So we set off early today for a visit to Leeuwarden to see a project that supports young people, catching the train to travel north for 3 hours was interesting. We met our escort Daan on the train. Daan is our main contact based in the Hague’s Rapporteurs office and has arranged our visit here very well, so it was unfortunate that this morning in a ‘manly’ debate about football that as Mike slowly began to lose the ground he thought he had gained, he reminded Daan ‘We did win two world wars though’ a clever move. Daan bravely fought back with the mention of William of Orange, but Mike countered the attack with the following comment ‘but he had a son Mad King George who was over here but we have bred that strain out now!’ Fortunately Daan thought this was very funny and only suggested he was foolish to have raised the counter attack!

 

Since we last came to see The Centre for Child and human Trafficking centre in 2010 they have built a new centre and further develop their service. It really is an amazing project, now employing over 300 staffs intensively supporting around 200 victims each year, the atmosphere is remarkable, the programme of support around so many aspects of needs is carefully built for each child.

 

Whilst we are beginning to develop our residential services for sexually exploited young people in the UK, we are a long way from such a service being available here, but I am again motivated to bring the learning from their project across to the UK!

 

It’s has been an amazing whistle stop visit!

 

We then travelled down to Zwolle to meet with the expert investigating team who had some interesting system processes in place to manage human trafficking and heard about the detail on some of their investigations.

 

We then heard from the public prosecution service about how prosecutions are managed along side the police, how decisions are agreed on investigating strategies and who does what role. We came away with lots of ideas which we hope to look for funding for to progress for our members in the future.

 

All in all our trip to The Hague has been fantastic!