The ordeal of traveling endlessly, having your money stolen, and dignity robbed off your person is enough trouble to have in one life.
The road ahead is fraught with danger for a victim of trafficking, and if there’s a lull when authorities can get to a group, it resumes as soon as the authorities pull out. It doesn’t matter if it’s Dover, or further into London, or even further afield such as Birmingham or Newcastle up north.
The point is people can catch up with a group of migrants as easily as the police can, but for a trafficker the job is not over.
The truth is trafficking is a horrible crime. It’s the worst transit crime a person can face whether they are rich or poor. The idea traffickers can reduce wealthy people to poverty and “disappear” poor people away from their families is frightening.
It’s the cruelty involved which is debilitating. The people who do it are just plain evil. These are the experiences of those who’ve been trapped by something they were not planning on becoming embroiled with.
The reason why it happens
Some may say such people got involved because of gambling debts, or irreligion, or because of bad choices in a bad place. The reality is far from it. It isn’t a fault or personal waywardness which comes on people.
The resultant effect of a trafficker’s actions is slavery and it becomes mental, emotional, and spiritual torture for those caught up in it. It’s worse than homelessness. It hits harder than assault or domestic violence put together.
It’s all these rolled up into a larger punishment against the human body which breaks it outright into a form of submission. The use of people who are as broken – and empty inside – as these are is uncertain.
It’s clear that some may end up in sex crimes of different kinds but not the sort which ends up in posh hotels.
It may be labour they become useful for but it isn’t going to be well paid or maybe even paid at all. The numbers of those involved is low and so they can be slotted in just about anywhere. In fact, traffickers are so emboldened they are able to show who they’ve got and “disappear” those people anywhere they want to.
It just depends on the response they get. The cover of a political moment is sometimes all they need to start it off as a process of breaking into a country to make it acceptable. It’s the sympathy vote which can win in countries where there’s a reluctance to accept what trafficking is.
In the UK we have a history of opposing slavery and it takes a lot of work to bring it to a halt, but we’ve done it before to great effect.
The trouble today is information doesn’t get to people and there are those who spread misinformation all over because they want jobs in industries that do it.
Maybe they want a protest to succeed in its goals, or they want to contradict other people for the sake of contradicting other people. It’s more newsworthy to bite back than to comply.
The intransigence of traffickers
There isn’t much change of tact if it looks bad as we’ve seen from the traffickers who use the English Channel to their advantage. They’ve continued to push boats across and they continued to endanger the lives of thousands.
The truth is they know the UK isn’t a safe place for victims of trafficking anyway. We don’t understand the nature of crime and though we have laws most people are apathetic towards its existence.
The attitude in workplaces is that we don’t matter anyway. The ethic in the UK is that if someone hasn’t got any dignity they’re unlikely to get it while they’re here. It’s a truth seen in schools, universities, and graduate workplaces where selfishness is the rule of thumb.
The idea of people’s self-worth isn’t factored in. It’s a bad place to work at the best of times without feeling inferior already.
The overall downturn in the UK right now isn’t over economics or lack of discipline but a tide of ill-will – or a general wash of selfishness – that’s swept over the entire country.
It leaves us incapable of understanding each other and a basic human need that lies in such issues that goes far beneath the surface of a protest movement or a placard.
There’s a strange gap in people’s understanding. It’s no wonder traffickers find it easy to be here. We don’t appear to care at all.
