The Trade In Care Home Children

One of the most difficult subjects to write about is the potential ‘trading’ of care home children between local authorities. It’s such a difficult subject that I’ve put writing about it off until now.

The very idea that children might be moved from one local authority area to another for the sole purpose of being abused takes some getting used to and yet many people I have talked with believe that this may have been the case.  Last month The Needle published this article by Dr Liz Davies HERE concerning ‘exchange  holidays’ between Islington children and those from Jersey’s Haut de la Garenne.

Dr Davies goes on to highlight other ‘exchange  holiday’ destinations across the country.

“In Islington, some children made trips to Nick Rabet’s activity centre in Sussex. He was the deputy manager of one of the Islington homes and he also owned this activity centre. Groups of children were taken there. Later he was convicted in Thailand of abuse of 30 boys.”

But these temporary ‘holidays’, worrying as they are, could potentially be just the tip of the iceberg of what may be a sickening trade in care home children across the country.  Difficult as it is to believe, children in the care of local authorities may have been moved across the country,  not because another local authority might better be able to fulfil a child’s needs or because one local authority did not have enough places available and another did but moved from one part of the country where child abusers operated to another based on a child’s gender, age, and appearance.

This would demonstrate a national network of paedophiles within various council social services  literally trading children so that they could be abused.

The story below by Eileen Fairweather from 2008 highlights an as yet unexplained and illegal transfer of 5 children from Birmingham to Jersey and it’s well worth a read.

We need a national inquiry to get to the bottom of what exactly was going on over the last 40 years with vulnerable children in care.

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who discovered that his local city council had sent children to Jersey, believes other children from the UK ‘were also placed in care there’.

The MP for Birmingham Yardley added: ‘The Government has refused to order councils to check properly because it does not want to open a can of worms, on the links between abusers in England and Jersey.’

The Mail on Sunday has also learned that children from UK local authorities, which have also been the subject of abuse allegations, were taken on holiday to Haut de la Garenne, where the bone fragments are said to belong to five children whom detectives believe were killed.

Daily Mail