EXPOSING BRITAIN’S SOCIAL EVILS prize winner
Mark Townsend
, The ObserverMark Townsend is the Observer’s home affairs editor and was previously a foreign reporter for the paper. He is a former British Press Awards news reporter of the year. His investigation The disappeared: how the Home Office allowed the mass kidnapping of children from its care exposed the wilful neglect of the Home Office towards some of the most vulnerable in society. It revealed how, despite taking effective custody of unaccompanied asylum seeking children in an undeclared policy that bypassed parliamentary scrutiny, the government turned a blind eye as young people were abducted.
His shortlisted pieces are:
- Revealed: scores of child asylum seekers kidnapped from Home Office hotel
- ‘They just vanish’: whistleblowers met by wall of complacency over missing migrant children
- Revealed: child migrants racially abused and threatened with violence at Home Office hotel
- The car drew up. The children got in: UK child asylum-seekers’ narrow escape from kidnap
- The children going missing from Home Office hotels
- Revealed: UK’s missing child refugees put to work for Manchester gangs
