When Steve McQueen accepted the prestigious Best Picture Oscar award for ‘12 Years a Slave’, he dedicated it to the ‘21 million people who still suffer from slavery today’. When I think about slavery I consider it an issue consigned to the history books, yet this poignant fact, reiterated by McQueen, indicates the sad reality that is it still present in the world today and is in fact, expected to increase.
When talking about modern slavery, we are fundamentally referring to the different forms of exploitation for economic gain. The two most prevalent types of slavery are sexual exploitation followed by labour exploitation. It’s hard to comprehend that slavery generates a massive $32 billion a year for traffickers, with 55% of slavery victims being female.
However, slavery is not something confined to third world countries, in fact it is happening right on our doorstep. In 2012, 2255 victims of human trafficking were reported in the UK according to the UK Human Trafficking Centre, with the majority of these people from eastern European countries. In one case, it was discovered that a group of 5 Hungarian men and a women had transported more than 50 young women into the UK and advertised the girls for sex through an adult website. However, trafficking is not exclusively an immigration problem, as shown by the existence of British victims found in Bedfordshire. In this situation 24 people, of whom 15 were British, were held against their will, forced to work for no pay whilst living in squalid, cramped conditions.
Modern slavery is particularly prevalent amongst domestic staff, with people hiring au pairs and then subjecting them to slave like conditions. These include not paying their wages and confiscating their passports. A Nigerian woman was brought to London to work in the home of a solicitor where she was promised £50 a week to work as a nanny. In reality, she was subjected to verbal and physical abuse over a period of 3 years, unable to leave the house without permission. This ill treatment was also evident by a British couple who kept their 23-year-old au-pair in France under inhuman conditions, forcing her to work day and night in breach of an initial 30 hour contract.
This article only mentions a few cases of modern day slavery focusing on the UK, yet there are millions of other cases of ill treatment and inhumanity across the globe. Only by gaining pubic acknowledgment that modern slavery exists, will a solution be found. McQueen’s emotive highlighting of this issue is a good start:
Photo Credits: www.socialistresistance.org, www.leftfootforward.org, www.filmclub.org