3071-The political economy of new slavery

72 Trafficking and International Law
In 2001, the case of a 15-year-old Nigerian girl was brought to the
attention of ECPAT UK, the UK arm of an international NGO working
against all forms of commercial sexual exploitation of children, including
trafficking. A trafficker attempted to take the girl, who had been
brought into the UK illegally from Nigeria, to Germany. By chance, the
police questioned the trafficker and his victim at the port and they soon
realized that the girl was not 28 years old as stated in her passport.
When she could not remember the name in her passport they detained
her. They let the trafficker go as he claimed that he had simply given
the girl a lift and did not know her. When the girl told them the
full story they did not believe her and she spent five months in a detention
centre before a social worker convinced them of the truth of her
story, at which stage she was given some of the support she needed.
In November 2001, ECPAT UK issued a report revealing that, over
the past five years, children have been increasingly trafficked into the
UK and forced into prostitution. Some were prostituted in the UK and
others passed through the UK to other European countries. It was
impossible to define how many had been affected, but in the area of
West Sussex Social Services alone, some 75 children picked up at Gatwick
airport and taken into care had gone missing in the previous seven years
(Somerset, 2001).
Conclusion and recommendations
One of the misleading myths surrounding slavery, since the first laws on
abolition were passed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is that
the main action required to get rid of it is the enactment of a law
declaring slavery to be abolished – removing its legal basis and requiring
law enforcement officers to prosecute traffickers and exploiters. And yet,
on its own, this has very rarely been an effective way of getting rid of
slavery; it has merely been an essential precursor to a further set of much
more practical steps to stop people being reduced to slavery. That is to say:
• to specify who is to ensure the release of those enslaved, and how;
• to give those freed sufficient economic autonomy to prevent them
having to return to their former owners/exploiters;
• to spread the message that certain forms of employment and exploitation
are no longer acceptable and will henceforth be punished.
Today, despite the increasing international attention being given to
contemporary slavery and particularly to trafficking and migration,