We shouldn’t get too self-satisfied about abolishing slavery, argues rahila gupta |
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Right now a trafficked woman is selling her body in a massage parlour on your local high street; cocklepickers are working in the middle of the night; a 'servant' is sleeping on the floor of a middle-class home; and a man has imprisoned his 'foreign' wife in their bedroom.
All of these people have one thing in common. Their passport is in the hands of an 'employer', a 'spouse', an 'agent', a 'trafficker', or indeed the Government, as in the case of failed asylum seekers.
The year is bursting at the seams with events commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, and today we celebrate the 1791 slave uprising in Haiti on Anti-Slavery Day.
But we cannot snuggle comfortably into our armchairs, believing that an ignominious chapter in our history has ended - because slavery is alive and well in Britain today. As
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many as 25,000 people are starved, imprisoned, beaten, sexually violated, and worked relentlessly.
Take Farhia Nur, a Somali asylum seeker I interviewed for my book. She was forced into domestic slavery in her home country when the civil war there separated her from her family. Her employer's son raped her frequently.
She escaped to Britain hoping to get asylum, failed and was enslaved again, working long hours for shelter. As a hijab-wearing Muslim, she is embarrassed to admit she had to sell sex to feed herself. She cannot work, study or claim benefits nor can she be sent back while Mogadishu burns. She has attempted suicide on several occasions.
She has few rights: no right to marry, no family and no access to healthcare or housing. As a non-person she cannot look to the state for protection. British immigration law is inadvertently causing slavery. No civilised nation should tolerate this state of affairs.
Rahila Gupta's book Enslaved: The New British Slavery will be published in September 
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 23, 2007
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