Stolen Lives

Human Trafficking and Slavery in Britain Today

Louise Hulland

• Publisher: Sandstone Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913207199
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Esclavage

136, 000 people in the UK are in some form of slavery. This is big business, generating more than £120 billion annually for criminal organisations across the world.
Stolen Lives examines trafficking and slavery in Britain, hearing from those on the front line, including the police and charities involved with support and recovery. Powerful and moving testimony from survivors reveals the individual stories behind the headlines and charts one young woman's terrifying and ultimately inspiring journey to freedom and independence. Finally, it shows us what we can do to make a difference.

1

ELENA’S STORY:
MEETING ELENA (2017)

My child is 2 years now. I want to do something, to work, but I am not allowed to work. I just take £70 in week for us . . . is hard, somebody should understand this . . . I am just 24 years old and alone here . . . my life is very hard . . . please, I know it’s not your fault . . . but I am tired.

A text from ‘Elena’ on 24^th May 2018

Walking into a busy Caffè Nero in London, on a damp, cold November day in 2017, I’m greeted by three young women. Sarah, who works for a local charity, jumps up from her chair and greets me warmly, as I apologise profusely for keeping them waiting (I’d been sitting in the wrong coffee shop). I’m then introduced to an attractive, confident, dark-haired woman in her thirties with a friendly smile, who tells me her name is Kristina and that she’s here to translate for her friend.

Holding herself back from these cheery and slightly nervous greetings is the woman I’m there to meet: Elena. She’s tiny, with long, dark blonde hair tied back. Her pretty face can’t hide her exhaustion, and despite a brave smile, she seems haunted.

The baby she’s jiggling in her arms smiles and reaches out to me, and I reach for a cuddle without hesitating. As I bounce the child on my waist and pull ridiculous faces by way of a ‘hello’, Elena turns to Kristina in surprise, but I sense her nerves at meeting a journalist have receded a little.

It’s not just Elena who’s nervous. I’m quite anxious too, despite the fact I’ve interviewed countless vulnerable people about the most horrific experiences of their lives. Indeed, most of my career has been spent talking to contributors who have experienced a trauma or life event that most of us couldn’t possibly imagine. When someone has experienced an assault, a crime, a life-changing experience or diagnosis, it takes tremendous courage to recount it to a complete stranger, never mind the British public, and it’s a responsibility I’ve always taken seriously.

From what I knew about Elena’s short life so far, I was even more wary than usual about making her relive her trauma, pressing too hard, saying the wrong thing or triggering an emotion which could set her recovery back. I knew she wanted to tell her story, and I knew the charity responsible for her welfare had given it the go-ahead, but I had to judge for myself how vulnerable she was and – considering my experience of working with trafficking survivors was at that point zero – I wasn’t entirely sure how to establish that.

An email from Sarah two weeks earlier had first drawn my attention to Elena’s story. Sarah and I had met several times about the work she does with a small, community-based anti-trafficking charity with which I’d been interested in volunteering. When the email arrived in my inbox, I’d assumed it was to do with an upcoming training session. Little did I know it was a message that would change my life.

Hi Louise, hope you’re well. There has been an interesting development! While I was meeting with a charity which supports trafficking survivors last week, an Albanian lady who was trafficked into the UK and is now living in temporary accommodation said she would be willing to tell her story. And she’d like me to lead on it. I wanted to run this by you and ask if you might be interested in getting involved.

After I’d spoken to Sarah, and the charity responsible for Elena’s immediate care, we arranged to meet informally near where she lived, so that she could get to know me in the comfort of her own surroundings, and to see if I was a journalist she felt she could talk to. Sarah had given me a short overview of Elena’s background, so I had a basic understanding of what had brought her to London, but I wasn’t at all prepared for the story which unfolded.

Over hot chocolate, the noise of the rain battering outside, the hubbub of the busy London coffee shop and the wriggles and cries of her baby, Elena and I tried to communicate as best we could – with her good but un-confident English, and my non-existent Albanian.

I wanted to check that Kristina, her friend and translator for the day, was aware of Elena’s background, and whether Elena was comfortable sharing such intimate details of her life with her friend, two relative strangers and the danger of prying ears. But Elena was ready, and over the next hour or so, with the help of Kristina, I began to build a picture of what had happened to the young woman sitting before me.

In the summer of 2015, Elena was a university student in Albania. She had left her small, traditional village to experience a more metropolitan existence, and at the age of twenty-one had been enjoying the freedom of student life after growing up in a staunchly traditional Albanian village.

‘The village we lived in was very conservative and narrow-minded. My father was very strict. We had to stay indoors most of the time and we were restricted in the type of clothes we wore, our clothing had to be conservative and not revealing or provocative. This was what was expected of us, particularly girls.’

University had been a very different experience for Elena, living in dorms and making friends with other women from more liberal areas of Albania. Like most young people at university, spending time in the company of new, different kinds of people opened her eyes to other ways of life.

But there was still a clash with the culture she’d been brought up in. When Elena had asked for a mobile phone just before she left for university, her father’s immediate response was to find out if she wanted the phone so that she could speak to boys. Though her parents were happy she was studying at university, they were worried about Elena living alone, and warned her often that she shouldn’t go out too much, and that she should focus on her education.

One night, months before she finished her course, she met a young man at a local bar. Marco took her number and they started speaking on the phone, then dating once or twice a week. He was Albanian, and though he had made Belgium his home, he returned to Albania a couple of times a month. When they were apart, Marco called Elena regularly. He was her first boyfriend, and Elena thought he was the man for her.

‘Because of the way I was brought up, I always thought the first person I met and had a relationship with would be the person I married. This was the way I was thinking when I began my relationship with him – that he was who I would marry.’

Marco, however, appeared in no rush to meet her family. He told her he was worried that if he agreed to be introduced to her parents, her father would want to make the relationship more formal, and he wasn’t ready for that.

After finishing university, Elena moved back to the family home in the small village, and told her family she was in a relationship. Her father insisted that if this man was serious about her, then he would have no problem coming to meet him.

‘I was taught to respect my parents’ conservative values. For example, they believed that any husband I ended up with should be someone chosen for me by my family members. This is what they expected of me. At that time since I was living in a more open-minded way, I thought that perhaps Marco was right and it was my father who was in the wrong. I know now that my father was right to think that about Marco.’

Knowing her parents were set against her relationship, she carried on her love affair with Marco in secret, conducting all contact with him over the phone.

‘My father said to me that if I chose to stay with Marco then he would disown me, and my mother stood by my father’s decision.’

After almost five months together, Marco appeared to have come round to the idea of moving forward with their relationship, and suggested to Elena that she join him on a trip to Belgium in order to meet his family. Elena of course agreed, believing that marriage was the obvious next step for them.

Elena didn’t have a passport, so she told her father she needed to apply for one in order to be able to travel for her studies. Her plan was to spend up to three months in Belgium and to return to Albania to study for a master’s degree. Marco appeared to support this idea, telling her he could get her a temporary job in Belgium to help her save for the next step in her education. Because their plans were quite fluid, Elena didn’t think anything of the fact that she didn’t have a return ticket for the trip. It made sense, because they hadn’t committed to when exactly they would return. Besides, she was twenty-one, excited about visiting Europe, seeing more of the world, and experiencing a different culture. Most importantly she was keen to meet Marco’s family – her future family.

Before they set off on their adventure, there was one more hurdle to overcome: Elena’s parents. When Elena informed her family of her trip and her intentions to travel abroad with a man they didn’t know and who was not her husband, they were furious. Travelling as an unmarried couple is unacceptable in Albanian culture.

‘I explained to my family that I loved him and intended to go with him. They tried hard to convince me not to, but I had made up my mind.’

Her parents made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with Elena should she go on the trip, and if she ever returned they would simply disown her.

‘I had changed so much I could no longer relate to the village mentality in which I had been brought up. At the time I believed there was nothing wrong with what I was doing. I was just excited by everything that was happening.’

Elena assumed that despite her parents’ protests, they would accept her again when she returned to Albania in a few months’ time as an engaged woman.

Elena was never to return to Albania. That was the last time she would see her parents, her siblings, her friends or her country.

2

THE SCALE OF THE ISSUE

‘Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century. Instead, it changed its forms and continues to harm people in every country in the world’ – AntiSlavery.org

When we hear the word ‘slavery’ we tend to think of chains and physical restraints. Pictures from history books of a time we thought long since gone. One human owning another. Yet in modern Britain, slavery exists in many different forms, under our very eyes, and the victims are often in plain sight. From the men who wash our cars for £6 to the women painting our nails; from the teenagers caught up in drug gangs to our neighbour’s live-in cleaner, the phenomenon of modern slavery is all around us.

In the Government’s Annual Report into Modern Slavery released in 2018, the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid put the financial cost to the UK at ‘as much as £4.3 billion in 2016/17’. It’s impossible to put a price on the human cost.

The Government defines modern slavery as ‘the recruitment, movement, harbouring or receiving of children, women or men through the use of force, coercion, abuse of vulnerability, deception or other means for the purpose of exploitation’.

According to Bristol-based charity Unseen, someone is in slavery if they are:

• forced to work through mental or physical threat;

• owned or controlled by an ‘employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or the threat of abuse;

• dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as ‘property’;

• physically constrained or have restrictions placed on his/her freedom.

The Modern Slavery Act defines the crime as ‘holding a person in a position of slavery, servitude, forced or compulsory labour, or facilitating their travel with the intention of exploiting them soon after’.

There are several categories of exploitation linked to modern slavery, into which most of the crimes fall:

• sexual exploitation

• forced labour

• domestic servitude

• organ harvesting

• child exploitation

HUMAN TRAFFICKING

Bernie Gravett, former Metropolitan Police Superintendent and current Anti-Trafficking consultant, distilled a variety of complicated legislation into one pithy statement for me: ‘Human Trafficking is basically moving somebody from A to B for the purpose of exploitation or the intention to exploit’. He added, ‘If it’s a child that is all you need to prove. However, if the victim is an adult you also have to prove that their recruitment or cooperation was achieved through the use of deception, lies, fraud, other forms of coercion of the use of threats and/or force.’

The more formal definition is from the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, more widely known as the ‘Palermo Protocol’:

The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

There are some important nuances within this definition. It is possible to be a victim of trafficking even if consent has been given to be moved – because you may have given your consent through fear for your life or the lives of others (coercion), or you may be deceived as to the purpose of your employment or trip (fraud).

PEOPLE SMUGGLING

Legally, people smuggling is a crime against the state, while people trafficking is a crime against the person. Practically, the difference comes down to consent. Bernie once again helped with a clear definition:

Trafficking of adults is when a person is tricked or deceived. They may think they are being smuggled for work but are in fact exploited when they enter the country. Trafficked victims enter either with legal documents or illegally. Smuggling is always illegal. It is when a person pays another to transport them illegally from one country to another. The service ends when they are dropped off. Trafficking can take place inside a country and takes place every day in the UK.

Examples of cases in the UK can be found across the whole country.

Bath

When thinking of Bath, I’m more likely to picture bonneted young ladies in a BBC Jane Austen adaptation, than Thu Huong Nguyen, the forty-eight-year-old woman convicted of trafficking young women into the city to work in nail bars for no pay. She was found guilty in November 201...