At Least 100,000 Victims of Modern Slavery Just in UK

Aug 14, 2020 by

by Judith Bergman, Gatestone Institute:

A new British report, “It Still Happens Here: Fighting UK Slavery in the 2020s”, by The Modern Slavery Policy Unit, a joint initiative led by the anti-slavery charity Justice and Care and The Centre for Social Justice, has estimated that “there could be at least 100,000 victims [of modern slavery] in the UK, with the actual number likely to be even greater”.

According to the report:

“Many thousands of children, women and men of all nationalities and backgrounds — including a growing number of British citizens — continue to be trafficked and exploited for profit by ruthless criminal networks. They are tricked, taken and coerced into sexual slavery, crime, hard labour and domestic servitude. Forced addictions are increasingly used as methods of control”.

According to the report, despite the scale of the crimes, prosecutions have barely increased:

“Human traffickers and Organised Crime Groups are running riot in too many communities. Very few face prosecution relative to the number of victims found and even fewer are convicted. As the number of victims discovered has skyrocketed in the last five years, convictions have barely increased. In the year ending March 2019 there were 322 completed prosecutions for modern slavery-related crimes and 219 convictions served. During the same period, 7,525 adults and children were identified as potential victims of modern slavery”.

The report shows that modern slavery has many brutal forms and that it is an issue that remains mostly hidden from public view. Examples mentioned in the report include homeless British men enslaved by travellers — a term for nomadic communities in Britain — who were subjected to forced labor, financial exploitation and horrific physical abuse; Romanian girls trafficked for sexual exploitation between the UK and Romania by their Romanian handlers; and children groomed and exploited, most often by gangs, as drug couriers.

Read here

Read also: This pandemic has left more people exploited by ruthless traffickers by Andrew Selous, Conservative Home

 

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