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Green Lanes, Finsbury Park, North London, the main drag of an
ordinary neighborhood in Britain's prosperous capital city. The
street hums with economic activity, cars back up waiting to turn
into the parking lot of the supermarket, 100,000 square feet
of new retail space is under construction on an adjacent site,
pedestrian shoppers head for the Greek bakeries and fishmongers
for which this stretch of Green Lanes is famous.
What the people going about their business don't see and couldn't
possibly know is how much of the economic activity going on around
them is based on illegal migrant labor. In the supermarket, the
fresh English asparagus has been picked and packaged by migrants
working outside the reach of health and safety laws. On the building
site, the laborers are from Eastern Europe and probably paying
off debts with interest to the gang masters who got them their
jobs, debts that their masters may never let them pay off, and
the elite sauna, well the elite sauna is not a place where the
local hip crowd goes to relax and get clean. It is a brothel staffed
by women trafficked from Moldova, Ukraine and Thailand into sexual
slavery.
The situation on this street is not unique, nor is the public's
ignorance of it, according to Roger Plant, head of Special Action
programs at the International Labor Organization, a United Nations
agency headquartered in Geneva. "This is a hidden problem,"
he says. Plant is co-author of the
first study into forced labor around the world just published.
Twelve point three million people work in forced labor; 2.4 million
of them have been trafficked into this modern slavery.
Palermo Agreement
"Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons,
by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion,
of abduction or fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power
of a position of vulnerability or of the giving of receiving
of payment or benefits to achieve the consent of a person
having control over another persons, for the purpose of exploitation.
Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation
of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation,
forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to
slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. |
Forced laborers earn $44 billion a year for their employers/masters.
Thirty six billion dollars a year is earned by people trafficked
into forced labor. Half that money is earned in the industrialized
world even though the number of people trafficked there is only
a small fraction of those who actually find themselves in this
dreadful situation.
The sex trade is one of the primary forces driving the illegal
traffic in human beings in Britain. Traffickers go to extraordinary
lengths to provide bodies for sexual exploitation in Britain and
the rest of Europe. And the age of the person being trafficked
doesn't matter much: hundreds of children have been trafficked
from Nigeria to Britain and then trans-shipped to Italy where
they are prostituted.
Trafficking in women is an even larger and more lucrative trade.
In Britain, criminals have discovered that trafficking women from
Eastern Europe into forced prostitution is astonishingly lucrative
-- the average woman working in forced prostitution earns $67,000
a year profit for her owner. And it's a virtually penalty free
way to earn money according to Detective Superintendent Richard
Powell of London's Metropolitan Police's clubs and vice unit.
"Humans are the commodity," he says. And since the women
are often afraid to testify against the traffickers it is hard
to make cases. "Get caught with a gun or a bag of dope and
you go to prison for a long time," Powell notes. But if you
get caught trafficking women and they don't testify against you,
you will go free. Powell believes there are several thousand women
who have been trafficked into the sex trade in Britain.
The average woman trafficked into sexual slavery is from Eastern
Europe. Sonya's story is typical. After graduating college with
an economics degree, this young Ukrainian woman found herself
unemployed because she did not speak good English. A "friend"
of her father arranged for her to travel to London to take classes
and even loaned her father the money to pay for them. When she
arrived she spent a pleasant week being shown the city by friends
of her father's "friend." Then she was informed that
she was not going to class after all and driven to a brothel where
she was forced into a life of prostitution.
For three years she worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week
in brothels and saunas all over London. She was beaten regularly
to keep her in fear and obedient. She escaped by chance, during
a falling out among thieves that turned violent and the police
were summoned to the brothel. But that didn't end her ordeal.
The British government began proceedings to deport her back to
the Ukraine, where the gang that trafficked her still operates.
She fears for her life if they find her.
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