Slavery

[bunn]

Last night on the local news, some person who had 'written a musical about slavery' said 'there are more people in slavery now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade' and that 'there are slaves in every town and city in the UK'.

Can this possible be true? I know human trafficking exists, and is a terrible thing, but surely this has to be on a much smaller scale, given that it is illegal?

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

It certainly seems hard to imagine a thriving slave trade happening in your village, for example, or some of the smaller towns here on the island. You can't sneeze in the garden without the entire village knowing about it, so it would be hard to keep a house full of slaves secret. Since, pretty much by definition, this is something that the authorities don't know about (or else they'd stop it), I imagine this expert is just guessing, or extrapolating from some large city.


(Though maybe they're all in Minions...)

(No, no, I know it's a terrible and serious topic. I really mustn't start getting amusing images of a particularly West Country brand of slavery... *slaps self hard*)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

LOL at the Minions.

It would be possible to keep someone totally isolated from the world, even here (actually, perhaps more here, given that there are no public phones and no police station for several miles), but you'd have to be awfully careful about it, and if you were that careful, I am not sure how people could have figures on it...

The village rumour mill is active, but very often extremely inaccurate! For example, there is a persistent idea that I've heard from several people, that I am a nurse who works shifts. I think this originated because I sometimes am seen walking my dogs during the working day, and then got muddled up with our neighbour Cassie, who also has greyhounds - she isn't a nurse either, but she is a care assistant... I wouldn't want to rely on the village rumour mill to identify any kind of crime!

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

But in large cities its easy to have a big house with "servants" who live in and only go out accompanied by an English speaker. I read of one, okay it depends on your view of the veracity of Reader's Digest & Candis and the like magazines, who was brought here and worked in London unaware of any rights she had here.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I'm not doubting that such things exist. However, saying "there are enough slaves in Britain today to be the equivalent of at least one in every town" isn't the same as saying "there is at least one in every town." This seems like a very sweeping statement. I find it hard to imagine that such things happen in every single town, even tiny rural ones in the middle of nowhere, with only 500 inhabitants. In my eyes, this is case of someone harming their very serious point by making sweeping unsupported claims. Saying "slavery is still a huge issue"... fine. Saying "there are slaves in every town in Britain", while not being able to prove it... It's going to invite people to say, "No way!" and thus harms his own point.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Ah I see. Mind you it does depend on how big a town they mean, giving helpful definitions would have been good of these statistickers. Technically 'Bubbles' sex slave brothelmassage parlour in a nearby town, was in that town, but reporting of it made more references to the general conurbation around abouts.

[wryelle.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia, that is true (especially as the global population is higher now than at the time of the Atlantic slave trade), with most of the number accounted for by slavery in countries where it is still practiced on a large scale. I think in many places its either legal or has only recently become illegal, although I don't know more details.

I have read there are about 4000 slaves in the UK, but I don't know how reliable that figure is.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

See, this is what I'm dubious about. Given that this is an activity which is both illegal and which the entire population is firmly against, it must be phenomenally hard to come up with any kind of figure, let alone an accurate one.

Presumably they would either need to be completely isolated from the world, including telephones, or in such a state of fear that they cannot ask for help - quite different to a state-sanctioned trade.

I really hope it was a wild exaggeration or misdefinition.

[purplecat]

Well you have to account for the fact that definitions of slavery are quite variable - e.g. illegal immigrants who "technically" get paid wages but well below minimum wage and work hours well above legal maximums but who dare not complain because they will get reported.

Add to that the various forms of debt slavery in which, again, isolation is not required.

It might not be obvious, in either case, to a casual observer that they were looking at a slave as opposed to a perfectly legal low paid manual labourer.

I can certainly believe there are people in such situations in every city in the UK and a lot of towns, anywhere there might be a demand for casual manual labour, or seasonal demands for a large number of hands, and employers prepared not too look too closely at the "agencies" who supply the labour.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I am not convinced by those definitions. They are certainly bad things, but if you count people who are not paid much, work long hours in bad conditions, are in debt and don't get much choice about it, then surely that definition would encompass an awful lot of the population, if you go back a hundred years or so? Coal miners, factory workers, agricultural laborers?

It seems to me to devalue the suffering of people in the past (and some in the present) to make the definition so broad?

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

It seems to me to be comparing apples and oranges, or perhaps fruit and oranges: "there are more people in bad working conditions now than there were in a specific legal definition of slavery then"

[bunn.livejournal.com]

yes, I feel that somehow a state sanctioned system of enslavement should have a different word.

Like, selling illegal drugs is 'the drugs trade' and selling legal ones is a tobacconist or an off licence. Well not quite, but something like that.

[chainmailmaiden]

Anti-Slavery International who work with Amnesty International on some campaigns, define a slave as someone who is:

1. Forced to work -- through mental or physical threat.

2. Owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse.

3. Dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property'.

4. Physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.

They include bonded and forced labour, descent-based slavery, early and forced marriage, child labour and trafficking of people into forced labour as forms of slavery.

The International Labour Organization estimates at least 12 million people are in forced labour around the world, more than six million of whom are children. I don't know how they come by their figures, but since there are far more people in the world now than there were at the height of the Atlantic slave trade I'd be prepared to believe there are more now. Also, even though slavery is illegal very little is ever done to enforce the law.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Yes I looked at their site. Possibly I am cynical due to my extreme mistrust of numbers of all kinds, but I have become particularly cynical about numbers that include the word 'million' but refer to things that seem like they would be extremely easy to mis-represent by lots either way, and are basically uncheckable....

Hum.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

I know no figures. However there are a couple of things that might point things in the direction of agreeing with the quoted statement.

1. The world population is much higher now than it was 100-150 years ago. 6:1, 10:1; I don't know but I would guess someting in that reagion, maybe more.

2. Illegal immigrants brought into this country (and other Western nations like France & Germany, etc.) who end up being forced into the sex trade in return for their trasnsport.

Children who are sold by their impoverished parents to child traffickers for a pittance and then sold on to wealthy buyers, often in other countries.

"Servants" of very wealthy "employers" who bring them into Western nations as part of their paid household, but who are unable to quit the job.

Where these occur in the UK their incidence is much, much higher in the larger cities. But I would guess if the known figures are extraporlated up (by whatever method) and then averaged across the number of towns and cities in the country there might be more than one in each.


Yes, I agree that the knowing how to do that extraporlation from the known smaller figures to the quoted ones is somewhat beyond a black art.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of people trafficked here and are by definitions above slaves either in the black market of staffing hotels/restaurants/cockle picking or brothels. The last two are the ones that get the headlines. The East-European girls brought here under false pretences and then sold between brothel owners are obviously slaves and are the high profile ones. But all the would-be-migrants just working to pay off their debt to the gangs that got them here are slaves too, only we only notice them when they die (either at sea or inside an overcrowded truck), and we don't really know how many of them there are here.

Sadly whilst the statement "Aren't there a lot of oriental people about these days" is true in some places, sadly it is often deemed a racist statement, so the problem becomes invisiblised (if that's a word).