a day to share their story and end slavery in the UK

Today, there are an estimated 100,000 victims of modern slavery in the UK. That’s 100,000 people crying out for their voices. And yet most of us have never heard a single one of those voices.

These victims live in our communities, in the neighbourhoods of London, not just in the slums of Delhi as many wrongly believe.

Metropolitan Police data shows that between 2013 and 2018, the number of people identified as victims of modern slavery and human trafficking increased tenfold in London, with more than 30% of all cases detected nationally in the capital. The pandemic has only made things worse.

The voices of victims and survivors can get lost in the statistics, and that’s why today I want to share the story of just one of those survivors and how her life could have turned out differently, if only someone had listened.

A 60-year-old woman presented to the hospital complaining of stomach pain. She was underweight, unkempt, frightened, distressed, and had difficulty communicating in limited English.

The medical team was worried and asked for an interpreter to translate from Portuguese. Catia told her story, that of her daughter and her grandson.

Catia had travelled to the UK to visit her daughter Aline, a hairdresser, and her young child. Upon arrival, her passport was confiscated by her daughter’s landlord and employer, who was physically violent towards them.

Aline, her daughter, had been locked up in the property against her will and visited by strangers. Catia, for her part, had been sent to live with an unstable and violent man.

No support was offered to her, her daughter or her young grandchild when they needed it most because people did not recognise the signs of modern slavery.

Catia’s story is not as rare as you might think. Despite the government’s best efforts to tackle modern slavery, 40 million people are living in modern slavery today, including 100,000 in the UK.

There are 99,999 more stories like Catia’s that deserve recognition and attention. For real change to happen, we must first listen to these voices.

Authorities, frontline services and first responders in our capital need to be more aware of modern slavery in their work and understand how it manifests itself in everyday life.

Often, our communities are on the front lines, as modern slavery plays out at the local level. Catia and the many other victims deserve more targeted action from local authorities, who know their communities best.

More work needs to be done across the city to identify and address modern slavery, even when the word itself is not being uttered.

The theme of this year’s World Day Against Human Trafficking is the voices of victims and, alongside raising awareness among authorities and first responders, we must ensure that victims have the opportunity to speak out and, when they do, are listened to and given the tools to tell their stories.

I created the Shiva Foundation in 2016 to do just that, and I am determined to make this year a turning point for victims who desperately need one of the most basic forms of humanity: someone to listen.

We are working with the Hertfordshire Modern Slavery Partnership, a group of over 100 statutory and non-statutory partners from across the county, to publish a survivor’s handbook in collaboration with the West Midlands Anti Slavery Network.

The handbook, translated into 14 languages, is a comprehensive guide to the options available to survivors within the national referral mechanism and elsewhere, and explains what these options mean.

The guide will be shared with hundreds of different agencies and organisations across the country who may come into contact with survivors. As an international gateway to the rest of the UK, London should also engage fully with new arrivals to whom the handbook is offered through a variety of channels, including job centres, local councils, housing providers and post offices.

We need to listen to these stories and understand the crimes that happen every day in our neighborhoods. Catia, her children, and all the victims in our communities deserve to be heard.

Sadly, what should be self-evident must be defended. We must act and work together now so that, in our lifetime, we can end modern slavery in our capital, across the UK and around the world. Today is about empowering and amplifying the voices of survivors, and helping them tell their stories themselves.

Tomorrow we will all sit down and listen.

Learn more

Political cartoon by Christian Adams published in the Evening Standard

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