Scotland is only home that my girl has known

Mum desperate after Home Office rejects asylum claim

- ANNIE BROWN

A SEX trafficking survivor and her daughter are living in fear of being deported to Rwanda from their home in Scotland.

The woman from Africa has raised her five-year-old girl in Glasgow after escaping sex trafficking and domestic slavery in the UK.

Her daughter was born in Britain but is not recognised as a UK citizen because her mother is not a national.

The woman has been refused asylum, despite evidence police have issued wanted notices for her in her native Cameroon after her father was arrested as a government opponent.

Last night, she said: "My daughter is Scottish. Scotland is the only home she has ever known. Her school is here, her friends are here. She speaks with a Scottish accent.

"It is terrifying to me that we could be sent to Rwanda or Cameroon, where we would be in serious danger." The woman, who we are calling Claudia, has being identified "conclusively" as a trafficking victim under the UK Government's own system, the National Referral Mechanism.

Last week, MPs voted against amendments from the House of Lords to exempt victims of modern slavery from its widely condemned Rwanda scheme.

And last night, Claudia's MP Anne McLaughlin blasted the British Government's "cruel" treatment.

She said: "Her life reads like a horror story. This woman has suffered unimaginable cruelty at the hands of individuals but alarmingly at the hands of governments too, including the British Government."

The SNP MP for Glasgow North added: "The Home Office agrees she was trafficked here, it knows the barbarity she faced for years but it doesn't think she is worthy of our help. How can it be so brutal? "And how can it justify sending a wee five-year-old Scottish girl to a similar fate as her mum?"