The Vietnamese girls who vanished
On November 4th, The Times published a story I’ve been working on for a while about a spate of disappearances of Vietnamese teenagers from British private schools.
The story — which I did with Senior Reporter Katie Gibbons — showed that Vietnamese students had gone missing from seven schools, and that several had been found working in nail bars. It said:
An investigation by this newspaper has uncovered at least 21 Vietnamese children who have vanished from boarding schools and private colleges across Britain in the past four years. They are mostly girls with what is known as the “private school visa”.
The findings raise concerns that traffickers are exploiting the visas to bring in children from Vietnam. The police and the Home Office are investigating the disappearances, but many of the youngsters remain unaccounted for.
Inside the paper we had more detail about two of the girls, and a background piece on how this type of trafficking seems to work.
And under the headline “Lost Girls”, the paper published a strong editorial on the story. It said:
“How so many Vietnamese teenagers could vanish without raising greater alarm among the authorities and institutions responsible for them is deeply troubling. The schools involved say that they correctly followed protocol. They called the police and reported the matter to the Home Office. But that still leaves many unanswered questions….
There are questions for the Home Office too. The eight establishments identified by this newspaper had all passed Home Office inspections to enable them to be licensed as visa sponsors.… As an institution that likes to present itself as being at the global forefront of the campaign against human trafficking, this is particularly shameful.”
Later in the week, we confirmed three more schools where Vietnamese students had gone missing in the past few years. Two of the girls went missing — from different schools — in the same month, January 2017. The charity Missing People told us:
“The fact that teenagers are going missing from private schools, having come into the country through legal processes is incredibly alarming. We are also seriously concerned that so little seems to have been done to find them and keep them safe.”
On Radio 4’s Today program, the BBC’s Mishal Husain asked the Chief Executive of the Independent Schools Council, Julie Robinson: “How many times has this happened?” Robinson said the ISC — which lobbies for private schools — only knew about “a very small number of cases.”
We have now confirmed 24 missing students, and are working on more. If you know anything that might help with our next story on this, please email me (joshi.herrmann@protonmail.com) or DM me on Twitter.
