FolLowing police interception of several bus, loads of children allegedly being trafficked to parts of the country, some children have adopted new tricks to outwit the police.
The latest method, according to the Northern Regional police command, is that the children have now chosen to move from town to town, rather than make the trip to their intended destinations in a day, in order not to create any suspicion.
“And unlike previously, where such children moved in groups, they have now chosen to move in smaller groups so as not to attract attention,” the Northern Regional Police Public Relations Officer (PRO), Chief Inspector Ebenezer Tetteh, told the Daily Graphic.
He said in spite of these new tricks, the police succeeded in stopping 11 more children, who were all girls aged between eight and 15, from travelling from the north to the south.
The children, he said, were in a Benz bus with registration number GW 978 V, which was intercepted at the Tamale Airport Junction, after it had set off from Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region on the early hours of Monday, August 2.
“Whilst seven of the girls joined the bus at Wulugu in the West Mamprusi District, the remaining four got on board when the bus got to Nasia,” he said.
The PRO said a plain-clothed police officer, who was also travelling on the bus, helped in saving the girls.
He said efforts were being made to transfer the children to the Human Trafficking Unit in the Upper East Region, which is working on similar cases, adding “The unit is working hard to expose the people behind these movements and to come out with a more efficient way of stopping this practice.”
Chief Inspector. Tetteh further mentioned that the children, when questioned, gave various reasons to why they were travelling to the south, and explained that “while some claimed they were going to visit their parents, others said they were going to engage in menial jobs to earn some income and return when school reopens.”
In a related development, challenging Heights, a child-related non-governmental organisation, has expressed concern about what it termed “child trafficking crisis in Ghana”.
It said the organisation was worried that within the last one week, four different suspected cases of child trafficking had been reported, and the number of children involved had been over 400.
In a statement, the organisation recalled that on July 30, 2010, 118 children travelling in three buses were intercepted by the police at Moree Barrier near Cape Coast, adding that a couple of days earlier, two suspects were arrested for trafficking 50 children from the Upper East Region to the southern part of Ghana.
It said another case, that could be described as the biggest single case of suspected child trafficking, involved over 240 children loaded in three different buses which were intercepted in the Greater Accra Region on Sunday, August 1, 2010.
“As a country, we cannot take these recurrences for granted, especially as there seem to be a pattern in all these cases. We believe that there is a business syndicate behind these trafficking cases. What is worrying is the fact that the phenomena is across the entire country, from Bolga to Cape Coast, with more unreported cases”. it said
The statement congratulated the police for their effort in apprehending some of the suspected perpetrators, and called for serious investigation to be conducted to unravel the network behind these crimes. It also called on the government to put the police on a high alert to deal with the trafficking syndicate.
It noted that lack of resources and the absence of shelters to house trafficked victims, were hindering efforts by the police to crack down on child traffickers, and as a result, the police have simply released the suspects and handed over the children to their parents.
It, therefore, called for the provision of resources and facilities for the police in addition to the construction of shelters to house abused and trafficked children.
“The Human Trafficking Act requires the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs to set up shelters for victims of child trafficking but this requirement has not been fulfilled. In the face of all these difficulties, we still have a lot of confidence in the police to conduct thorough investigations,” It said.
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