Sir Mo Farah reveals he was trafficked to the UK as a child
The Olympic star runner Sir Mo Farah has recently revealed in a documentary by the BBC and Red Bull Studios that he was illegally brought to the UK as a child by a woman he had never met and forced to work as a domestic servant looking after another family’s children. Sir Mo Farah was given a new name, Mohamed Farah, by those who flew him over from Djibouti, where he was living with extended family, as well as fake identity documents. His real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin and upon his arrival to the UK he was deprived of any contact with his mother and siblings in Somalia and family in the UK and was kept out of school for the first three years. Sir Mo Farah shares the psychosocial impacts: “for years I just kept blocking it out […] but you can only block it out for so long.”
Child Identity Protection (CHIP) recognises the importance of preserving the child’s family relations as an essential part of the child’s right to identity and re-establishing missing or falsified elements of the child’s identity as it can have a lifetime impact on the legal, medical, and psychosocial nature of children. CHIP hopes that all children who are trafficked will be given he same opportunities as Sir Mo Farah, including reconnecting with families of origins and ensuring that they are able to keep their nationality.
