The war on modern-day slavery is becoming a rising agenda in Wales.
Human trafficking is a shadowy reality on the streets of Wales
It was one o’clock in the morning and a woman was running through the empty streets. Since arriving in the UK one week ago, she had been deceived, sold and raped by 49 men. Terrified, confused and unable to speak English, she had taken her life in her hands by escaping from the house in which she was being held captive.
Later on, this woman was picked up by the police and then taken to a safe house. Slowly, using Google translate, her story came out. She had been promised a cleaning job in a London hotel to support her husband and children back home in Lithuania. Instead, she had been sold, abused and exploited.
The location of the house where she was being held was Blackwood and the officers who picked her up were members of the Gwent police. Human trafficking is not confined to developing countries or global megacities; it is a reality in modern-day Wales.
Neither was this simply an isolated incident. The National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is a framework for identifying trafficking victims; between April 2009 and May 2011, it recorded 34 potential trafficking incidents in Wales, 17 of which were verified.
But this may simply be the tip of the iceberg. Daisy Cole, head of influencing for the Welsh Refugee Council, says: “There are many people who aren’t being recognised as victims; we know from our work here that there are a lot more people who present trafficking indicators which should lead to their formal identification as trafficking victims.”
A lucrative business
Human trafficking is an extremely lucrative global business, second only to the drugs trade. It is estimated to be worth about £20 billion a year and affects every country in the world, whether they be places of origin, transit or destination.
Recent efforts have been made to raise the profile of human trafficking in Wales. Stephen Chapman, a former deputy director at the UKBA, was appointed as the second anti-human trafficking co-ordinator for Wales on 21 November. This post does not exist in England or Scotland.
Moreover, November saw two Cardiff-based human trafficking awareness conferences take place: one organised by the charity BAWSO and the other by the Christian organisation Gweini.
Huw Watkins, an ex-senior detective for the Gwent police and an anti-human trafficking consultant, says: “Because there’s a political will, there’s a strong all-party group in the Welsh government. There’s an acceptance around a lot of places that it does happen but there are still pockets of people who don’t want to take it on.”
In spite of the attention human trafficking is receiving, a recent BBC Wales article reported that 18 out of Wales’s 22 local authorities do not have specific policies to tackle the issue.
Exploitation
When it comes to trafficking, generalisations are difficult to make. A recent Home Office report pinpointed Nigerians, Vietnamese and Romanians as the top three nationalities for potential trafficking referrals. But the UK came in at number six, showing that vulnerable UK nationals are as susceptible to be trafficked as their foreign counterparts.
“In terms of the make-up of victims, probably the biggest number of trafficked victims that I’ve had anything to do with have been white Welsh girls,” says Huw. “And for every case of a girl going missing and being exploited, an equal case if not slightly more boys are going missing.”
There is an assumption that trafficking is wholly about sexual exploitation, but Daisy Cole points out that it can also involve forced labour, domestic servitude and even organ harvesting.
“Colleagues from a range of agencies have reported cases where young boys have been trafficked in the valleys, cannabis farms have been set up, quite dangerously with electric fences, and young boys have been bricked in, no windows, doors locked,” she says.
A well-known case in 2006 involved the death of a Vietnamese immigrant, Tran Nguyen, who was beaten and dumped at the Royal Gwent Hospital as a result of losing a cannabis crop. With a wife and two children to support back home, Nguyen was working illegally at a cannabis plantation in Newport. In the wake of his death, the Gwent police discovered over 20 cannabis factories in Newport alone, operated by criminal gangs and utilising slave labour.
Boys and men can also be victims of trafficking
Taking action
But who are the traffickers? Many operate in huge, cross-border criminal networks and highly organised gangs. Yet families and individuals may also be party to it, sometimes out of naivety. “If you have a situation where life is cheap and people think, ‘I can make money doing that’, people will do it – for a variety of reasons,” says Huw.
Whereas Wales has been praised for leading the way in the fight against human trafficking, many NGOs argue that more decisive action needs to be taken and traffickers need to be brought to justice.
Jim Stewart, director of Gweini, emphasises that the fight against trafficking needs to be a multi-agency action with everybody engaged – NGOs, health authorities, police. “It’s only by working together that we will be able to address the issue because everyone’s got a different part of the jigsaw,” he says.
The Lithuanian woman is now back with her family and the investigation into what actually happened is still ongoing. She is very much a survivor, but her exploiters have yet to be brought to justice – and there are many other trafficking victims out there whose tales are not being told.