They drove north during the night, up from Nice, through the Channel tunnel and into London. Abina remembers stopping outside a tower block, her boyfriend guiding her into a tiny flat and then a back room where she was locked inside. The first British man to rape her arrived the following morning in mid-December 2009, the next that afternoon.
The only time she was allowed to leave the room was to use the shower or the toilet next door. She had no phone, no television; food was brought to her room by her boyfriend.
Abina, 26, from Ghana, says she could do nothing but wait, "miserable", for the next man. "It was my first time to England, my boyfriend said it was east London but I have no idea. I never ever went outside. There was a street below but the window was locked."
For more than 300 days, Abina was incarcerated in the apartment, during which time hundreds of men visited, some black, some Asian, most white, and paid her boyfriend £30 to have sex with her. Men were allowed to beat her, she says, but most were not as aggressive as her boyfriend. He told visitors that they need not use a condom, and when she fell pregnant he punched her so hard Abina lost her baby.
"He says they can do things without a condom, he says they can beat me because they pay a lot of money for me. I can't decide what I can do, I have no say. When he beat me and I lost the pregnancy, he said that I cannot be pregnant because I was a prostitute."
Not all the women trafficked into Britain are for sex. Gloria was nine when she was exported as a domestic slave from Nigeria to Italy through friends of her father. After seven years of unpaid household chores, she was flown to Manchester in March 2006 and forced into a life of domestic servitude with another family. Imprisoned in their home, aged 16, she was coerced into caring for five children and doing all the household chores. She worked 20-hour days without receiving a penny; she slept on the living-room floor and was never allowed outside unattended.
Then the beatings began. "You had to do whatever they ask. They shout, blaming you for everything, sometime they bit me, they beat me. They say you are just a slave, you don't say anything, even though I am a child myself. I was scared all the time."
Abina and Gloria are two of the thousands of women trafficked into the UK every year, victims of a crime that stirs revulsion like few others.
This Saturday marks the 224th anniversary of the inaugural meeting of the anti-slavery movement in London, the city where Abina was enslaved most of last year. Now Timothy Brain, the UK's most senior police officer dealing with human trafficking before his recent retirement, has decided to speak out about his mounting frustration over government policy on the issue, as well as the abhorrent nature of the crime. "We think back to the cotton plantations and sugar plantations of the 18th and 19th century and it wouldn't be as bad as what some victims go through. It's inhumane," he said. The government has vowed repeatedly to take the issue seriously. Last Monday, immigration minister Damian Green told parliament: "It is simply intolerable that in 2011 human trafficking still plagues this country." Yet concern is mounting that the systems put in place to help victims and target traffickers are being systematically dismantled by the coalition.
Abina escaped last October. As always, she tried the apartment door when her boyfriend left; this time, he had neglected to lock it. She recalls panicking, opening the drawer where he stashed the money she made, taking the £30 from her last client and running into the street.
"I was terrified. I ran towards a train station and saw a couple, and I said that I needed to get out of there." The couple took her to Victoria coach station and bought her a National Express ticket to a northern city. There a woman found her weeping in the city centre and took her in. Within weeks Abina had found a job, selling perfume for tips in the lavatory of a nightclub in the city.
"I was so happy not working as a prostitute," she smiled last week, recalling her escape and rubbing her neck, which clients used to grip so hard that it bruised. For the first time in five years she was not being forced to have sex with strangers, her fate since arriving in southern France from west Africa and meeting the boyfriend who decided she could make more money in London.
But her fortunes soon changed again. In November 2010, police raided the club. Abina was arrested as an illegal immigrant and sent to Yarl's Wood detention centre for deportation. Four weeks later the Poppy Project charity assessed her, identified her as a trafficking victim, prevented her deportation and is now helping Abina rebuild her life.
Gloria, too, made a break for it one afternoon. She fled from the family in March last year, telling staff at a college nearby that her life was in danger. "I couldn't go back, it would only get worse," she said. The authorities placed her in a women's refuge and eventually with the Poppy Project, which she credits with transforming her life. Although police arrested her captors, the case was dropped for insufficient evidence.
Locating trafficking victims is notoriously difficult; most cases emerge through a network of voluntary groups or occasional police raids on known brothels. In 2006, concern about trafficking inspired two nationwide policing operations, Pentameter One and Two, which were credited with hundreds of arrests and stamped the problem on the political and public consciousness. Despite this, there are no plans for a repeat.
But now Brain, the architect of those police operations, believes that momentum is being lost. Pentameter's perceived success led to the formation of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, a pioneering facility that pulled together intelligence, police and immigration experts. The centre closed in Sheffield in April 2010, moving to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), and since then sources say that 90% of its specialist staff have left. Soca itself is now to be wound up and assimilated into the new National Crime Agency. Police sources admit it remains unclear what precisely will be the agency's strategy on trafficking aside from tightening border security.
Brain believes the relegation of the trafficking centre to an undefined role within a new organisation betrays a shifting of priorities: "The net result is that it is just going lower and lower down someone else's policy agenda," said the former chief constable.
With the resignation of the Human Trafficking Centre's head, former Detective Chief Superintendent Nick Kinsella, anti-trafficking policing has lost a recognisable national co-ordinator. When Soca was asked last week who now headed its anti-trafficking team, its press office could not recall the incumbent's surname.
Concern is mounting that an apparent lack of proactive policing has bolstered Britain's reputation as a soft touch for traffickers who can operate without fear of being caught and prosecuted. Whitehall sources cite a lack of frontline police officers trained to identify trafficked people, especially women, who are often too terrified to approach police and testify against their captors. Kinsella's ambition was for every frontline police officer to understand the impact trafficking had on its victims and to treat such women as victims rather than illegal immigrants, but he believes that this is not happening. "We are in danger of slipping backwards," he said.
There is no precise figure for the number of officers trained to handle the peculiar complexities of trafficking. Devon and Cornwall police currently have only one, who is due to retire in 18 months. Most forces lack a specialist trafficking unit. Scotland Yard's dedicated team, Operation Maxim, was disbanded 14 months ago due to loss of funding. Even so, Green said last week that "organised immigration crime" remains the second highest priority of Soca after drugs. Yet convictions for trafficking, by comparison with narcotics crime, are desperately low.
Abina's traffickers were never arrested because of difficulties trying to identify the correct address. On average there have been 25 convictions a year for sex trafficking since 2004, with only eight in England last year. Scotland and Wales have yet to record a single successful prosecution. Senior legal sources say that is too easy for accused traffickers to plead guilty to lesser charges. The attorney general, Dominic Grieve, will shortly meet the all-party parliamentary group for human trafficking to discuss possible changes to the law. Peter Bone, the group's Tory chair, said: "Someone in the CPS told me that if they were in government they'd tear it up and start again."
Regardless of the technical difficulties, the consensus among the voluntary sector is that trafficking's political profile has slipped. Incentives to tackle it are few, as it is an invisible crime largely below the electorate's radar. Brain said that trafficking's underground nature helped explain its position as "peripheral to what most Home Office and police strategists see as core business". Anthony Steen, chair of the Human Trafficking Foundation, said: "In William Wilberforce's day, slavery could be seen. Now it is hidden from view but no less prevalent." Another factor influencing the allocation of resources to combat trafficking is quantifying the numbers. Data gathered under Operation Acumen, an intelligence exercise by senior police officers, indicated that up to 11,800 women may have been trafficked into England and Wales. Bone estimates there are at least 10,000 slaves in the UK, a conservative estimate given the unknown numbers cajoled into forced labour and domestic servitude, and said: "If hardened police officers say this is happening on the scale they say, and I'm a rightwing Tory arguing to opt into an EU directive [on trafficking], that indicates it is pretty serious."
Acumen identified more than 6,000 brothels in England and Wales, a figure unlikely to include the kind of discreet flat in which Abina was incarcerated. A potential glimpse of the true picture is provided by a recent investigation by a victims' trafficking group in Croydon, south London. Lengthy police inquiries uncovered eight brothels in the borough. The Croydon Community Against Trafficking found 65.
Abina's experiences are very similar to those of Morowa, 33, who arrived in London from Ghana in April 2003 expecting to receive help with her education from friends of her father. They collected her at Heathrow airport and drove for several hours to a "small village" where they said she was welcome to stay. Morowa was kept imprisoned for almost four years.
Like Abina, she was never allowed outside, but hundreds of men arrived to abuse her. She said the men forced her to have sex and that if she refused she was "tortured and beaten" by her captors. "I didn't know where I was, all the time I was sexually abused and then tortured." She says she has no idea where in England she was held, only that it seemed very quiet. She has no idea where all the men came from, or how much they paid, because she never received a penny.
But, like Abina and Gloria, she grabbed her chance of freedom. In April 2007, her captors were unusually absent from the detached property where she was imprisoned; she climbed from the building and just remembers running. "For four years I had never been out in the street and I had no idea where to go." She guesses someone must have called the police because she was arrested and referred to the Poppy Project.
Many trafficking experts condemn Britain's failure to care properly for those who have escaped. "Unless you are prepared to provide some form of safety net for rescued victims you are almost going to undo the good," said Brain.
The principal care provider, the Poppy Project, which is rehabilitating Abina, Gloria and Morowa, had its Home Office funding withdrawn and redirected to the Salvation Army. Yet there is hope: the government's decision to endorse the EU directive on trafficking pre-empts the Home Office's forthcoming four-pillared strategy on the issue, which promises the disruption of trafficking networks outside the UK, an increase in border security, improved but unspecified "law-enforcement efforts" and improved victim care arrangements.
Charities still fear a ministerial document with no specific targets or concrete promises. Britain purports to be a world leader in fighting human trafficking; now, they say, is the time to prove it.
• Eaves
• Human Trafficking Foundation
Locating victims of sex trafficking is notoriously difficult. (Picture posed by model.) Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
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