/ 5 March 2007

Large-scale slavery returns

Slavery has made a “horrific” return to modern Britain, according to the most wide-ranging study of the secret world of forced labour yet published.

Shocking statistics about the country’s sex trade, including an estimated 5 000 under-16s coerced into prostitution, mask equally violence-ridden and illegal practices in jobs ranging from crop-picking and factory work to nursing and the catering trade.

Victims are now in the tens of thousands, according to the report by researchers at Hull University, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It says that parts of the economy depend on slave labour, in the same way that 18th century businesses [like sugar] profited from the “triangular trade” between West Africa, the Caribbean and Western Europe.

“We are not devaluing an emotive word,” said Professor Gary Craig, associate director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at Hull. “The shackles may not always be physical, although I have no doubt that in some cases they are. Debt bondage, theft of passports and ID, and threats of violence are tools of slavery.”

The report details case after case where conditions contravene the United Nations 10-point definition of forced labour. Craig and co-author Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, say a huge percentage also meet the three definitions of modern slavery: extreme economic exploitation, absence of human rights and actual or threatened violence. — Â