Opinion

Tom Kelly: Slavery is operating in plain sight and must be stamped out

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly is an Irish News columnist with a background in politics and public relations. He is also a former member of the Policing Board.

Millions of people worldwide are still trapped in modern slavery
Millions of people worldwide are still trapped in modern slavery Millions of people worldwide are still trapped in modern slavery

Now for something completely different, but disturbing.

A few weeks back I drove to a car wash. It appeared to be staffed by Eastern European men and women. Having spent some time in the Balkans on peace-keeping work in the 1990s I suspected some of the workers were Albanian or Roma. Some of the men appeared elderly and one of the women was pregnant. The wash was very thorough.

Yet as I sat comfortably in my car I noticed the presence of a shiny new 4x4 parked to the side of the car wash. Inside the 4x4 were two well dressed men. The workers took the payments for each washed car to the car and handed over the money. In my case this included the tip. Whilst the whole operation may have been perfectly legal it didn’t feel or seem right. Concerned that I may have unwittingly supported the exploitation of these workers, I resolved not to return.

Later that evening I happened upon a play by David Morley called ‘I am slave’ on Radio 4. It’s about modern day slavery in the UK told by a woman caught up in a prostitution racket. It’s only about fifteen minutes long but it's a harrowing tale.

The central character was lured into slavery by a fake boyfriend, who was in fact the recruiter of ‘fresh meat’ for criminal gang-masters. She was then trafficked into the UK for enforced prostitution. Her passport was confiscated. Shamed and alienated from her family life in Albania she was trapped into sleeping with sleazy men. Failure to comply led to threats against her family back home. During the play we are introduced to other characters, each one a slave or in bonded labour. An Asian girl in a High Street nail bar. A Polish worker on a construction site. A Romanian teenager picking fruit on a farm.

All that was missing was the ubiquitous Eastern European working in a car wash. Immediately the faces of those who washed my car flooded my brain. They didn’t look as if they were happy. In fact they had misery etched on their foreheads.

We see these types of people every day. We are blinded to them as they work amongst us in construction, hospitality, manufacturing and agricultural industries. However some aren’t paid or treated like us. Most are here legally, working and contributing to the diversity of our society. Some came with the expectation of a better life only to discover they were no more than bonded labour. Worse still some were forced into domestic slavery or prostitution.

It is hard to believe that in the twenty first century, people are still being used as a commodity in the western world. In most cases the hapless souls are simply looking for a better life, take out a ‘loan’ from an agent who promises them travel, jobs and accommodation. The interest rates are astronomical. In some cases taking years to pay off. The accommodation is little more than rundown apartments or crammed dodgy boarding houses.

Violence is common practice and with passports taken away, the workers become victims.

Help organisations estimate that there are over 135,000 victims of slavery in the UK. That is more than the combined populations of the cities of Derry and Armagh. In 2017 a staggering 5,000 people were referred to the police suspected of being victims of slavery. Some 2,000 of these were children.

Here in Northern Ireland there was a case of a man enslaved to work in a restaurant for several years without being paid. Others were found to be working in what amounted to labour camps in the agricultural sector. Even the homeless are not safe from human traffickers, who have been known to sweep them off the streets in English cities.

Here several hundred cases have been investigated but they prove hard to crack because the victims are too frightened.

The main categories of slavery in Northern Ireland break down as sexual exploitation, labour exploitation and criminal exploitation. Whilst most people associate slavery, trafficking and labour exploitation with immigrants, the reality is that after Vietnam and Albania, the third biggest source of modern day slavery is from within the UK itself.

In a week when we learned that slaves were being openly sold in Liberia we need to remember that slavery is operating in full sight throughout the UK and Ireland. We have a collective duty to stamp it out.