Last year Theresa May announced new legislation to end human trafficking and modern slavery, describing it as the “evil in our midst”. Figures from the National Crime Agency in September estimated that 2,744 people, including 602 children, were trafficked for exploitation in the UK in 2013, a 22% increase on 2012, and forced to work in brothels, in domestic servitude, or exploited in factories, farms and building sites. Since this is such a hidden issue, the actual numbers are assumed to be much higher.
On Tuesday, parliament will scrutinise the modern slavery bill for its third reading in the House of Commons. Although the bill – which the government trumpets as “the first of its kind in Europe” – is broadly welcomed for forcing the issue on to the political agenda, there is dismay from charities working with the victims of trafficking. Campaigners say the bill is tilted too heavily towards prosecuting traffickers, without providing enough support for their victims.
The charity Eaves, which runs the Poppy Project to support trafficked women, is concerned that the bill won’t end the double trauma that most trafficking victims currently face. Dorcas Erskine, who works for the Poppy Project, says: “A lot of the women we have supported face two nightmares – the brutality of the slavery-like conditions their traffickers have imposed on them, and, post-escape, getting officials to believe them or, even worse, finding themselves imprisoned for crimes their traffickers forced them to commit.” Because of this lack of support, very few of the women Eaves helps are willing to get involved in prosecuting their traffickers, and many remain vulnerable, often ending up in the hands of new exploiters.
The stories of four recently trafficked women reveal how frequently they are disbelieved.
Ellie: ‘Putting trafficked people in prison – that is the worst part of it’
When Ellie, 32, describes the first part of her life, she races through the disturbing details in a neutral tone; the problems she experienced as a child and a young woman are not what makes her angry. She grew up in a slum outside Kampala in Uganda. She was sent to live with another family when she was seven and sexually abused by the head of the household; when she turned 15, she was forced to marry him. He was violent, so when a neighbour offered to help her escape to a new life abroad, she agreed.
She was taken by plane to the UK with a group of six other women. Ellie thought that she was going to work as a cleaner, but on the day she arrived, she was driven to the home of a white man who told her she would have to work as a prostitute to pay back her debts for the passport and air travel. For two years she was locked in a house with the other women, and periodically driven to customers’ homes.
She only escaped when a sympathetic client gave her £60 and explained how to get to London. In London, she met a man who allowed her to stay with him, but who quickly began to ask for sex in exchange for shelter. One night when he was violently abusive, she called the police.
This is the moment, in a life story of unmitigated misfortune, when you might expect that things would begin to improve. However, it marked the beginning of a new wave of difficulty, and this is where she begins to get angry. She was taken to hospital, but not treated; later the police took her to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and told she had no visa. Since she had only been given a passport to hold for a few seconds when she passed border control at the airport, she knew nothing about visas.
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“They were asking each other: ‘Did she come here legally or illegally?’ The way they were talking was very intimidating. They didn’t ask about the attack. They were more interested in why I was staying in the country without a visa.” The man who hit her was not arrested, but she was taken to Yarl’s Wood detention centre. “I’d never been in detention before. It felt like a prison: being locked up, eating your food at certain times, sleeping at certain times. Most of the time you can’t go outside; you can barely see daylight.”
The other inmates laughed at her when they found out she had called the police, and told her she was stupid to have expected them to help her. She was quickly put on suicide watch because she told staff that she would kill herself rather than be deported back to a country where she would be in danger from her husband and her traffickers. “They wouldn’t let me buy tinned food in case I took the tin and cut myself; they watched me while I showered in case I hanged myself,” she says. For a while she regretted having escaped from her trafficker, and thought returning to her existence as a sex slave might be preferable.
It was only when she was in Yarl’s Wood that she realised she had been trafficked. “So many of the women I met in detention had been trafficked. I don’t think the police who interviewed me knew about trafficking. They were more interested in catching someone for being an illegal migrant than in helping someone who has called for help. All they were talking about was deporting me,” she says.
It was only when a sympathetic guard suggested that she put her name down for legal aid that she was put in touch with Eaves. Her asylum claim on the grounds of trafficking was rejected initially, but with Eaves’ help, this was overturned.
She wishes there was greater awareness of trafficking throughout the system. If border staff had been on the lookout for people-trafficking when she arrived in the UK, she would have been prevented from coming into the country. “If they had stopped me on the border, I would have been so much happier; I wouldn’t have done all the bad things that I was made to do. But I came here and I was turned into a prostitute.”
She is calm when we speak; very articulate and very angry about what has happened to her. “Putting trafficked people in prison – that is the worst part of it. You have gone through bad times, and then you find yourself in detention, told you are going to be deported back to the traffickers. That man is still there and he is still bringing in women. That’s why I’m so upset.”
Varsha: ‘I’m scared they will come and take me and send me to my country’
Varsha, 22, grew up in Albania, her childhood overshadowed by a violent father who arranged for her to get married when she was 19 to a man she didn’t know. The wedding went ahead; her new husband moved to Greece to work, and she moved into her in-laws’ home, where she was bullied and unhappy. She met a young man through a friend on her hairdressing course. He told her how sorry he felt for her and, after a while, she agreed to run away with him to live abroad.
He brought her to the UK, where he left her with two Albanian men. She never saw him again. She was told that from now on, she would be working for them as a prostitute. When she screamed and protested, one of the men took off his belt and beat her. She was locked in the flat, given meals twice a day, raped and beaten repeatedly. On average, she was forced to have sex with five men a day. She was told that if she tried to escape, the traffickers would find her and kill her or her family.
One day, however, she found the doors unlocked, and she escaped. She got to a coach station (she found out that day that she was being held in Liverpool) and got on a bus to London. She was wearing only slippers and was in the early stages of pregnancy. Two women from Kosovo saw her crying and offered her a place to stay in London, but this place was only temporary. She had no passport, because it remained with the traffickers.
“I was scared to go to the authorities, I was scared that they would send me back to my country,” she says. When she did tell the Home Office about her experiences, she was struck by their insensitivity. “They seemed as though they were in a hurry, they were just doing their job, they had heard this story too many times before.”
She was interviewed by the Home Office about her trafficking experiences, but her application for asylum was rejected in 2012. “They said in some points, I wasn’t believable. You want to be believed. You hope other people will believe you.”
It was only when she went to court for a second time that the judge believed her and her application was accepted. “I’ve told my story maybe 10 times, 15 times – in hospital, in council offices, to the Home Office. It’s not nice. In hospital when I was pregnant, they asked me about the father of my baby. I said I don’t know and I had to explain. I hate being reminded every time of what happened to me.
“I’m scared every day that they will come and take me and send me to my country. I’m scared at the idea of prosecuting those men. I’m scared for my child.”
Her asylum claim was accepted in July 2013. “That felt good, but it was just the beginning of other problems,” she says. She no longer has any support with housing and money from the National Asylum Support Service. “When you have nothing, how are you supposed to find somewhere to live?”
Dorcas Erskine says this lack of longer-term support makes victims very vulnerable. “We have several women who are doing survival prostitution, or they slowly drift back into exploitative situations. Victims are being recycled back into the trafficking system.”
Varsha thinks it would be a good idea if there was counselling for victims of trafficking, something that is not proposed under the bill. “Every day I was crying, wondering what was going to happen to me, wondering what I was doing. It has been two years now. I’m learning how to protect myself a bit. It is just the beginning for me. But I’m still scared. Last Friday, I heard a woman screaming near my house. I was scared when I heard her voice. She was being beaten.”
Eleni: I tried to tell them about the exploitation, but they didn’t want to listen’
When she was 16, Elena’s father was imprisoned without trial because he supported a banned political party in Ethiopia. An uncle arranged for her to leave the country and travel to the Middle East to work, where he told her she would be safe; he paid traffickers to organise a passport and find her work. She was employed by a couple to look after their children, cook and clean. She wasn’t ever paid; sometimes she was raped by her employer; sometimes his wife hit her for failing to complete her work.
Periodically, the family moved to Europe for a few months, where she continued to work for them, sleeping in the kitchen. When they told her they planned to return home and send her back to Ethiopia, she was frightened that she would be imprisoned there, just as her father had been. She chose a moment when her employers were distracted and fled the house.
“I didn’t know where I was going, I just left,” Eleni, now 24, says. She ran and then walked for a long time, until she was tired. When she was resting on a park bench, crying, a man stopped and asked if she was all right. She spoke very little English, but she made him understand enough of her situation to make him concerned. He put her in a taxi and paid the driver to take her to a police station. Police officers were sympathetic, found her a hostel to stay in and returned with an interpreter the following day to interview her about what had happened.
For several weeks, she was left in the hostel while the police decided what to do with her. Then one morning, at around 5am when she was asleep, officers knocked on the door, unlocked it themselves and told her they were sending her to London. She cries when she remembers the shock of the visit. She asked if she could get dressed before they took her; they agreed but wouldn’t let her close the door.
She was sent to Yarl’s Wood detention centre and remained there for three months. “When I was there, I asked what crime I had committed. They told me that my visa had expired. I told them my passport was always with my employers. They didn’t believe me. They said: ‘You are not a child; you should be able to carry your own passport.’ I tried to tell them my story, about the exploitation, but they didn’t want to listen. It was as if they had heard it all before. I escaped from my employers hoping to get some help. I expected the police to help me but my experience was really bad.”
She was released with the help of the Poppy Project. “I am very angry and very scared when I think about all the things I went through. I was relatively healthy when I went in, but I became ill quickly because of the stress of being locked up. It was only when I had an interview that I managed to ask through an interpreter why I was there. It was only when I was referred to Poppy that I understood what trafficking was.”
Hamida: ‘All the suffering I have been through still hasn’t ended’
Hamida, 23, starts crying before she speaks. She has only recently extracted herself from the trafficking system and is barely ready to start recounting her experiences.
She was one of nine children, and with both her parents out of work, there was little money at home in Morocco, so she was sent to be a domestic worker in the UK. Her future employer filled out the passport and visa application for her, and kept hold of her passport. She worked seven days a week and was frequently not paid; her English employers were physically and verbally abusive. She wanted to return home but her employers told her that if she tried to leave, they would report her to the police for theft.
After 18 months, she fled the house, took advice from a Moroccan woman whom she met in a cafe, and went to seek help from the police. Police officers organised a telephone translator for her and for a moment she thought she might get some help, but the call was very brief, then she was told: “That’s enough, you must finish now.”
“They didn’t listen to what I was telling them,” she says. They called her employers, who brought in her passport. “They looked at the visa stamp and said it had run out.” She was put in a police cell in Hastings for 24 hours. “I was crying in the police station, I was very frightened.” Police officers arranged for her to have another telephone conversation with an interpreter. “The interpreter said: ‘What have you done, my daughter?’ I said: ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’ He said: ‘Hopefully God will look after you.’”
She was transferred to Yarl’s Wood, where she was held for 19 days. Fellow detainees, more experienced in the British system, were incredulous when they heard that she had gone to the police station. She had felt confident that it was the right thing to do. “I thought: this is a country of law and they will help me get my rights.”
She is so fond of the child she looked after for 18 months that she feels ambivalent about any possible prosecution of the parents, her ex-employers. “All this suffering I have been going through, with the police and with my employers, it still hasn’t ended. I feel scared whenever I see the police, I feel worried even when I see someone wearing a suit.”
Poppy staff say she has flashbacks and panic attacks and cries frequently. She is attending English classes while a legal case to show that she was the victim of trafficking proceeds, but she finds studying difficult. “I am very frightened. It’s deep inside me. It’s hard to concentrate on the classes.”
