British trafficking victim suing Priti Patel over alleged ‘abuse of personal data’

(Image credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

published 31 July 2020

A British victim of of sex abuse and drug trafficking is bringing a case against Home Secretary Priti Patel, arguing that her department “unlawfully accessed personal information including details of her intimate thoughts”.

The woman cannot be identified, but “is currently living in a safe house, assisted round the clock by support workers” due to a combination of learning difficulties and mental health problems, The Guardian reports.

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The paper reports that she was the victim of drugging, abuse and was “trafficked on a number of occasions for the purposes of sexual exploitation and drug trafficking”, the paper adds. She has “suffered extensive sexual and physical abuse”, and has been said by the Home Office to be a “serial victim of modern-day slavery”.

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Lawyers for the woman claim that “sensitive information” about her, collected and stored on a database operated by the Salvation Army, was accessed by the Home Office, despite being “considered irrelevant to her trafficking case”.

The Home Office says that while it is unable to directly access the database, it can get data via the Salvation Army. The charity told The Guardian that “the Home Office owns the information and so it is obliged to disclose it under the terms of its contract”.

Patel last week promised “sweeping reforms” to Home Office culture, following condemnation over the Windrush scandal which saw people wrongly deported, the BBC says.

The new legal action also comes a year after the Salvation Army was revealed to have allowed immigration officers to “infiltrate refugee centres for the homeless in order to gather information used by immigration enforcement”.

Speaking to political news site Left Foot Forward, director of advocacy at the Refugee Council Dr Lisa Doyle said at the time that “homelessness charities and shelters must remain the safe places for vulnerable people they are designed to be”.

“Home Office processes should remain entirely separate from this,” Doyle added.

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Joe Evans is the world news editor at TheWeek.co.uk. He joined the team in 2019 and held roles including deputy news editor and acting news editor before moving into his current position in early 2021. He is a regular panellist on The Week Unwrapped podcast, discussing politics and foreign affairs.

Before joining The Week, he worked as a freelance journalist covering the UK and Ireland for German newspapers and magazines. A series of features on Brexit and the Irish border got him nominated for the Hostwriter Prize in 2019. Prior to settling down in London, he lived and worked in Cambodia, where he ran communications for a non-governmental organisation and worked as a journalist covering Southeast Asia. He has a masterâ€™s degree in journalism from City, University of London, and before that studied English Literature at the University of Manchester.