The scandal of slavery in Britain

Ten years after the United States was violently awoken to its vulnerability to terrorist attacks, the date 9/11 marks another rude awakening much closer to home. On 11 September 2011, British police raided a caravan site in Bedfordshire and recovered 24 adult men who were being held in slave-like conditions and forced to work in construction.

Seven people have since been charged with holding the men in slavery and servitude and requiring them to perform compulsory labour, under Section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. If convicted, the traffickers could face a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment. That this happened at all is disturbing enough. What is perhaps more shocking is that half of the victims were British.

Human trafficking, the recruitment and movement of someone by deception or coercion for exploitation, has been stereotypically portrayed as targeting Eastern European women who are tricked or forced into sexual exploitation in other countries.

However, a much more complex picture of this modern-day slave trade has been emerging over the last five years. Men, women, and children are now being identified as victims of trafficking not only for sexual exploitation, but also for forced labour, domestic servitude, cannabis cultivation, benefit fraud, forced begging and pickpocketing, organ harvesting, forced marriage, and much more. They are not only trafficked into the UK, but also within and out of the country. It is no longer a case of someone else, somewhere else, but a global crime with local implications here in the UK.

Between April 2009 and June 2011, 1,664 suspected human trafficking victims from 92 different countries were officially referred to the UK Human Trafficking Centre. British nationals were the seventh largest victim group, with 60 men, women, and children identified. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as many victims go unnoticed and unreported.

For example, in June 2011 the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) produced an assessment of what they described as ‘localised grooming’ of young people for sexual exploitation, identifying 2,083 child victims. This form of abuse fits within the agreed definition of child trafficking provided by both the United Nations and the Council of Europe, agreements to which the UK is subscribed. And herein lies a worrying trend. The current coalition government under David Cameron, driven by an immigration-dominated focus, is deliberately sidelining British victims in its anti-trafficking efforts.

According to CEOP’s report on child trafficking in 2009, British nationals were the second largest group of victims with 46 individuals. They identified boys and girls who were being groomed by local criminal networks using gifts and relationships to trick them into sexual exploitation. In the 2010 CEOP report, only five British nationals were reported, and in the 2011 report — none.

Does this mean that the trafficking of British children is no longer a problem? Definitely not. Of the hundreds of sexually exploited British young people that the charity Barnardo’s supports, one in six were believed to be trafficked. And of the suspected human trafficking victims officially referred to authorities, 88 per cent of British nationals were conclusively confirmed as genuine victims, compared to just 32 per cent for other nationalities.

The inclination to sideline British victims as an outcropping of the government’s immigration agenda is reflected in official government policy. The Home Office’s 2007 UK Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking stated that ‘It is apparent from the trafficking definition … that movement of a victim for exploitation within the UK can amount to trafficking’ and contained a commitment to addressing the extent and nature of internal trafficking. An update to the Action Plan published in 2009 highlighted ‘growing evidence of a number of UK nationals’ as trafficking victims. Yet when the coalition government released The Government’s Strategy on Human Trafficking in 2011, there was no mention of the internal trafficking of British nationals.

That such a trend is identifiable in official government policy and research is bad enough, but even more detrimental are the effects this approach is having on the ground. In the case of the 24 men held in Bedfordshire, one of the victims had been enslaved for 15 years without being noticed. Some of the men were recruited outside benefits offices, job centres and soup kitchens, but their disappearance failed to trigger an investigation. After the police raid, homeless charities stated that this scenario is not uncommon, but such front-line care providers have not been engaged by national or local government in anti-trafficking efforts. Furthermore, some police officers falsely believe that if you are a British national you cannot be a victim of human trafficking.

This month sees Harper Collins publish Trafficked, written by a young British woman.  She tells how she was targeted and befriended by her so-called boyfriend, who then trafficked her to mainland Europe and forced her into sexual exploitation. It was only when she became too ill to work that she had a chance to escape and return to the UK. This trafficking victim did not come to the attention of the immigration authorities, but experienced a horrific abuse of her human rights. Deemed ineligible for the limited and oversubscribed assistance available to other trafficking victims within the UK, the Stop The Traffik campaign eventually helped her recover and start a new life.

There are several simple and practical steps that the UK government can take to prevent the internal trafficking of British nationals, in line with its United Nations and European obligations:

1. Explicitly address the issue of internal trafficking in its Human Trafficking Strategy;

2. Proactively include research on internal trafficking in its agencies’ reports;

3. Incorporate education on staying safe from trafficking as a statutory part of school curricula;

4. Engage with a much wider spectrum of front-line organisations and community groups who might encounter trafficking victims.

These measures will help awaken the country to the domestic as well as global dimensions of human trafficking, and remind the coalition government that every part of a ‘big society’ is needed to tackle it.  

Simon Chorley is the UK Coordinator for STOP THETRAFFIK www.stopthetraffik.org