A 13-year-old girl was brought to New Zealand and enslaved, with a paediatrician saying the teenager would most likely have died if she had not been rescued when she was.<\/p>\n
But her abusers have never been charged with trafficking the girl – given the pseudonym Grace – and Oranga Tamariki says it would “push a lot harder” for more serious convictions if that situation happened today.<\/p>\n
International child protection manager Sharyn Titchener told a webinar last month that a social worker was alerted to Grace’s plight by a medical professional, got a warrant and described seeing her when she arrived.<\/p>\n
“The social worker wrote the description of how this child came out looking gaunt, sad. And she was only 13 years old. She spoke very little English, but the social worker who collected her was from her country of origin, so was able to speak in her first language. And she used words such as slave and that she was treated like a dog.<\/p>\n
“She had 35 current injuries on multiple parts of her body. She was underweight, she had poor hygiene and she had head lice. Due to the appearance of the historical and the current injuries, it was determined that weapons had been used to repeatedly assault her. The paediatrician stated that in his findings – he’s an extremely experienced paediatrician – that some of the injuries were the worst he’d seen on a child of that age. The paediatrician also stated that the removal of Grace from the home had very likely prevented a homicide occurring.”<\/p>\n
It was an example in a webinar being held to raise awareness among health professionals about telltale signs of people being held against their will. The two adults in the house where she lived were convicted of abuse and jailed.<\/p>\n
“This was a couple of years ago, we would push a lot harder now to make sure this was handed to Crown [prosecutors] to consider trafficking,” said Titchener. “And without a doubt this – Grace’s – story was a story of domestic servitude, slavery. She was moved into New Zealand, into this home, and was enslaved.”<\/p>\n
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A 13-year-old girl was brought to New Zealand and enslaved, with a paediatrician saying the teenager would most likely have died if she had not been rescued when she was. But her abusers have never been charged with trafficking the girl – given the pseudonym Grace – and Oranga Tamariki says it would “push a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13286,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13284\/revisions\/13286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}