ABSTRACT
At the centre of this chapter is ‘Operation Golf’, the joint UK–Romanian police investigation into the trafficking of Romani children to London from the small Romanian village of Tanderei. The chapter draws on empirical data 1 to analyse the development of policing operations from 2007 onwards to investigate the trafficking of Romani children for criminal exploitation in London. Although focused on London, the police investigations had a far greater territorial reach, stretching from the UK capital city to rural Romania, indeed tracing it back to a single point of origin. The Metropolitan Police (MPS) subsequently uncovered the scale of organisation associated with the trafficking of these children, revealing the entanglement of multiple criminal activities. Links were uncovered between forced begging, perhaps the most visible role imposed on these children, and a range of other criminal enterprises, including sophisticated benefit fraud, ATM theft, and pickpocketing. In response to these initial investigations, the first long-term EU Joint Investigation Team (JIT) – ‘Operation Golf’ – was established in 2008 to co-ordinate policing efforts between the UK and Romania. Although JITs had been established earlier (Block 2012) and executed on one previous occasion in the UK, Operation Golf generated a template for subsequent collaborative cross-border investigations in the EU. This chapter examines the provenance, establishment and execution of the JIT alongside the progression of the investigation into child trafficking and the multiple associated policing operations it stimulated.
