Slavery returns to Britain

[Menydh]

Slavery returns to Britain on large scale, study says

The Guardian
February 26, 2007

Slavery has made a "horrific" return to modern Britain, according to the most wide-ranging study of the secret world of forced labour yet published. Shocking statistics about the country's sex trade, including an estimated 5,000 under-16s coerced into prostitution, mask equally violence-ridden and illegal practices in jobs ranging from crop picking and factory work to nursing and the catering trade.

Victims are now in the tens of thousands, according to the report by researchers at Hull university, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It says that parts of the economy depend on slave labour, in the same way that 18th century industries like sugar profited from the "triangular trade" between west Africa, the Caribbean and western Europe.

"We are not devaluing an emotive word," said Professor Gary Craig, associate director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of slavery and emancipation at Hull. "The shackles may not always be physical, although I have no doubt that in some cases they are. Debt bondage, theft of passports and ID, and threats of violence are tools of slavery."

The report details case after case where conditions contravene the United Nations' 10-point definition of forced labour. Prof Craig and co-author Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, say a large percentage also meet the three definitions of modern slavery: extreme economic exploitation, absence of human rights and actual or threatened violence.

Documented instances include two Vietnamese men who paid £18,000 to an agent in Vietnam for London hotel jobs, came to Britain legally for work agreed at £4.95 an hour, but then had their passports taken by the agent's British counterpart and were given food only for two months. When they protested, their families in Vietnam were threatened with violence.

A woman from Latvia had her passport confiscated by a Hull agency that forced her to work 16-hour shifts at a Barnsley factory, sleeping between them in a car. A couple from eastern Europe paid another Yorkshire agency £250 for an "introduction to work" in the Humber port of Goole, where they were underpaid and slept in a dormitory shared with eight men.

"When they said that they were going to tell the police, their savings of £200 were stolen and the woman was threatened with violence," says the report. "They estimated that there were at least another 800 people in the area living and working in the same circumstances."

The findings were endorsed yesterday by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said he was shocked by the spread of slavery. He said: "I just didn't know about all these forms that exist. It is hidden. Generally people would not believe that it is possible under modern conditions."

Prof Craig said: "That is our most important point. So many people say: 'Come on, slavery was then, and this is now. It can't possibly happen.' But it does, and on a large scale."

The report calls for the government to acknowledge that most victims came to Britain legally but were then trafficked by criminals into illegal jobs. Prof Craig said: "There is still an attitude that trafficked people are illegal entrants, rather than victims, so on top of all their suffering they are then deported."

It suggests improved training for employment agency and local council staff to spot potential slavery conditions, and for the government to ratify the recent Council of Europe convention against the trafficking of people, something the prime minister, Tony Blair, has promised but not yet done.

A Home Office action plan on tackling trafficking and helping victims is due next spring, and a spokeswoman said the report would be carefully considered. She said not enough was known about the spread of forced labour because resources had been concentrated on the sex trade. "We are currently conducting a review of the research evidence on trafficking for forced labour in the UK," she said.


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[Almost a Christian]

That such practices are continuing are both well known and do not surprise me in the slightest. It compliments well the heavily popularised modern slave trade that is mass immigration...

[Menydh]

That's very much true.

On a lighter note, the article made me think of something that I experienced in England, which at the time shocked me quite a bit. The au pair business there.

I met many very young girls from many parts of Europe who went to study English there and, in order to finance a part of it (the accommodation and some pocket money), they would work as au-pairs for British couples. I can't tell how many of those young girls I saw crying because the families where they were staying in actually made them work as full time employees in the house, in exchange for a few miserable Pounds a week and a bed, knowing that many of those girls tell their parents only to avoid them a hard time.

Very different to the case of one of my sisters, who went to Ireland where she stayed for one year. My mother was worried because my sister insisted in that she wanted to stay on for another year as she had made good Irish friends there who she later invited to come to stay with her back in Spain. A few months ago she still asked me if I could help her to find the whereabouts of some of them.