Former Premier League footballer reveals how he was brought to the UK as a child and forced into male prostitution
In a report on Today programme, Al Bangura who played in
the Premier League for Watford from 2009 - 2015, spoke to BBC's Sima
Kotecha on how at 14, his parents told him to become the leader of the
secret society his
late father had headed in Sierra Leone. The 27-year-old who is now
working with the Premier League to raise awareness on the growing number
of teenage players being tricked into leaving Africa for Europe,
refused.
"I said I didn't think this was something I wanted to get involved with. I want to play football and I'm going to school so I don't want to do that," he says.
So he travelled to neighbouring Guinea where he met a French
man, who pretended to be his friend and promised to help him fulfill his
dream.
"I didn't know he had another different intention - to get me into the sex trade,"
The pair travelled to France and on to the UK. Once there, the man left him alone in a building.
"All of a sudden I saw two or three guys come around me, trying to rape me and make me do stuff. Because
I was young and I was small, I just started screaming. They probably
thought I knew what I was there for - obviously I know what I came over
here for, I was here to play football."
"I
was just crying and proper screaming and I tried to make my way out - I
was cold, I was crying, I was shaking, I didn't know what to do, I was
all over the place. I made my way outside. I didn't know where to start, I thought it was the end of my life."
He
requested help from a Nigerian man, who told him to go to the Home
Office and claim asylum. Because he was 16, he was later given a
two-year right to stay.
"It was so emotional, because after a few months I'd kind of forgotten
about what what I'd been through, it had been sad but I ended up coming
to a good thing.
"I started meeting people, started playing
football and I got the opportunity to join Watford when I was 16 and
things just started building up for me," he explains. "It's quite
emotional to talk about it now, I'm happy I've got over it, but it's sad
for me."
It is estimated that 15,000 teenage footballers, are moved out of 10 West African countries every year - many of them under-age.
The
figures come from non-governmental organisation Foot Solidaire, which
helps send boys back to Africa after they have been tricked by
unscrupulous agents into leaving the continent.
The National Crime
Agency says its most recent figures from 2014 show a total of 2,340
potential victims of trafficking were referred from 96 countries - of
these 29% were minors.
But Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner
Kevin Hyland said he believed more children were trafficked to the UK
than the official figures suggest.
Sports journalist Ed Hawkins has just spent two years investigating the football trade for a book called the Lost Boys.
"It's
difficult to put a number on it, but it's probably in the thousands
each year. People aren't aware of the scams, how the culture of greed
permeates from top to bottom (in football) and encourages the slave
trade," he says.
A Fifa rule called Article 19 says clubs cannot sign people aged under 18, but it has caveats.
"It's
not worth the paper it's written on, it's just for window dressing by
Fifa, they have given get out clause for clubs to do what they like," he
says.
"There should be a blanket ban on the signing of minors -
it shouldn't be allowed at all, Uefa says this should be in place, with
no caveats at all. That would help reduce the numbers."
Bangura,
who also now works with charities to publicise the issue, said:
"I
think there's loads of vulnerable kids in Africa who want to achieve
what I've achieved in my life. There's loads of kids who might
not even tell their parents, or their parents might use their last money
to make sure they come over here to play football and they end up doing
something else. It's important for me, having been through what
I've been through in my life, for me to say I've been through that,
I've survived, but what about the young kids coming up, will they
survive, are they going to be able to cope with that, so we really need
to find a way to stop all of that."
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