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

[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).