By Felicity Gerry

This week the BBC broadcast Stolen which they described as a “Fast-paced thriller about the trafficking of children who are brought to Britain for a better life but end up working outside of the system”. It had Twitter followers blubbing, one describing herself as all “snot and tears”.

Benji Wilson wrote in The Telegraph: “The worry was that Stolen (BBC One, Sunday), a feature-length single drama about child trafficking, might be just a little too preachy to stomach. The alarm bells jangled from the first frame, which was a white-on-black strap reading: ‘Once upon a time, each and every day in fact, children are being trafficked and put to work, unpaid, unprotected, unseen.’ If the first law of television is ‘show, don’t tell’ this was like being lectured by a po-faced Pecksniff, or Bono. In the event, Justin Chadwick’s film, starring Damian Lewis as a detective in the Human Trafficking Unit, stayed just on the right side of overbearing”.

For my part the idea that the viewing public are switched off by the truth is sad indeed and makes me realise why there is so much misunderstanding these days about what goes on in court. With Damien Lewis and his on-screen wife as the obvious eye-candy, Stolen followed three children; Rosemary, 11, was brought in by a trafficker and sold as a house servant, Kim Pak, a Vietnamese boy, 15, sent to work in a sealed house converted to a cannabis factory; and the superbly played Georgie, a 14-year-old Ukrainian who worked for nothing in a sandwich factory – thus putting me off ready meals for life.

The film explained what most criminal barristers already know – that child trafficking is a £multi million industry where the product is the soul of a child. Of course, apart from a few slaps and the obvious inferences, the film did not show the abuse suffered by women and children conned and forced into work and prostitution to fill the pockets of men across the world as that would be unpalatable viewing but, it is the reality that in large measure, trafficking is for sexual exploitation.

The programme was timely as it was also announced this week that new guidance to prosecutors issued by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) would mean that women and children who it is suspected have been trafficked into the UK should no longer be treated as criminals, thus bringing Britain into line with an EU directive which says that where victims of trafficking have been compelled to commit crimes, member states must not prosecute them. No anti-Europe rhetoric today. Here it is the UK that appears to have been slow on the uptake.

The CPS policy states that where there is a suspicion (not necessarily evidence) that a child engaged in criminal activity has been trafficked, the case should not be pursued. The idea is to encourage victims to complain and thus assist in the investigation of such matters so often hampered by fear.

The Guardian reported that between 2004 and 2009, just 48 people were convicted of trafficking offences in England and Wales and that “the US state department recently complained that the British government was not doing enough to address trafficking for domestic servitude in foreign diplomatic missions in London. There have been 19 recent cases of alleged trafficking of domestic workers by diplomats. These were reported to the government’s anti-trafficking agency by the charity Kalayaan”.

Sometimes, it is hard to tell the trafficker from the victim. I have represented a woman who was convicted (before this policy) as a “madam” for trafficked women but maintained she was a fellow prostitute. There may also be cases where businesses have become unwittingly involved, the priority of the traffickers to use others for their own ends. Innocent businesses will find it hard to defend such horrific allegations where the mere fact of involvement in such a scheme appears (without careful explanation by defence counsel) to infer guilt.

Operation Golf, a police operation aimed at a Romanian criminal gang suspected of trafficking 181 children into the UK for begging and theft, has led to 85 convictions in British courts, but only four were for trafficking offences. Until now the best weapon we had were money laundering offences as these people don’t like to be hit in their pockets.

Whatever the facts of the proceedings, it will be important not to let true traffickers escape by pretending to be victims rather than criminals. One thing you can be sure of is that the traffickers will be familiar with the laws they break and if caught will seek to use the new policy to their own advantage. Whether you know the law or simply enjoyed the film, Benji Wilson was right “There could be no more piercing reminder of the gap between the country we are, and the country we’d like to think we are”. The Government just has to hope that the Criminal Justice System survives the oncoming wave of cuts to ensure that the right people are arrested and prosecuted and the victims heard and protected.

It might involve some decisions by prosecutors on suspicion rather than evidence and unpalatable defence cross-examination but that’s what advocates are there for – the overriding objective being justice – which does not stop with Damien’s Lewis’ arrest of the bad guy or his arresting looks but ends with the proper and fair conviction of people traffickers based not on the snot and tears of the viewing public but on compelling complaints from real victims whose evidence is properly tested.

* Felicity Gerry has both prosecuted and defended cases of people trafficking

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