Scotland's Slaves - the Amnesty International report

[sam]

Direct link to AI's report http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=325

Plight of women sold into slavery revealed
LUCY ADAMS, Chief Reporter for The Herald
August 19 2008

http://www.theherald .co.uk/news/news/display.var.2428222.0.Plight_of_women_sold_into_slavery_revealed.php

Mai-Pia was working in a café in Thailand when she met her future husband. He promised love, romance and a new life in Scotland.

Before the end of his holiday there, he asked her to move to Edinburgh to be his wife. Once she had gone through all the appropriate immigration paperwork they were married in the capital.

Like any new wife she was excited and delighted, but her husband soon became physically and sexually abusive and he refused to allow her out of the house unaccompanied.
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One night her husband brought some of his friends home and told Mai-Pia that she had to have sex with them in order to earn her keep. This became a regular occurrence.

Mai-Pia is one of numerous women unable to access the limited support available to those trafficked for commercial reasons, partly because her case would be considered as domestic abuse.

Her story is one of many in a new report by Amnesty International which highlights the plight of those trafficked to Scotland.

According to Scotland's Slaves - the Amnesty International report - marriage is one of many ways in which young women are trafficked into the country.
Some victims have been put into accommodation and disappeared

The report praises the commitment shown by the Scottish Government in tackling human trafficking by extending across Scotland the support services run by the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance (Tara) in Glasgow.

However, it raises concerns about the lack of suitable accommodation and treatment services for those who have been trafficked and highlights problems faced by many victims who have illegal or uncertain immigration status.

Some 600,000 people are illegally trafficked into the European Union each year, the majority for the sex trade.

In 2000 the Home Office estimated that in one year, between 142 and 1420 women are trafficked into the UK. By 2003, the UK government estimated that 4000 victims of trafficking for prostitution were in the UK.

A Unicef report in 2006 suggested that there were 5000 child sex workers in the UK, most of them trafficked.

The Amnesty study, which will be launched at Holyrood on Wednesday, reveals that Scotland actually has a disproportionately high incidence of human trafficking compared to the rest of the UK.

Naomi McAuliffe, author of the report, said this could be related to the fact that Glasgow has the highest number of sex workers in the UK outside of London, with an estimated 50% from overseas, and that it could also be a result of temporary displacement from London and south-east England.

"Trafficking includes forced labour and domestic servitude and forced marriages," she said. "We know for a fact that there are victims who will not disclose to the police that they have been trafficked because of issues of shame and the intimidation they have suffered. This makes the need for a sensitive multi-agency approach particularly important.

"Some of those who have been identified as victims have been put into accommodation and disappeared. We don't know if they have run away because they're frightened or if they have been recaptured by traffickers. This is an indictment of some of the accommodation being provided.

"We have also found cases of women identified as victims of trafficking who have been put in Dungavel - which is entirely inappropriate."