Warned what to expect, it was still shocking when I finally met the children. I’d been told they might be hard to reach, fearful and afraid, possibly on drugs. In reality, they were all these things with one overriding trait.
Meeting them on a windswept morning in Brussels, on a scruffy street west of the Eurostar terminal, what stood out was their absolute vulnerability.
Teenage boys tend to hide their exploitability: these children couldn’t.
Having travelled alone from Morocco and Algeria to make their mums proud by landing work in Europe, they now found themselves on the streets, addicted, starving, and reliant on the generosity of a few charities.
The journey to this meeting had begun two months earlier. A routine phone call with a long-trusted UK child protection specialist in London had referenced something new and perplexing. North African lone children had been found by the authorities, abused and in a highly vulnerable state. Serious criminals were suspected of exploitation.
The source cited Brussels, where Moroccan and Algerian minors were being repeatedly coerced into crime. Senior police figures in Belgium quickly corroborated the tipoff.
Police had warned how cocaine networks were swamping Europe with the drug. Not known, was the industrial-scale recruitment of unaccompanied north African children by organised criminals to do their dirty, dangerous work – or the sheer levels of brutality these children faced at their hands.
The story is far from over. Exactly how many children have been coerced into helping feed Europe’s appetite for cocaine? Many thousands of unaccompanied children from Africa remain missing in Europe, their fate an enduring mystery. Mark Townsend, senior global development reporter
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