preventing disappearances. As highlighted by the Irish Refugee Council's 2006 report, Making Separated Children Visible, separated migrant children currently receive a lesser provision of care and support than Irish children.

Additionally, separated children must have a guardian ad litem to ensure that all decisions taken are in the child's best interests and to ensure that the views of the child are heard.

"The incoming Irish government must prioritize fulfilling its international obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and provide better protection to these vulnerable children. Without stability and prospects for the future, children whom we protect today may fall prey to traffickers tomorrow when they leave residential care", Ms Kanics added.
END

Contact:

Ms Jyothi Kanics
Separated Children's Officer
Irish Refugee Council
Phone: 01-873 0042
Pager 01-209 7716

Notes to Editors

  • Separated children are under 18 years of age, outside their country of origin and separated from both parents and from their previous legal/customary primary caregivers. In Ireland the term unaccompanied minors is often used.
  • The Irish Refugee Council is a non-governmental organisation. Its mission is to pursue fair, consistent and transparent policies and to promote informed public attitudes in relation to people seeking refuge.
  • Separated migrant children make up 3%-5% of the movement of peoples in the world and are of particular concern having no parent/guardian to care for them.
  • 'Making Separated Children Visible' was published by the Irish Refugee Council in December 2006. See www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie/pub06/children.pdf

Quotes from separated children

"We try to get to know this country but it seems like this country doesn't want to know who we are." - 19-year old 'aged-out minor' in Ireland.

"When you are scared, you don't have anyone to talk to." - 16-year old separated child in Dublin.

"Being an unaccompanied minor is not easy especially in a strange country all by yourself. At first the process of asylum is complicated for most minors especially because most of the time we are treated as adults when it comes to the asylum process and are expected to produce the same documents relating to our stories as adults would" - Robert (16-year old African separated child, Dublin)

"Even though I live in a safe country now, I don't feel safe enough as I don't have refugee status." - 16-year old African separated child in Dublin.

Statistics for separated children in Ireland

  • In Ireland, separated children represented 3.2% of asylum applicants for the first half of 2006. A total of 643 separated children arrived in 2005. This compares with 877 in Austria, 1,470 in the UK and 2,131 in Belgium in the same period.
  • The majority are adolescents aged 14-17.
  • Over 4,500 separated children have arrived in Ireland since 1999. while over 300 have gone missing from their accommodation centres since 2001.
  • From 2003 until the end of June 2006, a total of 279 separated children were recognised as refugees while 1,233 were refused asylum.
  • The numbers of separated children presenting to the Social Work Service (HSE) is higher than the numbers presenting a case for asylum. Those who do not enter the asylum process remain in a legal limbo.
  • According to the HSE: In 2005, a total of 643 referrals were made to the &lsquoHSE Separated Children Seeking Asylum Unit' in Dublin. 442 were reunited with family, while 201 were put in HSE care. Follow-up mechanisms for those children who are reunited are inadequate.

 

 

 

The Sunday Business Post May 20 2007Missing

Sunday, May 20, 2007 - By Susan Mitchell
More than 300 foreign children have disappeared from Irish state care in six years. As the world searches for Madeleine McCann, what happened to the children whose parents are given no voice?

It would not have been the first time a child taken from Portugal ended up in the grip of a paedophile ring.

So when three-year-old Madeleine McCann (her fourth birthday was last week) disappeared from a holiday resort in Portugal two weeks ago the Portuguese police quickly began working on the assumption she had been abducted to order by an international paedophile network.

In 1998, an 11-year-old boy called Rui Pedro Mendonca vanished while walking home from school in a northern Portuguese town called Lousada. Hopes were raised a month later, when he was sighted with a middle-aged man in Disneyland in Paris.

Then, three years later, his mother&rsquos worst fears were realised. Horrific images of Mendonca being sexually abused were reportedly uncovered during an international police operation that cracked a global paedophile network. More than 200 paedophiles in 13 countries had exchanged more than 750,000 images of children through a private internet club called Wonderland.

Analysis showed more than 1,200 children had been subjected to abuse that officers described as &lsquo&lsquounimaginable&rsquo&rsquo. Some were babies, raped by their abusers. Others were sexually abused live, to order, online. Officers described weeping as they catalogued the pictures and said they are still haunted by what they had seen and heard. Mendonca has never been found.

A recently-infiltrated child pornography ring in Austria once again exposed the extent and severity of sexual crimes against children. Videos of children as young as five being sexually abused, were reaching 77 countries worldwide.

The child sex industry is thriving due to several factors. This includes the advent of the internet, which has helped paedophiles form anonymous networks and gain better access to victims.

As paedophiles swarm the net, another disturbing trend is that younger and younger children are being victimised, and that child pornography images are becoming increasingly graphic and violent.

A recent study from the US involving people arrested for internet-related child pornography crimes over a one-year period bears out this argument.

The study found 83 per cent had images of children aged between six and 12 years old; 39 per cent had images of children three to five years old; and 19 per cent had images of infants and toddlers under the age of three.

Of those arrested,80 per cent had pictures showing the sexual penetration of a child, including oral sex; and 21 per cent had child pornography depicting violence such as rape, bondage and torture.

While little research has been carried out on the child trafficking conducted by organised paedophile gangs, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the trafficking of children for sexual purposes within European borders is on the rise.

Child abduction occurs on a daily basis and affects every nation. As international travel and tourism becomes more frequent - and as national borders become increasingly irrelevant - cross-border child abduction is more easily done.

The invisible and clandestine nature of trafficking and the lack of strong data collection on the subject make it difficult to calculate the global number of child victims. According to the latest estimates available from the United Nations&rsquo children&rsquos fund, Unicef, some 1.2 million children are trafficked worldwide every year.

In many countries child trafficking is closely tied to the sexual exploitation of children. Just three months ago Kasenge Bangu, from Congo, was convicted of raping a 15-year-old he claimed he had married after paying, &lsquo&lsquoa dowry of a goat, a length of fabric, a frying pan and $500&rsquo&rsquo.

You may assume the case was heard in some far-flung African court. In fact, it came up before Mr Justice Barry White at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin.

According to the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, organised criminals, extremist organisations, and terrorist groups are increasingly moving into child trafficking and child pornography to generate revenue to support their activities.

Studies show children are most vulnerable in Asia, Latin America and Africa, but those from the furthest reaches of Europe are most often put to work in Germany, Austria, Britain and - possibly - Ireland. Ecpat, a network of organisations that seeks to end child prostitution, child pornography and trafficking of children for sexual purposes, has campaigned on this issue since it was founded in 1990.

Originally established in northern Thailand by a group of social workers, the charity first focused on the problems in Asia that were being fuelled by sex tourism. It quickly expanded its scope when it realised this was not just an Asian problem, but a global problem - and a growing one.

More than ten years have passed since Ecpat&rsquos work prompted the first world Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC).

Held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1996, the congress was viewed as a landmark event, providing testimony that convinced the world that sexual violations against children existed in all nations, irrespective of cultural differences or geographic location.

It marked the first public recognition by governments of the existence of child exploitation on this scale.

Ecpat believes progress in improving protection for children from commercial sexual exploitation has been made, but says the increasing sophistication of resources available to those who seek to exploit children has grown in equal measure.

&lsquo&lsquoChild trafficking is a complex area,&rdquo says Muireann O&rsquoBriain, a Dublin child protection consultant and former head of Ecpat International. &lsquo&lsquoIt is hard to get accurate figures as it is an illegal activity, but we do know it is increasing.&rdquo

O&rsquoBriain says that, while the trafficking of toddlers and infants for sexual exploitation is rare, it does happen. In general, she says, very young children are more likely to be sexually exploited in the country in which they live. &lsquo&lsquoBut we have come across quite a few cases in eastern Europe where young children have been adopted out of care homes and simply disappear.&rdquo

O&rsquoBriain says paedophile gangs are believed to have abducted many of those children, adding they are likely to have killed them when they finished abusing them.

Children are being trafficked to race camels in the Middle East, weave carpets in India and fill brothels all over the developing world.

O&rsquoBriain says young girls are most at risk to be trafficked for sexual exploitation. She has come across numerous cases of girls being brought to western Europe from Africa and eastern Europe to work as domestic slaves or as prostitutes.

The case of a Kenyan girl was recently highlighted in the British press. The teenage orphan was living on the streets of Nairobi when a man approached her and promised her work in Britain. He told her she would be working as a house girl.

True to his word he brought her into Britain, but instead of placing her with a family the man took her to a brothel where she was systematically raped and beaten. She was then forced to work as a prostitute. Three months later, when the 16-year-old became pregnant, she was forced to continue sleeping with a succession of men until she was almost due to give birth.

The heavily pregnant teenager was then removed from the brothel, driven out of the town where she had been held and dumped miles away.

This week the world will mark International Missing Children&rsquos Day, with humanitarian organisations hoping to bring awareness to the large number of children missing around the world and join forces to find more effective ways to reduce that number.

Last year, the Irish Refugee Council used the day to highlight the number of children who have gone missing in Ireland. According to the Irish Refugee Council more than 300 foreign children have disappeared from state care centres in the past six years.

While some of these children have been located and are now back in the care of the HSE (Health Service Executive), a significant number of those children remain missing. Muireann O&rsquoBriain believes it is highly likely those children were trafficked.

Correspondence from the HSE to the Department of Health and Children in 2005, released under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that: the HSE, which is responsible for separated children seeking asylum, believed that the majority of separated children coming into care have been trafficked into the country. In a letter to the department, the HSE stated: &lsquo&lsquoThe executive has on several occasions taken children into care following their rescue from desperate situations by the Garda National Immigration Bureau.&rdquo

One such example is that of an African minor who was rescued from a brothel by Gardai and placed in HSE care in Dublin last year. Without adequate numbers of staff to watch over her 24 hours, the vulnerable girl went missing again from the centre within days.

Children who have been abducted, abandoned or who have run away are, together with migrant children, particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Paul Gilligan, chief executive of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children says it is difficult to know what has become of the missing children in Ireland, but describes trafficking and sexual exploitation as &lsquo&lsquoa huge European problem&rsquo&rsquo.

Gilligan stresses the true number of missing children in Ireland is likely to be much higher than the official figures suggest, as the children cited as missing are &lsquo&lsquoonly those that have presented to the gardai.

There are many other children out there who we simply don&rsquot even know are here.&rdquo Gilligan says the gardai are frustrated by the lack of resources to tackle the mounting problem.

Unlike the Madeleine McCann case, which has involved international police teams and a high-profile media campaign, the plight of the missing children in Ireland is largely ignored.

&lsquo&lsquoThe only way to generate cohesive action is to have someone driving it, like the parents in the Madeleine McCann case. The problem here is that most of the missing children are what we call &lsquounaccompanied minors&rsquo. There is nobody looking out for them and the authorities don&rsquot have the necessary resources to do it,&rdquo he says.

&lsquo&lsquoTen years ago trafficking was not an issue in Ireland. Now the number of missing children has risen to such a degree we are looking at establishing a missing children&rsquos unit with the guards. International reports have described Ireland as a gateway for traffickers,&rdquo says Gilligan.

As of yet, there is no evidence to suggest children are being sexually abused and photographed for internet websites in Ireland, but some experts believe it has already occurred.

According to the ICMEC (International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children),two of the greatest challenges facing advocates for missing and exploited children are the &lsquo&lsquocomplexity of the problems&rsquo&rsquo and the fact that &lsquo&lsquofew of the world&rsquos nearly 200 countries have any kind of meaningful system in place to report, track and recover abducted or exploited children&rsquo&rsquo.

The internet also presents huge obstacles for law enforcement agencies involved in protecting children and enforcing restrictions on the use and distribution of illegal images.

Sexual predators are known to use the internet to contact and befriend children. Electronic communication also allows for the easy and widespread sharing of photos and videos of sexual abuse of children.

In 2002, Operation Amethyst investigated more than 100 people suspected of downloading child pornography in Ireland.

That operation - and the resultant spate of high-profile investigations of men in the entertainment industry, most famously former Who guitarist Pete Townshend - has convinced the public that paedophilia is not a rare perversion confined to Third World sex tourism.

But bringing a criminal prosecution against someone holding photographic images of such abuse is a legal minefield, with child pornography laws varying widely among countries.

The ICMEC has found many countries that belong to international law enforcement organisation Interpol do not have concrete laws addressing child pornography.

The legal picture is even more complex when it comes to virtual depictions of sex with children, or child pornography in cartoons or computer generated images. They are rarely illegal. Legislators are faced with a number of difficulties: How to effectively regulate obscene and offensive websites when the content produced is perfectly legal in its country of origin? Would such legislation be an infringement of human rights? How are the police to deal effectively with so-called cyber-crimes - including the distribution of child pornography - when perpetrators may be located anywhere in the world?

As Philip Jenkins, author of Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet, points out, the problem is compounded by the fact that child pornographers started using the internet in the early 1980s; with a 20-year head start on police, they are adept at covering their tracks.

Former MEP Mary Banotti, vice-chair of the ICMEC, says much remains to be done in the fight against the trafficking and exploitation of children. &lsquo&lsquoCross-border cooperation, which includes an international arrest warrant, has been painfully slow,&rdquo says Banotti. &lsquo&lsquoUp until recently Interpol&rsquos progress was painfully slow when it came to missing and exploited children, although its work has improved.&rdquo

The ICMEC is campaigning for the implementation of a database of known convicted paedophiles and other sexual predators in the US and Europe. It has called for greater uniformity of child protection legislation in the EU and the US.

Banotti says financial institutions, credit card companies and internet service providers must be forced to work with the police to combat child sexual exploitation. &lsquo&lsquoWe&rsquore living in a world that is very dangerous for children in a way we would never have dreamed possible in the past,&rdquo she says.

The case of Madeleine McCann has parents everywhere gripped in the horror of the moment.

It has renewed attention on child trafficking and sexual exploitation, but thousands of children remain unaccounted for across the European Union; across the world. Few of them have cost us a thought.