The child victims of the UK’s EncroChat house raids

When law enforcement agencies swooped on households around the UK last year after hacking the mobile app, EncroChat, children were often the collateral damage.

As six-year-old Eva* lay asleep in her bed one night last July, she heard angry shouting from downstairs. There were loud thuds, as though someone was kicking through the front door of the family’s two-bedroom home in Merseyside, northwest England. She hid under her duvet cover, as six men wearing black balaclavas and holding guns ran into her bedroom. One of the men yelled at her to place her hands above the blanket, but she was frozen in fear. She screamed as he ripped the duvet from her. The men began to tear her bedroom apart. The raid on Eva’s home was one of the hundreds carried out during Operation Venetic; the National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation through which Dutch, French and United Kingdom law enforcement gained access to tens of thousands of EncroChat messages. This operation – carried out primarily from April to July 2020 – resulted in 746 arrests, including that of Eva’s father who was charged with class A drug supply.