Anti-slavery day: 'Global epidemic' sees 50 million exploited worldwide

It’s a meeting I will never forget.

It’s 2005, and a neighbour knocks on my door. Her name is Juliet Singer and she works for the National Missing Persons Helpline.

As part of her work, she is starting to come across young women, who’ve been brought to the UK under false pretenses - their passports held by those who’ve promised to find them work here - and who are put to hard labour, often sex work, to repay the debt they owe.

They’ve been trafficked. They are being abused as modern day slaves.

I had never heard of the crime.

Juliet is planning to set up a charity to support victims of it and is hoping to start raising profile around the issue.

She takes me to meet a young woman called Omosovie (not her real name) who is being held at Holloway prison on immigration offences, whom she is trying to support.

Omosovie had been trafficked from Nigeria. Her slave master had promised her work in a hotel. Instead, when she arrived - she was forced to work on the streets, and was beaten if she refused.

She rolled up her sleeve and showed me the marks on her arm where she had been whipped with a belt. The man had kept her passport, and took all of her earnings - which he claimed she owed him for the journey to Britain.

She’d been infected with HIV, and he had forbidden her from seeing a doctor. And now she was being treated as a criminal rather than as a victim.

It was a story which has never left me, and which I’ve just recounted in an interview with the Anti-Slavery Collective - an organisation set up by Princess Eugenie and her friend Julia de Boinville.

In a campaign to mark this year’s Anti-Slavery Day - they have interviewed a number of figures involved in the fight against this pernicious crime. They’ve asked each to describe their ‘epiphany’ moment with the issue.

Omosovie’s story was mine. In the nearly 20 years since, when I can, I’ve tried to get the stories of those who’ve been trafficked and enslaved into the news.

And it’s more important than ever.

Here are the statistics which never fail to shock.

A global epidemic of modern slavery in which 50 million are being coerced and controlled by criminals - in forced labour, forced marriage. Organ harvesting. Drugs running. Child soldiers. Exploited and abused. On and on.

Some are tattooed as property of gangmasters. These are human barcodes.

Twelve million of that number are children.

It’s happening under our noses in all our towns and cities. In nail bars, in car washes, in agriculture.

On Anti-Slavery Day I’m thinking of those who’ve courageously shared their stories.

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Thanh, the young Vietnamese woman who was thirty years a slave. Trafficked to China at the age of five - used as a drugs runner. At puberty, put to sex work. Raped so often she couldn’t sit comfortably in the chair for long as the violence had damaged her back.

Trafficked into Russia to work on farms, then into France for more sex work. Brought into Britain in a refrigerated lorry to live in a basement in London and sent out to pack vegetables.

She only escaped when she got medical treatment for what turned out to be breast cancer. Thankfully, she is now free of her slave masters and rebuilding her life.

I’m thinking of the Nigerian women who had made the journey through Africa with the hope of a better life in Europe, only to be enslaved in Libya for sex work.

When they became pregnant and therefore no longer profitable - they were thrown into boats with dozens of others and pushed off to Italy. They gathered in Turin with their babies in a shelter.

And I’m thinking of the 53-year-old grandmother called Susan who was cuckooed in her own home in the north west. A drugs gang took over her home and forced her to run drugs for them.

They made her sleep on her own floor, and threatened to cut out her tongue if she went to the police. She was a slave in her own home, until rescue finally came.

Modern slavery is the darkest underbelly of our societies, now finding an all too easy home online and well as in the real world, with children sold for sexual exploitation. My great colleagues Emma Murphy, Peter Smith and Lucy Watson have all reported on it too.

There is great work being done by so many agencies supporting survivors, shaping legislation and with police and intelligence experts going after criminal gangs. Everyone can play a part. Keeping an eye open in your local community.

If someone is selling anything too cheaply - is someone being exploited because of it? Do the women working in your local nail bar look scared of their boss? Is there a pop up car wash where it’s uncannily cheap and the workers look uncared for? When you’re buying clothes online - what do you know or suspect about the supply chain?

I often think of Omosovie.

Sadly despite all my friend Juliet’s best efforts, she eventually fell back into the hands of her traffickers, due - probably - to a greater fear of the authorities back then treating her as a criminal.

But there are many stories of hope too. Thanh built a new life. The awareness of the crime is growing.

This oldest of affronts to life - the enslavement of another human being - endlessly need fresh energy, creativity and political pressure to counter it.

Anti-Slavery Day 2024 should be the loudest clarion call to action yet.

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