Our anti-trafficking response is failing victims.

Calls are being made for a victim-centred approach in the UK’s anti-trafficking response after three women have allegedly lived unnoticed as slaves in London for a 30-year period.

The UK has been shocked and shaken by this story of three women who have allegedly been kept as slaves in a house in London for over thirty years.

A Malaysian woman aged 69, an Irish woman aged 57 and a British woman aged 30, believed to have been born in the house in question, were rescued after having been held apparently against their will by a couple for three decades.

Reports so far say that Freedom – a charity set up to fight child abuse – helped rescue the women after one of them saw an advertisement for the charity on television and managed to make calls asking for help, starting a week-long operation involving the charity and the police.

Following a number of telephone conversations the women were able to leave the property when the owners of the house were not around. A man aged 73 and a woman aged 67 have been arrested and bailed until January 2013.

Detective Inspector Kevin Hyland from the Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit said the police had never seen anything of this magnitude before.

These women appear to have been held in an ordinary house in an ordinary street by seemingly ordinary people for over thirty years.

While this case is particularly unusual because of the length of time, speculation is that cases of this nature are not as uncommon in the UK as one might think.

The best official figures come from the UK Human Trafficking Centre, now part of the National Crime Agency (NCA).

According to their report, Strategic Assessment on Human Trafficking in 2012, 2255 potential victims of human trafficking were encountered in 2012, representing an increase of 9 per cent on to those reported in 2011.

In 1991 there were 391 potential victims so this crime is most definitely on the increase.

Sexual exploitation and labour exploitation were the two most prevalent exploitation types reported in 2012 at 35 per cent and 23 per cent of cases respectively.

According to the report, the ten ‘most prevalent’ countries of origin for victims of trafficking are Romania, Poland, Nigeria, Vietnam, Hungary, Albania, Slovakia, Lithuania the Philippines – and the UK.

The report also outlines some of the experiences described by victims of traffickers.

‘Some potential victims of all forms of exploitation reported being locked into the premises in which they were exploited.

‘Others had their movement restricted through surveillance by traffickers.

‘Threats were reported, in which potential victims were told that if they left their exploitative situations, they or their families would be harmed.’

So not only does it happen, but the UK’s Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group (ATMG) accuses officials of taking a confrontational stance in the treatment of victims of trafficking, too frequently treating them as immigrant cases rather than potential victims of a crime.

Established in 2009, ATMG works to promote a victim-centred human-rights based approach to protecting the well-being and best interests of trafficked people.

It also undertakes analytical and evaluative monitoring of the implementation of the Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005, in an attempt to improve the overall effectiveness of the UK’s anti-trafficking policy.

In its latest report, Hidden in Plain Sight, ATMG says that the UK’s response is failing victims of human trafficking.

This report has analysed the UK’s response to trafficking four years on from the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking convention coming into force.

The report describes how the focus on the immigration status of people who are potential victims of trafficking discriminates against people from outside the EU and that the National Referral Mechanism system – a process set up by the government to identify and support victims of trafficking in the UK – fails to systematically identify, assist and protect victims of trafficking.

An analysis of cases of suspected trafficking dealt with by UK authorities in 2012 found that more than 80 per cent of the UK and EU nationals dealt with by the UK’s Human Trafficking Centre were found to have been trafficked and received the necessary protection.

However, fewer than 20 per cent of cases passed on to what was then called the UK Border Agency (UKBA) (now called ‘UK Visas and Immigration’), which processes people from elsewhere, had their cases accepted.

And there is still no formal appeal procedure.

A proposed new modern day slavery bill has the chance to rectify the situation.

It is expected the bill will propose tougher sentences for traffickers including the introduction of a maximum life sentence, set up an ‘anti-slavery commissioner’ post and one single act combining the offences of trafficking and trafficking prevention orders.

The report also highlighted how victims do not trust criminal justice officials.

And alarmingly, the proposed anti-slavery bill fails to incorporate a victim-protection system. Without a more victim-centred approach, it is hard to see how the system will gain the trust of victims.

Klara Skrivankova, Anti-Slavery International’s Trafficking Programme Co-ordinator, said: ‘Unless a comprehensive anti-slavery bill is introduced that puts assistance to trafficked persons on a statutory footing, the value of such law will be minimal.

‘Internationally, it has long been recognised that an effective anti-trafficking instrument must contain provisions for victim protection in addition of criminal offences of trafficking.’

Before the headlines involving the case of the three women allegedly held against their will for three decades in a house in Lambeth, we may not have considered slavery as an issue we in the UK needed to be concerned with. But with attitudes like this we may be missing vital signs.

How many people missed clues or failed to report signs that those three women were being held against their will because slavery is something we did not consider happened here in the UK?

There will have been clues, there will have been signs – over a thirty-year period there has to have been things that people ignored or turned a blind eye to.

Without education and the inclusion of a victim-centered approach victims of trafficking, victims of slavery will continue to suffer in silence.

As President Barack Obama remarked to the Clinton Global Initiative on 25 September 2012: ‘It ought to concern every person, because it is a debasement of our common humanity.

‘It ought to concern every community, because it tears at our social fabric.

‘It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets. It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organised crime.

‘I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name – modern slavery.’

You can add your voice to the call for increased victim protection in the new modern day slavery legislation by visiting the Anti-Slavery website, by clicking here.