After I keep hearing news of how adults & youths, of both genders, were keep getting enslaved in war torn countries, where there is no law & order, I came upon this article & thought to put some perspective to this news of slavery ... in a developed Western country. Now, this article is highlighting the problem of slavery in UK, but US & Australia have a similar problem.
These 3,000 children are enslaved in UK. They are being sexually & physically abused & put in domestic labour as a slave. The authorities, as usual, keep saying that they are trying to end it but losing the war against slavery. The reality of 21st century is that the slavery has actually increased in this century.
Slavery is wrong, regardless of whoever or wherever it happens. But, considering, there are almost 10,000 to 13,000 slaves in Britain, then how can the Western developed countries expect people in war torn countries to prosecute people in slave trade (criminal gangs & organizations) & protect people from being enslaved. It's very easy to blame others for their practices & ideologies before judging oneself where he/she is standing.
Furthermore, we need to keep in mind that these criminal gangs are only suppliers of slaves. Supply cannot exist without demand. That means then that people in the West, regardless of their race, education, national origins, ethnicity, religion, are open to knowingly taking in a slave, as long as it benefits them, somehow. Slavery exists because the general public demands it. Now, it might be a small section of the general public who is demanding it, but they definitely are the customers. The public supports slavery by either directly buying the slaves (usually rich elites) or indirectly asking for quality products at the lowest prices possible, which is possible only by businesses paying no or extremely low wages (recall my blog on Thailand's fishing, & Australian & Spanish agricultural industries employing slaves).
Since, we also know that criminal gangs would not be involved into this business without making a good return on their investments, they charge high prices for these slaves. So, their customers must be well-heeled to be paying such high prices for these slaves, which, in turn, means that they themselves are earning handsomely. So, the "respected" rich elites of our society don't hesitate from slavery. Hey, I thought, that happened in 1800s in the Western countries. So, after all, it seems like that the society hasn't developed, at all.
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Hien was 10 when he arrived in Britain. He did not know where he was or where he had been. He knew only that he was here to work. Since he emerged from the back of a lorry after crossing from Calais 7 years ago, his experience has been one of exploitation & misery. He has been a domestic slave, been trafficked into cannabis factories, been abused & beaten & was eventually prosecuted & sent to prison. It has been a life of terror, isolation & pain.
... . He is one of an estimated 3,000 Vietnamese children in forced labour in the UK, used for financial gain by criminal gangs running cannabis factories, nail bars, garment factories, brothels & private homes. Charged up to £25,000 for their passage to the UK, these children collectively owe their traffickers almost £75m.
While there is growing awareness of the use of trafficked Vietnamese people in the booming domestic cannabis trade, child trafficking experts are now warning that the British authorities are unable to keep up with the speed at which UK-based Vietnamese gangs are recruiting & exploiting children for use in other criminal enterprises such as gun-smuggling, crystal meth production & prostitution rings.
“By our calculations there are around 3,000 Vietnamese children in the UK who are being used for profit by criminal gangs,” says Philip Ishola, former head of the UK’s Counter Human Trafficking Bureau.
“The police & the authorities are now aware that trafficked children are being forced to work in cannabis farms but this is really only the tip of the iceberg. Often the same child will be exploited not just in a cannabis farm but also in myriad different ways. This is happening right under our noses & not enough is being done to stop it.”
Police admit that they are struggling with the speed at which Vietnamese criminal gangs are diversifying & expanding their activities across the England & into Scotland & Northern Ireland. “Right now we are just fighting in the trenches, fighting in the nail bars,” said detective inspector Steven Cartwright, who heads Police Scotland’s human trafficking unit. “It is vital that we that we understand new methods being deployed by the gangs because we need to stop demand at one end or limit their ability to make money at the other.”
Hien’s journey to the UK started when he was taken from his village at the age of 5 by someone who claimed to be his uncle. As an orphan, he had no option but to do as he was told. He spent 5 years travelling overland, completely unaware which countries he was going through, from Vietnam before being smuggled across the Channel & taken to a house in London. Here he spent the next 3 years trapped in domestic servitude, cooking & cleaning for groups of Vietnamese people who would come in & out of the property where he was held.
The men in the house beat him & forced him to drink alcohol until he was sick. Other things happened to him that he still cannot talk about. He was never allowed out of the house & was told that if he tried to escape, the police would arrest him & take him to prison.
During his time in that house, Hien says, many other Vietnamese children were brought in. They told him that they were here to work & to pay off debts for their families back home. They would stay for a few days & then be taken away, & Hien never saw them again. He became homeless after his “uncle” abandoned him. He slept in parks & ate out of bins. He was eventually picked up by a Vietnamese couple, who offered him a place to stay but then forced him to work in cannabis farms in flats in first Manchester & then Scotland.
In his testimony to police, he says he still does not understand exactly what the plants were, although he understands now that they are worth a lot of money. He looked after the plants, using pesticides that made him ill, & only left the flat when he helped transport the leaves to be dried elsewhere. He was locked in, threatened, beaten & completely isolated from the outside world.
“I was never paid any money for working there,” he says. “I did not stay there for money but because I was afraid & I hoped the whole thing would end soon.”
When the police came, they found Hien alone with the plants. He told his story to the police, but was still sent to young offenders’ institution in Scotland, where he spent 10 months on remand, charged with cannabis cultivation. He was released only after the intervention of a crown prosecutor led to him being identified as a victim of trafficking.
Vietnamese children such as Hien are easy pickings for the increasingly sophisticated trafficking gangs operating between the UK & Vietnam. Children make up nearly a quarter of the estimated 13,000 people trafficked into the UK every year, & Vietnamese children are the largest group of children trafficked to the UK. The United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime estimates that 30 Vietnamese children arrive illegally in the UK every month, on well-established smuggling routes.
“Children are an increasingly valuable assets to criminal gangs because they are easy to get hold of, easily intimidated & exploited, & easy to keep isolated & unaware of what is really happening around them, which makes it far less likely for them to be able to disclose anything of use to the police,” says Ishola.
When it comes to Vietnamese children, he says, the culture of seeing a child as the “golden egg”, who will be sent to work abroad & provide for their families still prevails. This attitude is exploited by gangs, who deceive families into believing that there is legitimate work in Britain for their children.
“During their journey to the UK, the traffickers keep charging the children more & more money, & by the time they arrive, the pressure to pay back this enormous debt is a key factor in their vulnerability to ending up trapped in forced labour,” he says. “Upon arrival the children are faced with a highly organised system of criminal activity, with methods of control ranging from extreme physical brutality to debt bondage. Before they even arrive, that trap is set for them.”
Members of the Vietnamese diaspora in London told the Observer that they had seen an explosion in child trafficking by criminal gangs operating on the peripheries of their communities in recent years. “Some of these children & victims have told me that it cost them £25,000 to get to the UK,” said one Vietnamese community leader in London, who did not want to be named. “They come with a debt & they are not allowed to leave until the debt is paid. That is slavery & exploitation.”
Like Hien, many of the children end up working on cannabis farms. The link between child trafficking & the UK’s domestic cannabis industry has been increasing, with Vietnamese children the main group at risk. According to a 2014 report by the NGO AntiSlavery International, almost all potential victims of trafficking linked to cannabis are Vietnamese, & more than 80% are children.
Many of these children are subsequently prosecuted by the UK justice system, despite many being identified as potential victims of trafficking. This has led to Vietnamese children becoming the second-largest ethnic group held in youth detention centres across the UK.
Vietnamese gangs have historically dominated the UK’s £1bn cannabis trade & have been instrumental in the proportion of domestically grown cannabis in Britain rising from 15% in 2005 to about 90% now. While the trade remains enormously profitable – the number of Vietnamese cannabis factories in the UK has grown by 150% in the past 2 years – their grip has been weakened thanks to increased law enforcement & under competition from British growers. Now they are finding new & more efficient ways of doing business.
“In terms of law enforcement, I think we’re about 2 years behind the curve,” says Daniel Silverstone, a criminologist at London Metropolitan University who has written extensively on Vietnamese gangs in the UK.
“Traffickers have changed their modus operandi in recent years in direct response to the attention & interventions of law enforcement. A few years ago it was almost exclusively cannabis farms, but their business interests have now become much more diverse. So we’re seeing an expansion into Scotland & Northern Ireland, the use of nail bars for forced labour & money laundering, & moves into drugs like crystal meth.” This means that children, who are an integral part of the gangs’ business operations, are also now being moved into other areas of exploitation. “As their grip on the domestic cannabis trade slips a little, they are looking to maximise their profits from these children in whatever way they can,” he adds.
The Metropolitan police say that there is now much more awareness of the complexity of tackling the UK’s child trafficking problem but that the closed nature of the Vietnamese community has made things difficult. “What has persistently been a challenge for us is making inroads into this community,” says Phil Brewer, who heads its new human trafficking & kidnap unit. “We usually only find out about a child when we make a raid & find someone in a cannabis factory or nail bar, but often this person has been through multiple forms of exploitation before we reach them.”
Parosha Chandran, a leading human rights barrister & UN expert on trafficking, has represented Vietnamese children charged with cannabis cultivation who have gone through many different trafficking situations before being moved into cannabis farms.
“Trafficked Vietnamese children have rarely faced just one type of forced labour,” she says. “I’ve come across cases where young people have been subjected to a spectrum of exploitative practices. In one of my cases, for example, the child was forced to look after people’s homes & care for their children, when he was just a child himself, then he was taken to work cleaning a nail bar, then moved to another place where he was forced to sew labels on to clothing – & all of this happened before he even arrived in the cannabis factory.”
In March the UK passed its first Modern Slavery Bill, designed to increase the prosecution of traffickers & give better protection to victims of modern slavery in the UK. However, Chandran says that Vietnamese children continue to be prosecuted for cannabis cultivation while their traffickers remain free.
“The Modern Slavery Act’s central focus on prosecution is misguided & its provisions fail to fully protect the rights of trafficked children,” she says. “We as a democratic country need to find durable solutions to ensure these children remain protected from harm for the rest of their lives.”
...
Methods used to lure children from Vietnam to the UK are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, including use of social media. “Vietnamese children are brought to the UK, taken in by Vietnamese adults & put to domestic work,” says Swat Pandi, from the NSPCC’s child trafficking advice centre. “The child feels indebted to the adults for food & shelter & is told they need to return the favour by looking after cannabis plants. These children suffer high levels of neglect, emotional abuse &, in the absence of any protective factors, are highly vulnerable to physical & sexual abuse.”
Despite the government’s pledge to end modern slavery & the UK’s first modern slavery bill, passed in March, Chitty says she has seen no change in the numbers of Vietnamese children coming through her charity’s services. “It’s very much business as usual,” she says. “We still have a problem with immediate safeguarding & appropriate placements for trafficked children. And young people are still being criminalised by the courts.”
Even when a child has been taken out of trafficking & come under the care of a local authority, he or she is likely to return to the control of the traffickers. In 2013, a report by independent thinktank the Centre for Social Justice concluded that 60% of trafficked children in local authority care go missing, nearly a third of them within a week of arrival. Most are never found again. There are increasing reports of children being retrafficked from foster homes or when they have been given asylum status.
“I don’t think we understand the entire enterprise,” says detective inspector Cartwright. “Despite our best intentions I think we’re not offering them anything that would persuade them to stay. Many will get retrafficked because we didn’t offer them a better alternative to what the traffickers are providing.”
Hien is trying to rebuild his life after being given asylum in Scotland, but is struggling to find peace after years of trauma. “I still worry that the traffickers may find me & come to my house. But I know this time that I will ask for help,” he says. “I think they have justice here but I wish they hadn’t kept me in prison for so long. By telling my story, I want people to understand what I have experienced here.”
These 3,000 children are enslaved in UK. They are being sexually & physically abused & put in domestic labour as a slave. The authorities, as usual, keep saying that they are trying to end it but losing the war against slavery. The reality of 21st century is that the slavery has actually increased in this century.
Slavery is wrong, regardless of whoever or wherever it happens. But, considering, there are almost 10,000 to 13,000 slaves in Britain, then how can the Western developed countries expect people in war torn countries to prosecute people in slave trade (criminal gangs & organizations) & protect people from being enslaved. It's very easy to blame others for their practices & ideologies before judging oneself where he/she is standing.
Furthermore, we need to keep in mind that these criminal gangs are only suppliers of slaves. Supply cannot exist without demand. That means then that people in the West, regardless of their race, education, national origins, ethnicity, religion, are open to knowingly taking in a slave, as long as it benefits them, somehow. Slavery exists because the general public demands it. Now, it might be a small section of the general public who is demanding it, but they definitely are the customers. The public supports slavery by either directly buying the slaves (usually rich elites) or indirectly asking for quality products at the lowest prices possible, which is possible only by businesses paying no or extremely low wages (recall my blog on Thailand's fishing, & Australian & Spanish agricultural industries employing slaves).
Since, we also know that criminal gangs would not be involved into this business without making a good return on their investments, they charge high prices for these slaves. So, their customers must be well-heeled to be paying such high prices for these slaves, which, in turn, means that they themselves are earning handsomely. So, the "respected" rich elites of our society don't hesitate from slavery. Hey, I thought, that happened in 1800s in the Western countries. So, after all, it seems like that the society hasn't developed, at all.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hien was 10 when he arrived in Britain. He did not know where he was or where he had been. He knew only that he was here to work. Since he emerged from the back of a lorry after crossing from Calais 7 years ago, his experience has been one of exploitation & misery. He has been a domestic slave, been trafficked into cannabis factories, been abused & beaten & was eventually prosecuted & sent to prison. It has been a life of terror, isolation & pain.
... . He is one of an estimated 3,000 Vietnamese children in forced labour in the UK, used for financial gain by criminal gangs running cannabis factories, nail bars, garment factories, brothels & private homes. Charged up to £25,000 for their passage to the UK, these children collectively owe their traffickers almost £75m.
While there is growing awareness of the use of trafficked Vietnamese people in the booming domestic cannabis trade, child trafficking experts are now warning that the British authorities are unable to keep up with the speed at which UK-based Vietnamese gangs are recruiting & exploiting children for use in other criminal enterprises such as gun-smuggling, crystal meth production & prostitution rings.
“By our calculations there are around 3,000 Vietnamese children in the UK who are being used for profit by criminal gangs,” says Philip Ishola, former head of the UK’s Counter Human Trafficking Bureau.
“The police & the authorities are now aware that trafficked children are being forced to work in cannabis farms but this is really only the tip of the iceberg. Often the same child will be exploited not just in a cannabis farm but also in myriad different ways. This is happening right under our noses & not enough is being done to stop it.”
Police admit that they are struggling with the speed at which Vietnamese criminal gangs are diversifying & expanding their activities across the England & into Scotland & Northern Ireland. “Right now we are just fighting in the trenches, fighting in the nail bars,” said detective inspector Steven Cartwright, who heads Police Scotland’s human trafficking unit. “It is vital that we that we understand new methods being deployed by the gangs because we need to stop demand at one end or limit their ability to make money at the other.”
Hien’s journey to the UK started when he was taken from his village at the age of 5 by someone who claimed to be his uncle. As an orphan, he had no option but to do as he was told. He spent 5 years travelling overland, completely unaware which countries he was going through, from Vietnam before being smuggled across the Channel & taken to a house in London. Here he spent the next 3 years trapped in domestic servitude, cooking & cleaning for groups of Vietnamese people who would come in & out of the property where he was held.
The men in the house beat him & forced him to drink alcohol until he was sick. Other things happened to him that he still cannot talk about. He was never allowed out of the house & was told that if he tried to escape, the police would arrest him & take him to prison.
During his time in that house, Hien says, many other Vietnamese children were brought in. They told him that they were here to work & to pay off debts for their families back home. They would stay for a few days & then be taken away, & Hien never saw them again. He became homeless after his “uncle” abandoned him. He slept in parks & ate out of bins. He was eventually picked up by a Vietnamese couple, who offered him a place to stay but then forced him to work in cannabis farms in flats in first Manchester & then Scotland.
In his testimony to police, he says he still does not understand exactly what the plants were, although he understands now that they are worth a lot of money. He looked after the plants, using pesticides that made him ill, & only left the flat when he helped transport the leaves to be dried elsewhere. He was locked in, threatened, beaten & completely isolated from the outside world.
“I was never paid any money for working there,” he says. “I did not stay there for money but because I was afraid & I hoped the whole thing would end soon.”
When the police came, they found Hien alone with the plants. He told his story to the police, but was still sent to young offenders’ institution in Scotland, where he spent 10 months on remand, charged with cannabis cultivation. He was released only after the intervention of a crown prosecutor led to him being identified as a victim of trafficking.
Vietnamese children such as Hien are easy pickings for the increasingly sophisticated trafficking gangs operating between the UK & Vietnam. Children make up nearly a quarter of the estimated 13,000 people trafficked into the UK every year, & Vietnamese children are the largest group of children trafficked to the UK. The United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime estimates that 30 Vietnamese children arrive illegally in the UK every month, on well-established smuggling routes.
“Children are an increasingly valuable assets to criminal gangs because they are easy to get hold of, easily intimidated & exploited, & easy to keep isolated & unaware of what is really happening around them, which makes it far less likely for them to be able to disclose anything of use to the police,” says Ishola.
When it comes to Vietnamese children, he says, the culture of seeing a child as the “golden egg”, who will be sent to work abroad & provide for their families still prevails. This attitude is exploited by gangs, who deceive families into believing that there is legitimate work in Britain for their children.
“During their journey to the UK, the traffickers keep charging the children more & more money, & by the time they arrive, the pressure to pay back this enormous debt is a key factor in their vulnerability to ending up trapped in forced labour,” he says. “Upon arrival the children are faced with a highly organised system of criminal activity, with methods of control ranging from extreme physical brutality to debt bondage. Before they even arrive, that trap is set for them.”
Members of the Vietnamese diaspora in London told the Observer that they had seen an explosion in child trafficking by criminal gangs operating on the peripheries of their communities in recent years. “Some of these children & victims have told me that it cost them £25,000 to get to the UK,” said one Vietnamese community leader in London, who did not want to be named. “They come with a debt & they are not allowed to leave until the debt is paid. That is slavery & exploitation.”
Like Hien, many of the children end up working on cannabis farms. The link between child trafficking & the UK’s domestic cannabis industry has been increasing, with Vietnamese children the main group at risk. According to a 2014 report by the NGO AntiSlavery International, almost all potential victims of trafficking linked to cannabis are Vietnamese, & more than 80% are children.
Many of these children are subsequently prosecuted by the UK justice system, despite many being identified as potential victims of trafficking. This has led to Vietnamese children becoming the second-largest ethnic group held in youth detention centres across the UK.
Vietnamese gangs have historically dominated the UK’s £1bn cannabis trade & have been instrumental in the proportion of domestically grown cannabis in Britain rising from 15% in 2005 to about 90% now. While the trade remains enormously profitable – the number of Vietnamese cannabis factories in the UK has grown by 150% in the past 2 years – their grip has been weakened thanks to increased law enforcement & under competition from British growers. Now they are finding new & more efficient ways of doing business.
“In terms of law enforcement, I think we’re about 2 years behind the curve,” says Daniel Silverstone, a criminologist at London Metropolitan University who has written extensively on Vietnamese gangs in the UK.
“Traffickers have changed their modus operandi in recent years in direct response to the attention & interventions of law enforcement. A few years ago it was almost exclusively cannabis farms, but their business interests have now become much more diverse. So we’re seeing an expansion into Scotland & Northern Ireland, the use of nail bars for forced labour & money laundering, & moves into drugs like crystal meth.” This means that children, who are an integral part of the gangs’ business operations, are also now being moved into other areas of exploitation. “As their grip on the domestic cannabis trade slips a little, they are looking to maximise their profits from these children in whatever way they can,” he adds.
The Metropolitan police say that there is now much more awareness of the complexity of tackling the UK’s child trafficking problem but that the closed nature of the Vietnamese community has made things difficult. “What has persistently been a challenge for us is making inroads into this community,” says Phil Brewer, who heads its new human trafficking & kidnap unit. “We usually only find out about a child when we make a raid & find someone in a cannabis factory or nail bar, but often this person has been through multiple forms of exploitation before we reach them.”
Parosha Chandran, a leading human rights barrister & UN expert on trafficking, has represented Vietnamese children charged with cannabis cultivation who have gone through many different trafficking situations before being moved into cannabis farms.
“Trafficked Vietnamese children have rarely faced just one type of forced labour,” she says. “I’ve come across cases where young people have been subjected to a spectrum of exploitative practices. In one of my cases, for example, the child was forced to look after people’s homes & care for their children, when he was just a child himself, then he was taken to work cleaning a nail bar, then moved to another place where he was forced to sew labels on to clothing – & all of this happened before he even arrived in the cannabis factory.”
In March the UK passed its first Modern Slavery Bill, designed to increase the prosecution of traffickers & give better protection to victims of modern slavery in the UK. However, Chandran says that Vietnamese children continue to be prosecuted for cannabis cultivation while their traffickers remain free.
“The Modern Slavery Act’s central focus on prosecution is misguided & its provisions fail to fully protect the rights of trafficked children,” she says. “We as a democratic country need to find durable solutions to ensure these children remain protected from harm for the rest of their lives.”
...
Methods used to lure children from Vietnam to the UK are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, including use of social media. “Vietnamese children are brought to the UK, taken in by Vietnamese adults & put to domestic work,” says Swat Pandi, from the NSPCC’s child trafficking advice centre. “The child feels indebted to the adults for food & shelter & is told they need to return the favour by looking after cannabis plants. These children suffer high levels of neglect, emotional abuse &, in the absence of any protective factors, are highly vulnerable to physical & sexual abuse.”
Despite the government’s pledge to end modern slavery & the UK’s first modern slavery bill, passed in March, Chitty says she has seen no change in the numbers of Vietnamese children coming through her charity’s services. “It’s very much business as usual,” she says. “We still have a problem with immediate safeguarding & appropriate placements for trafficked children. And young people are still being criminalised by the courts.”
Even when a child has been taken out of trafficking & come under the care of a local authority, he or she is likely to return to the control of the traffickers. In 2013, a report by independent thinktank the Centre for Social Justice concluded that 60% of trafficked children in local authority care go missing, nearly a third of them within a week of arrival. Most are never found again. There are increasing reports of children being retrafficked from foster homes or when they have been given asylum status.
“I don’t think we understand the entire enterprise,” says detective inspector Cartwright. “Despite our best intentions I think we’re not offering them anything that would persuade them to stay. Many will get retrafficked because we didn’t offer them a better alternative to what the traffickers are providing.”
Hien is trying to rebuild his life after being given asylum in Scotland, but is struggling to find peace after years of trauma. “I still worry that the traffickers may find me & come to my house. But I know this time that I will ask for help,” he says. “I think they have justice here but I wish they hadn’t kept me in prison for so long. By telling my story, I want people to understand what I have experienced here.”
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