BY KEVIN SAWYER – A huge pickpocket empire, fueled on the backs of child slaves, has recently come onto the radar of law enforcement authorities in The Netherlands and other European countries. About 300 children have been identified by Europol as being forced against their will to steal, mostly by means of picking pockets, by a criminal organization that kidnaps young children, some as young as 7 and 8, from eastern European countries and forces them into slavery.
The pickpocket operations have been uncovered in The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Germany. When local police pick the children up for stealing, all they can do is process them and then let them return to the streets and slavery. Dutch law enforcement authorities began to suspect a huge criminal ring when they noticed that the same children were being arrested time and again. Children, authorities say, tend to be invisible which is why the criminal organization behind it is having such success all across the major cities of Europe.
A Dutch prosecutor who handles human trafficking and slavery, Warner Ten Kate, said that, “What you see is not often what it appears. When you see a mother, for instance, begging with a child, you don’t necessarily think about the child being forced to serve as a prop for a woman who isn’t the mother at all. As the child gets older, they are forced to work for the organization.”
The children, experts say, tend to range in age between 8-16 and child slavery and crime has been on Europe’s radar or several years but little headway has been made to shut the operations down.
“The pressure on the kids is immense,” said Ten Kate. “We believe that most of them are forced to steal more than $1,115 a day.”
One investigator working with a task force created to stop the slavery, Arthur de Rijk, had been tracking some children who ended up going from Amsterdam to Barcelona where they were arrested. When de Rijk arrived he found three girls, a young boy and a baby. He choked for words as the conditions he found them in were so deplorable.
“It was too dirty for words,” de Rijk said. “They were living in a crack house. It looked OK from the outside but inside was utter chaos. It smelled like urine and the kids were covered in lice. The fridge was moldy and there were mattresses on the floor and no chairs. The electrical wires were hanging from the walls. It was a dangerous place. It was dreadful.”
The children were returned to Amsterdam and turned over to the Dutch child services agencies where they have begun to play again and to try an assimilate into the life of a normal child. The children of the organization move and pickpocket in teams and then are quickly moved to another city to avoid detection.
The pressure and coercion is overwhelming, Ten Kate said. Quite often the kids are forced to use drugs so that their addictions help bind them to the organization. The odds of escape are almost non-existent and the children are constantly indoctrinated that the outside world is an awful and hostile place and the only hope they have for survival is to continue to be drug addicted thieves and slaves.
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