Slave tells the true story of “Anna”, a Romanian girl who was
snatched off the streets of London in 2011 and forced into the darkest corners
of Ireland to work as an unwilling prostitute for her captors. The book is a
difficult, often harrowing, read that reveals some of the inner workings of a
global enterprise, the international sex trade, as seen from the perspective of
one of its innumerable victims. As Anna herself explains, she was the product
of the trade, the victim of the crime, and – in the eyes of many of the ‘respectable’,
naive public – a complicit criminal in an extremely lucrative business.
How does one become a victim of
human trafficking? In Anna’s words, “they took me because I would not be missed”.
Women, and men, like Anna are targeted for trafficking because they can be
disappeared without drawing attention from authorities or friends or family
members that might raise the alarm. A few carefully constructed Facebook status’
supposedly from the victim, a new name (or several new names), a new country,
and enough beatings to break the person’s will to fight, and one more
individual has simply ceased to exist. Now they can be taken anywhere, made to
do anything, bought and sold on the black market and forced to work constantly
until their bodies are bruised and beaten enough that they are no longer
desirable to the hardworking, respectable family men – the ‘assholes’ as Anna
refers to them – who frequent the underground brothels present in major cities
all over the world. If, after all that, they wind up dead then nobody
investigates because they never existed anyway.
The secrecy of this world allows
the cogs to keep turning in a global machine. This is no small enterprise; the UN
Office on Drugs and Crime estimated in 2012 that human trafficking
accounted for around $32 billion in the shadow economy every year. This is a conservative
estimate, with the International
Labour Organisation placing the global forced labour economy at $150
billion. Although this includes those trafficked for labour, child trafficking,
and the organ trade, by far the most lucrative business for traffickers is sex.
Anna tells in Slave of how she was personally
valued at £30,000 when she was first taken. By the end of her captivity her
traffickers, Ilie Ionut and Ancuta Schwarz, considered her their “million-pound
girl”. The true numbers that traffickers and pimps make per victim will never
be known, but it is clear that through systematic abuse, torture and
manipulation, they are making a killing.
Following Anna’s ordeal, Northern
Ireland passed the Human
Trafficking and Exploitation Act, Europe’s strictest anti-trafficking law,
which not only tightened existing laws on traffickers but also introduced a new
offence that made it illegal to pay for sexual services. Now the “assholes”
would be criminals too. The Act was controversial at the time of its inception,
with police arguing it would be impossible to enforce, and some sex workers
arguing that it would only force the trade further underground and make things
more dangerous for them. Anna supports the Act, arguing that criminalising
those who pay for sex may drive them away from the trade. If the demand dries
up and the business becomes less lucrative, maybe the traffickers will have to
find new ways to make their money.
Again, due to the immense secrecy
of the business it is difficult to tell how successful the Act has been since
it was passed in 2015. In 2017 the National Crime Agency reported that modern
slavery was a “significant problem” for Northern Ireland. However, as Anna’s
story demonstrates, the nature of modern slavery is international. The issue
may simply be more visible in Northern Ireland due to its stricter laws. The
National Crime Agency also warns that human
trafficking affects every major city in the UK, and the true scale of the
industry continues to elude the authorities.
The uncomfortable truth of the
sex trade is that it is only as lucrative as the level of demand allows. And
the level of demand is extremely high. Some estimates suggest that as many as one
in ten men in the UK have paid for sex at least once. In the US, this
figure rises to around 15-20% of men. In the Netherlands, where prostitution is
legal and regulated, the figure also hovers between 13 and 22% of men. This
would suggest that laws governing prostitution do not significantly alter the percentage
of men who are willing to pay for sex. As was argued in Northern Ireland, this
is perhaps because laws that make prostitution illegal criminalise the sex
worker, not the customer. Arguments surrounding the legalisation of
prostitution argue that a legal and regulated system can help to protect the
women and men engaged in sex work, but as Anna argues, this does nothing to
protect those who are trafficked. Instead, some activists are now calling for a
new change to prostitution laws, where the selling
of sex is legalised but buying it is illegal. Criminalise the trafficker
and the buyer, not the seller. This arguably would reduce demand and therefore
dismantle the shadow economy built around the trade.
Debates around the best ways to
combat the modern sex trade will continue, and the nature of the industry means
facts, figures, and evidence will always be hard to come by. The sex trade
makes us uncomfortable, and that is why it has been able to operate in the
darkness for so long. It is this darkness that allows girls like Anna to be
disappeared in order to be used as a slave for people in positions of power,
whose actions may never be revealed. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of
men living their lives today who paid to use Anna, who contributed to her
trauma, and who will never be forced to face up to that.
Modern slavery thrives because
ordinary people do not want to discuss it. It is a dark and scary world, and it
should be brought into the light. Only then can we begin to make a change.
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