Abstract
Much British crime and immigration policy over the last decade has been justified as a response to the problem of modern slavery perpetrated by ‘evil’ foreign national organised criminals profiting from the exploitation of vulnerable people. Social scientists, by contrast, have drawn attention to the hallmarks of a moral panic. We report here on findings of the first interview-based study of modern slavery offenders in the UK. Our findings reveal a diversity of motives among a disparate sample, only a minority of whom profited substantially from crimes organised internationally by illicit enterprises. Few participants bore much resemblance to the folk devil politicians have evoked to obscure the social, legal, and political factors that render some of the world's most destitute people vulnerable to severe exploitation when their rights are no longer fully protected by Western governments.
Introduction
Across the social sciences the criminological concept of a ‘moral panic’ is widely used to underline the vested interest Western governments have realised in directing public concern about crime, immigration, and sexual morality towards the phenomenon of ‘trafficking in human beings’. Doezema's (2010) ethnographic study of the drafting of the United Nations (2000) ‘Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children’, borrows, for example, from Cohen's (1972: 64) observation that when social problems become ‘stylized’ in a ‘stereotypical fashion by the mass media’ ‘the moral barricades’ become ‘manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other … socially accredited experts’. Doezema exposed how the mythologization of trafficking established a consensus between twentieth century officials and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) variously concerned with tackling violence against women, international migration, and labour rights at the end of the twentieth century that was reminiscent of Victorian fears concerning ‘the inevitable fate of women’ who in seeking better lives for themselves elsewhere ‘leave the protection of the family’ (1972: 126–7). Likewise, Weitzer (2007) documents how a ‘moral crusade’, waged by a coalition of right-wing religious groups and radical feminists, shaped the outcomes of US elections through the recounting of ‘atrocity tales’ that depicted the ‘unqualified evil’ of human traffickers who entrap women in prostitution (2007: 448). Ellison (2017) shows similarly how concern about trafficking has been misdirected at the commercial sex sector in Northern Ireland, the criminalization of sex workers reflecting racialized fears about the arrival of Eastern European migrants whose presence was assumed by some to be symptomatic of Northern Ireland's economic decline. Meanwhile, Cockbain (2013: 25) notes that ‘Asian grooming gangs’ have become Britain's ‘newest folk devil’, successive failures by police and social services to protect vulnerable young people attributed to a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about abuses perpetrated by Muslim men, with ‘society's ambivalent attitudes to children and childhood… age… gender and sexuality, and to ‘race’ and racism’’ projected as contempt onto a racializable enemy within (Cree et al., 2014: 429−432).
In turn, panics about trafficking have shifted debates about immigration, employment, and labour rights in many countries onto terrains where law and order politics prevail, much as Hall et al.'s (1978: 221) seminal analysis of the ways in which the racialization of ‘mugging’ exposed how a ‘silent minority’ in Britain accepted ‘increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state’ (1978: 221). The UK's subsequent refashioning of ‘people trafficking’ as ‘modern slavery’ prolonged this dynamic, pitching vulnerable people against ‘evil’ ‘organised’ criminals, in a series of discursive manoeuvres that obscure the degree to which border control policies, combined with acute economic inequalities within and between countries, coalesce to produce illicit marketplaces in which foreign nationals with diminished rights have little option but to participate (Gadd and Broad, 2018). As Agustín (2020: 223) surmises: Trafficking became a big-time crime issue not because of its truth but because it served governments’ purposes. The interminably warlike USA loved a reason to go after bad men of the world on the excuse of saving innocent women. European states got justification to tighten borders against unwanted migrants. The UK could pretend it was going to be the new leader of anti-slavery campaigning just as their empire comes to an end… They set up a straw man so frightening that scads of educated liberal folks were bamboozled… I do not refer here to what is called moral panic, though that helps explain how the general public got caught up in the frenzy. I’m referring to the cynical selection of a cause as governmental policy.
The folk devils of modern slavery policy
Politically, however, the evocation of ‘crimmigrant others’ (Franko, 2020) threatening the very security of the UK gifted the Conservatives in government with a new ‘law and order’ agenda they could reclaim as their own (Bosworth et al., 2018), while reconfiguring those features of the political landscape (low pay, workers’ rights, unionisation) that are the raison d’être of the Labour movement as crime issues. News-reporting, in both the right and left-wing press helped establish a new ideological consensus. While the signs of modern slavery the public were encouraged to spot remained ill-conceived, the reporting of arrests enabled a tacitly racialised narrative to be overlain. Intelligence briefings defined certain forms of exploitation in terms of the nationalities of victims or suspects, i.e., ‘Vietnamese nail bars’, ‘Romanian sex traffickers’, ‘Albanian cannabis farmers’, including the insidious enemy within epitomized by ‘Asian grooming gangs’ (Parmar, 2021). Images of those arrested suggested that the perpetrators of modern slavery were typically ‘foreign-looking’ people keeping others in squalor. The reporting of arrests of foreign national offenders liable to deportation was cited as evidence that the government could deliver on former Prime Minister, David Cameron's 2011 promise to reduce ‘net migration to the tens of thousands’.
Subcontracting arrangements for victim care work rapidly consolidated a new anti-slavery sector whose fundraising activities drew the public's attention to the scale and nature of exploitation the world over (van Dyke, 2019). While tensions between the modern slavery and hostile environment policy agendas are now cause for concern for many professionals working with survivors, including law and border enforcement officers (Aliverti, 2020), few NGOs within the sector fully anticipated that their philanthropy would be corralled into the service of policy geared to demoralising destitute migrants so much that they would ‘go home’ and dissuade others from coming (Cockbain, 2020, ATMG, 2018). In tandem the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts removed the rights of some groups of migrants in the UK to work, rent properties, hold bank accounts, drive and access healthcare and welfare benefits. Hence, while the modern slavery sector heralded the advent of the UK's National Referral Mechanism (NRM) – a system to which potential victims of modern slavery must apply to be officially identified as victims and to therefore extend their stay in the UK - ‘the hostile environment policy’ in tandem with austerity policies, rendered the lives of those with no legal right to work in the UK much more precarious and hence vulnerable to exploitation.
Increasingly, those referred into the NRM have been treated as a suspect population, motivated to avoid criminalization or deportation as ‘immigration offenders’ (HMICFRS, 2020; 2021; IASC, 2020, 2022). Once in the NRM, ‘potential victims’ wait in legal limbo for an average of 568 days while the credibility of their accounts is assessed (IASC, 2022). Deportation proceedings can and are imposed even on those with positive conclusive grounds decisions (Roberts, 2019). Meanwhile some applications fail because the NRM requests supporting documentation that it is impossible for those from non-Western countries to secure, especially whilst held in UK immigration detention (Esslemont, 2019). Such complexities were barely acknowledged in 2021, as the UK government – in making the case for the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 – asserted without evidence that virtually all undocumented migration to the UK was ‘illegal’ and that the country was enduring an ‘alarming rise’ in ‘child rapists, people who pose a threat to national security, serious criminals and failed asylum seekers’ ‘abusing our modern slavery system’ (Home Office and Patel, 2021). Before Boris Johnson's resignation as British Prime Minister in June 2022, his government attempted, in direct contravention of the 1951 (Geneva) Refugee Convention to deport prospective asylum seekers to Rwanda under the pretence that this would ‘save countless lives’ from ‘human trafficking’ and ‘break’ the ‘business model’ of ‘vile people smugglers’ who have turned the ‘ocean into a watery graveyard’ (BBC, 2022).
Convictions for modern slavery offending nevertheless, remained rare during the Conservative's term of office. Between 2017−2019, only 60 convictions were secured for offences under the Modern Slavery Act (Sentencing Council, 2020). Of those convicted, two thirds were in their 30s and three quarters were men, one quarter women, suggesting a population that is older and includes proportionally more female offenders than is commonly found among populations of serious and violent offenders. In the absence of convictions, public interest in modern slavery was sustained through disproportionate media coverage of a small number of select cases through which a succession of (often racially-coded) folk devils were embellished - ‘modern slavery offenders,’ ‘slave-drivers’, ‘sex traffickers’, ‘grooming gangs’, ‘traders in human misery’, ‘county lines drug dealers’, ‘people smugglers’, ‘organized criminal gangs’ and ‘foreign national offenders’ (Cockbain and Tufail, 2020; Koch, 2019) whose deeds were so dastardly they could only be explained in biblical terms: ‘heinous’, ‘barbaric’ and ‘unspeakably cruel’ (May, 2013; Home Office and Rudd, 2016; HM Government, 2020). Meanwhile, measures of success were recalibrated by the government to include prosecutions ‘flagged’ as ‘potentially’ involving modern slavery. The number of these flagged prosecutions rose from 294 to 451 between 2018 and 2021, though in most cases the modern slavery aspect was discontinued or unproven in court (IASC, 2022). Indeed, the first ethnography to report on the policing of modern slavery within the context of the hostile environment policy, reveals that some victims ask the police not prosecute ‘traffickers’ who have provided them with habitable accommodation neither their families nor the British government failed to do so (Aliverti, 2020).
While there are no primary studies of modern slavery offenders, aside from or own reported below, the few international studies of traffickers reveal that many present as the ‘fixers’ of problems to populations otherwise unable to secure liveable lives for themselves amidst the legacies of war, colonialism entrenched poverty and climate change, and that few resemble the folk devils of modern slavery policy. Choi Fitzpatrick's (2017) ethnography of ‘slaveholders’ in rural India, for example, depicts farmers struggling in a global economy that had driven profit margins down who regarded themselves as behaving benevolently towards often ungrateful indentured labourers to whom they provided the ‘gift’ of work (2017: 72). Budiani-Saberi et al. (2014) study of organ trafficking in urban India revealed most to be destitute, unwell, and socially ostracised in the aftermath of having sold one of their own kidneys to provide for themselves and their dependents. Keo and colleagues (2014) interviews with the population of predominantly female offenders convicted of trafficking in Cambodia presents a similarly bleak picture of poorly educated people taking desperate measures for comparatively small gain. Cambodian women convicted of trafficking children are typically divorced mothers and sex workers unable to afford the bribes their male counterparts pay corrupt officials to evade prosecution.
Within Europe, Howard's (2017) ethnography of the ‘so-called traffickers’ who broker migrant labour in the Italian agricultural sector reveals them to be mostly West African male migrants who made similar journeys themselves as teenagers. Having become fluent in Italian, the ‘caporali’ ‘play a critical intermediary role’, connecting communities back home in search of work to the ‘various groups with whom they collaborate’ for a small fee (2017: 521). Mai's (2018) ethnography of those presumed to be sex trafficking in Western capitals depicts mobile migrant populations from Eastern Europe and South America voluntarily entering sex work to pay off debts, support family, buy properties or fund education and healthcare, often in partnership with business-come-romantic partners who facilitate their employment in return for a share of their earnings. Some of those being exploited become the organisers of other sex workers, while some of those investigated by law enforcement present as victims and betray their business partners to secure ‘normal’ lives for themselves. By way of contrast, Hoang's (2015) ethnography of Vietnamese sex workers reveals how some women work together to entice Western businessmen to invest in their education and/or ‘rescue’ them from desolate lives that were partially fictionalized to appeal to those holding stereotypes of ‘oriental’ women.
Methodology
Between 2018 and 2021 we interviewed 30 research participants whose criminal records were consistent with being ‘flagged’ as ‘modern slavery offenders’ in the UK. Most (n=19) were convicted under the 2015 Modern Slavery Act or prior laws prohibiting sex trafficking, but a minority had been convicted for allied offences including: the facilitation of illegal immigration (n=6), conspiracy to traffic illicit drugs through the exploitation of vulnerable people (n=2); keeping a brothel (n=2) and breach of a gangmasters licence (n=1). Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) provided 114 reference numbers that were passed to offender managers who invited suitable clients to participate in the study. We followed up with offender managers three times, but typically received no reply. We learnt that 12 potential participants had been deported or discharged before they could be invited to participate. Of the 40 people who were invited to participate in the study, 13 declined and 27 agreed and were interviewed. Three further participants who had completed custodial sentences approached the project directly, having heard about the research through NGOs they were engaged with. All but one participant was interviewed in English, though translators assisted two participants whose English was not fluent. As directed by the ethical approval granted by the University of Manchester Research Ethics Committee, all participants were advised that potential identifiers in the transcripts of their interviews would be pseudonymized, but that this would not totally eliminate the risk of them being identifiable from the substance of their disclosures.
The age range of the sample spanned from 22 to 62 and averaged at 40 years old. Four participants were aged between 20 and 29 (Adam, Aron, Susan, and Vicky). Nine were in their 30s (Andrei, Anton, Estelle, Faizel, Hina, Keith, Rasheed, Reshmin and Zahir). 13 were in their 40s (Alessandro, Charles, Darius, Grace, John, Linda, Mir, Naz, Nina, Sammy, Sandra, Tambara and Thierry), and four were in their 50s or 60s (Ademola, Bob, Idris, Raja). 21 participants were men and nine were women. 16 were British citizens, of which six described themselves as white. Six of these 16 British citizens identified as ‘Asian’, two were of mixed ethnic heritage, and one identified as ‘Black’. Seven participants were Eastern European, of whom three were Romanian nationals, two were Albanian, one was Hungarian, and another Slovakian. The remaining participants were from Cape Verde, Iran, Kenya, Pakistan, Nigeria (n=3) and Zimbabwe. All but one had served a custodial sentence. Their prison sentences ranged from six months to 12 years and averaged at over five years: a profile of sentencing that approximated the norm for modern slavery convictions between 2017 and 2019 (Sentencing Council, 2020). 28 of the 30 participants were interviewed twice, using Free Association Narrative Interview techniques (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). Of the remaining two, one participant was interviewed three times because she was unable to finish her story within two interviews; another declined to participate in a follow-up interview. Participants were helped to tell their life stories in the first interviews before gaps and inconsistences were explored in the follow-up interviews. In the follow-up interviews, Free Association techniques were used to probe beneath surface rationalizations using active reflections and narrative questions that explored evasions and contradictions identified in the transcripts of the first interviews, our understanding of these first interviews sometimes supplemented with official records, newspaper reports or other historical accounts.
Data analysis involved seven key stages: 1) establishing a chronology of events anticipating the perpetration of exploitation; 2) constructing network maps to identify the relationships between participants, their co-accused, business partners, family members, law enforcement, and victims; 3) scrutinising the different narrative accounts contained in the transcripts pertaining to particular events, including all experiences of victimization and offending; 4) the construction of case histories, using direct quotes from participants to depict their life stories, retaining the complexity of the accounts offered, including competing explanations for the crimes they were convicted of wherever possible; 5) searches of academic, legal and official sources to locate, and where possible, verify the meaning of events described events by participants in historical, political and socio-cultural context; 6) critical interrogation of the case studies against the original transcripts by the co-author who had not interviewed the participant, with queries discussed and the dataset revisited until a new consensus was reached on the strength of evidence supporting competing interpretive claims; and 7) cross case analysis, organised by gender, country of origin and exploitation, as reflected in the analysis presented below.
Findings
Sex traffickers
Five men and three women within our sample had been convicted of offences that involved trafficking adults for the purpose of sexual exploitation. All claimed to be working consensually with sex workers who understood the nature of the work they had committed to, including those migrant sex workers who had come to the UK from Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia with the expectation of higher rates of pay than in their home countries. Two women, Sandra, a UK national and Grace, Kenyan, were both former sex workers who had become brothel keepers and were subsequently convicted for exploiting other women in their premises. After around a decade of sex work, Sandra had ‘had enough’ of ‘handing… money over’ to the ‘men who owned these places’. Irritated by those who judge sex workers for having ‘no morals’, Sandra enforced ‘rules’ about who worked in her brothel, asking for ID to confirm workers’ ages, prohibiting drug use, and avoiding ‘Eastern European girls, because she knew … the pimps are waiting outside for them, and they’re working 24h… just horrible’. Sandra was nevertheless prosecuted after allowing a pimp to bring an exploited Eastern European ‘girl’ into her premises, the police having been tipped off by a rival brothel.
Grace, by contrast, left Kenya to travel to the UK on the promise of education in return for domestic services. Once in her employer's home, Grace ‘didn't get paid any money’, was ‘mistreated’ and had her passport ‘confiscated’. She escaped to another city with the help of a friend and began working, undocumented, in a brothel, at first answering phone inquiries and cleaning and then ‘taking men’ to make more money. With the help of a British man who rented a property for her and who she eventually married, Grace opened her own brothel which earnt her around £1,000 per day, splitting the earnings 50/50 with workers she poached from her previous employer. Whilst most of the women in her employ were also from Kenya, there were some ‘Romanian’ and ‘Albanian’ women who did not speak English, whom Grace was not able to advise directly and who it materialised were ‘forced to work’.
Nina was one of two participants in our sample who claimed the sex trafficking she was convicted for involved little more than producing web-based advertisements. After she left Slovakia, Nina had become reliant on her partner, a drug-dependent man who was abusive towards her. Nina objected to her partner housing women he had brought to the UK with her and her children. He slapped her when she challenged him. So, Nina colluded with his pimping, creating websites to advertise sex work, while ‘cooking, cleaning’ and ‘speaking with the girls’. Though she was sentenced for seven years for trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, Nina denied receiving any money from the women. Nina's partner, who did profit from the sex work of others, stabbed her while they were awaiting trial. Another webpage maker, Andrei, was a Romanian heroin user who came to the UK partly in search of drug treatment. Andrei said he was initially misled into accepting work, having been told by his friend that he would be ‘fixing computers’. Andrei nevertheless established an amicable relationship with the men and their female partners who provided sexual services from the house he shared with them. Andrei denied he was the ‘ring-leader’ of an international sex trafficking network, as the police had depicted him, bringing victim statements to the research interview to evidence how the sex workers whose webpages he produced had been ‘happy’ and ‘free to come and go’ and that they hoped to work with him elsewhere in Europe upon his release. One other man, Anton, who identified as a ‘Romanian gypsy’, also explained his involvement in sex trafficking in terms of substance abuse. Anton had worked in very low paid, cash-in-hand agricultural and construction jobs in Western Europe, before supplementing his income by taxiing women between sex work jobs and a UK airport. This entailed giving lifts to his partner, who provided sexual services as a masseur to finance her cancer treatment, and driving other women to a cocaine dealer, who encouraged Andrei to sample his product, rendering him increasingly reliant on the taxiing work to fund an escalating habit.
Other men appeared to have greater influence over the business dimensions of the sexual exploitation in which they were implicated. Darius, another Romanian national, sold flight tickets online to couples of whom he asked few questions, much like any ‘travel agent’, though he knew many to offer ‘massage services’ via online sex sites. His principal business appeared to involve the laundering of van loads of cash transported between European countries. Faziel, a UK national, considered himself to be running an elite ‘escort service’ with Thai women whom he regarded as his ‘friends’ and whose work he supported through a phone-based app and the provision of professional photographs. Some of Faizel's sex-working friends, including his partner, were also able businesswomen, though others were highly vulnerable to exploitation and became physically and mentally ‘ill’ because of the demands of the job. Finally, Adam, a Hungarian national, had taken his sexual partner's passport after he ‘rescued’ her from another family who had made ‘£6,000’ from sexually exploiting her and selling her into a sham marriage. Adam had migrated to the UK with his family. His father, a man he idolised, was a ‘gang boss’ who introduced him to illicit drug use as a teenager. Unlike Andrei, Anton and Darius, Adam was physically violent to one of the women whose sex work he profited from. Adam said he ‘slapped’ her because she did ‘bad things’ like ‘smoking drugs’ and ‘lying’ about it’, while failing to send money back home to her son.
People smugglers
By way of contrast, none of those we interviewed who were implicated in people smuggling had threatened those whose journeys they assisted. Five out of seven explained that their motives for assisting were misconstrued by law or border enforcement and that they led law-abiding lives. Alessandro, for example, was a long-term unemployed Albanian refugee with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder following his time as a teenage combatant in the Balkans. He went to collect a lorry that contained – he implied, not entirely persuasively to his ‘surprise’ – other Eastern European migrants as a ‘favour’ to a man who had paid for life-saving medical care for his brother in Albania. Others claimed to have been duped into transporting undocumented migrants, either because they did not know their passengers were hiding in their vehicles, or because the passengers convinced them they had a right to enter the UK. Mir, an Iraqi lorry driver, claimed to ‘know nothing’ of the woman concealed in the lorry he was driving, even though, as he was later to reveal, she was the partner of a man who had given him free driving lessons. Thierry, a Burundian refugee, whose family had been helped across African borders during the armed conflicts he witnessed as a child, had offered a lift to the fiancé of a young woman he was counselling at his church. He was later told by French border force on return from the engagement party that he was committing an offence by giving a lift to a man with no right to enter the UK. Aron, similarly, had driven to an English city at the bequest of an uncle who asked him to collect some Albanian friends for a family party, only to find himself arrested for facilitating illegal immigration. Likewise, a British national, Raja claimed to have been duped by his partners in a social enterprise that supported Indian Sikhs to teach in the UK. Unbeknown to Raja, around one in ten applicants paid a fee to his business partners before ‘disappearing’ in London and taking up cash-in-hand work in retail and construction. A highly respected man in the Sikh community, Raja was devastated when he was convicted for facilitating illegal immigration, not only because of the upset it caused his family – his wife crashing her car during a ‘stress attack’ - but also because it meant he had to ‘sack’ the many legitimate religious teachers he had been keen to support and ‘inform the Home Office’ that they needed to return to India.
By way of contrast, two white British national men knowingly took driving ‘jobs’ for cross-border criminal enterprises. Both Bob and John were tempted by the prospect of the ‘easy money’ they were offered to bring vans and lorries concealing undocumented migrants from Calais to Dover. Both rationalised their offending in terms of helping those from Vietnam or Sri Lanka who wanted to work in the UK. Both men had very difficult starts in life: John was placed in care by his mother after his father was imprisoned for armed robbery. Bob had a long history of depression dating back to his childhood when his domestically abusive and alcohol-dependent father would belittle him for being ‘daft’; criticism that echoed Bob's teacher's assessments of his limited ability to ‘learn’ in school. Both men were prone to taking high-risk chances without much thought for consequences that often amounted to custodial sentences.
Labour exploiters
Extensive criminal histories were much rarer among those involved in labour exploitation who included: a corporate businessman (Charles) who had failed to comply with a gangmasters license; a takeaway owner (Sammy) who maintained a failing business by underpaying people living in a house of multiple occupation for which he was the landlord; a garment factory owner, (Hina) who had recruited low paid workers from Pakistan, but then could not afford to pay them more after new immigration law was introduced; a married, professional Nigerian couple (Ademola and Tambara) convicted of keeping two women in domestic servitude; and a drug-dealer (Keith) who had perpetrated grievous assaults on a mother and daughter, both British, kept in servitude by him and his mother-in-law.
Charles, the corporate lead for a logistics company – and the only participant who had not served a prison sentence - had failed to establish under what terms Romanian migrant labour was being supplied to a meat processing factory where profit margins were tight. Charles accepted that he had not exercised due diligence – there were ‘alarms’ that he ‘should have noticed’ – but explained that he had sought the intervention of the GLAA when he suspected subcontracted workers were being substituted for undocumented ones. The takeaway shopkeeper, Sammy, saw himself as doing his tenants a favour by giving them ‘left-over food’ from his takeaway in return for working there. A man with a ‘reputation’ for physically confronting those he regarded as ‘bullies’, Sammy saw nothing wrong with administering ‘tough love’ to men with substance dependencies, forcing some of his tenants to ‘take baths’ because they began to ‘smell’. Whilst Sammy denied any wrongdoing, it was easy to see how the destitute people who worked in his takeaway were afraid to refuse him, and how his failing business relied upon labour exploitation.
Others made more persuasive claims to have been trying to help migrant workers only to fall foul of modern slavery legislation when their employees became disgruntled. Hina was serving a four-year sentence for labour exploitation. Having escaped an abusive marriage which had left her ‘hugely damaged’ and in significant debt, Hina started a tailoring business to re-establish her financial independence. Hina travelled to Pakistan where she ‘selected’ ‘the best’ tailors and assisted them with their migration to the UK, utilising her prior training as a legal executive. However, when the government changed the rates of pay for skilled migrant workers, the tailors, as Hina recalled, became ‘greedy’, demanding a pay rise she could not afford plus a share of the company's profit, before by-passing the business to supply customers directly. In response Hina threatened the workers, explaining that their visas were dependent on her employ and that they could be ‘put back on a plane’ if they chose to leave it. In turn, the tailors accused Hina of ‘slave labour’, she presumed, to secure ‘leave to remain’ in the UK. Similarly, Ademola and Tambara, regarded their convictions for domestic servitude as unjustified. Ademola and Tambara had brought two teenage women to the UK from Nigeria, from their perspectives ‘by the books’ with Home Office visa requirements, and offering their ‘domestics’ an education and money, some of which was sent back home to the women's fathers. Ademola and Tambara were both ‘shocked’ when they were arrested several years later for keeping the women in domestic servitude and argued that fictitious complaints had been made against them in large part because the two women were at risk of deportation having become ‘illegal immigrants’ after they absconded from the family home.
The claim that he had not been implicated in slavery was much harder to justify in relation to Keith, who was convicted of keeping two women in domestic servitude and exploiting them in the distribution of drugs. Keith's father was a convicted sex offender who had abused his mother contributing to her mental breakdown and drug-dependency. Keith's ‘chaotic’ childhood was spent ‘robbing’, ‘taking drugs’, ‘staying out late’ and ‘doing commercial burglaries’, unaddressed learning needs leaving him confused about who was to blame for his father's conviction and unquestioningly loyal to his partner's parents as he entered adulthood. Keith established himself as a ‘Class A’ drug dealer, earning over ‘fifteen hundred quid a week’ to provide for his partner and children, paying his father-in-law to help with drug distribution and using two women that his mother-in-law exploited as domestic servants to store drugs. In an account of violence that was indicative of his own impoverished emotional learning, Keith revealed how he had assaulted these two women kept in domestic servitude whilst ‘cocained up’, under instruction from his mother-in-law, only later to discover she had tricked him to thinking the women were stealing from him and abusing his son.
Criminal exploitation
Like Keith, Vicki − another of the three participants whose modern slavery offending primarily involved criminal exploitation − was involved in the exploitation of vulnerable people in drug distribution, though she was herself a minor when this began. After her mother's death and expulsion from school at age 14, Vicki moved in with her brother. Their uncle, a drug dealer from their hometown, helped them out financially, before exploiting their dependence on him. He used to like ring me friend and ask me brother if he like needed anything… At first… we just lived off, obviously, the money that he was getting and then… it got to the point where we couldn't pay rent…So then that's when this uncle came into it.
Vicki's role consisted of ‘minding’ her uncle's drugs for £100 a day, while friends of her brother's ‘cut’ ‘everything up’ before bagging and delivering it. Despite being a minor when her drug-minding commenced, Vicki was sentenced to six years imprisonment for what was depicted as county-lines drug-dealing. Another man, Idris, was also both a victim of exploitation and a serial exploiter. He was a former child soldier and Nigerian police chief who had hired destitute people, typically sex workers, who were dependent on him for an income to smuggle drugs across international borders. Idris had smuggled drugs across three continents for two decades, often with assistance of corrupt border officials and police officers.
Child sexual exploitation
Few of these offenders would have considered themselves to have much in common with those involved in trafficking children for the purposes of sexual exploitation, of which there were five in our sample. Three British Asian men and two white (one British, one African) women – described sexual relations at parties that had been seemingly casual from the perspective of the men, with many of the young women consenting to sex because they were persuaded it would cement mutual love and exclusivity. One of these men, Reshmin, a British Bangladeshi, brought court transcripts from his trial to illustrate how he had been found guilty by association with men whom he had only a tangential connection depicted in highly racialized terms as an ‘Asian grooming gang’. Zahir, a married British Asian man in his 30s considered it implausible that the teenage girls – less than half his age – with whom he had sex at parties, had become dependent on the mephedrone he supplied - to the point that they traded sexual favours for it - though he attributed much of his own behaviour to drug dependency. Likewise, Naz a convicted sex offender in his 40s, himself exploited as a grossly underpaid restaurant worker, had a very convoluted view of why hungry and ‘lonely’ teenage girls were turning up at his one-bedroom flat, and ‘making out’ on his bed. The girls who attended these parties typically had parents who were struggling to care for them or were dependent on either a care system working with inadequate resources or ‘pimps’ who took a cut of their earnings. Typically, the girls came to Naz's flat to eat the ‘curries’ he was given to supplement the waitering work he undertook for just £2 per hour. Susan was a victim of this kind of sexual exploitation who had been convicted, also, of perpetrating it, having taken her sister to a party hosted by the men who had repeatedly ‘used’ her for sex. Linda, a Zimbabwean woman in her forties, who had been physically and sexually abused as a child and domestically abused as an adult, drove her own daughter and her daughter's friends to ‘hotel parties’ organised by a former male partner who had previously supplied her with cocaine.
Sham marriage
How some women become entrapped in exploitative relationships was also revealed in two cases of sham marriage. A Cape Verdean woman, Estelle, sentenced to four years imprisonment, had amassed significant debts through gambling after migrating to the UK to find work to support her children and ill mother. Estelle was encouraged by a man who helped bring her children to the UK to arrange sham marriages between Nigerian men and Portuguese women. This illicit enterprise had generated benefits in the form of money for Estelle and the man with whom she worked, plus visas for the ‘grooms’, and £1-2000 for the ‘brides’, until one of them was caught trying to marry a second time. By comparison, Rasheed, serving 12 years for purchasing a sham marriage, had grown up in indentured labour on the Pakistan/Afghan border before: coming to the UK on a tourist visa; becoming a victim of acute exploitation in a British off-licence where he both worked and lived; and being tricked into paying for what he regarded as an ‘arranged marriage’ to avoid deportation. Tragically, Rasheed had coerced the woman he married into having sex with him because he believed the Home Office required the relationship to be consummated to be officially accepted as genuine. Rasheed considered the Eastern European woman he married to be a ‘half victim’ of exploitation, cheated as much as he was by an unscrupulous broker. However, he also wanted it noting that the sham bride had ‘thought up this game’, leaving him ‘heart… broken’ with ‘nothing’ but ‘fear’, ‘shame’ and little chance of reuniting with his parents, wife and child back home for whom he had come to the UK in the hope of sending the remittances they needed to escape destitution.
Discussion
The modern slavery agenda is an ideological framing that utilized the features of a moral panic to build a consensus sympathetic to the hostile environment policy among those otherwise receptive to supporting vulnerable migrants. Through the utilization of false binaries that cast vulnerable victims as under threat from organized foreign criminals and other ‘foreign-looking’ enemies within, the modern slavery agenda dislodged questions about human rights. Discussion of migrants’ rights, workers’ rights, and women and children's were dislodged in favour of political posturing about the need to toughen immigration policy and clampdown on criminal networks; posturing that served to bolster a fictionalized reputation for ending transatlantic slavery in the marketing of ‘post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ (Kenway, 2021).
Within our very diverse sample of modern slavery offenders only a minority of participants (Darius, Faizel, Idris, John,) had connections with enduring organised criminal enterprises, though a wider group had international connections borne out of the necessity of immigration. Some were working in otherwise legitimate businesses and had never been involved in crime previously (Charles, Hina). These labour exploiters had fallen foul of new developments in immigration and modern slavery law, despite asking the authorities for guidance. Two participants (Adam, Keith) were brutal in their use of violence against people trapped in servitude. But, for most of our participants the idea of harming vulnerable people was morally repugnant. To the contrary, those involved in smuggling regarded themselves as nobly providing safe transit across borders.
This is not to idealise those implicated in various forms of trafficking. Those involved in sexually assaulting and ‘grooming’ young women and children for the purposes of sexual exploitation were, at best, confused (Rasheed) or dangerously reckless (Zahir and Naz) in their understanding of sexual consent. The same could be said about some of those who profited from the labour of sex workers. Whilst they had amicable business relationships with women who entered sex work wittingly, the protections men like Adam, Faizel, Idris and Darius offered women sex workers were rarely sufficient to safeguard the desperate and destitute from being exploited. Some sex workers had become exploiters themselves, running brothels (Grace, Nina, Sandra) though often with the intention of providing better working conditions and fairer shares of the profits than they had received. Like some of the men who facilitated sex work, some female modern slavery offenders (Estelle) were enterprising people trying to escape debt, while sending money back to family in countries where opportunities for well-paid work were scarce, healthcare was poor and physical security was lacking. But in most of these ‘non-grooming’ cases, ‘traffickers’ and ‘smugglers’ provided travel, accommodation, or employment to those refused protections from Western governments.
Histories of trauma were commonplace, with 19 participants disclosing serious abuse, bereavements, and threats to life as children or young adults. Four participants (Grace, Estelle, Naz, Vicky) had parents who died while they were children. All but one of the female participants had experienced child abuse or neglect or lived with domestic abuse as a child. Five women had suffered domestic abuse from adult partners. Three had been sex workers and one had been trafficked into domestic servitude though this remained unreported. Of the four men who were perpetrators of domestic violence, at least two (Bob and Keith) were raised by father figures who were domestically or sexually abusive to their mothers and/or sisters, while another two (Adam and Idris) were introduced, as children, to drugs by close male family members. Alessandro had suffered acute PTSD as a resistance fighter in the Balkans war. Idris was a former child soldier. Aron fled Albania having been threatened at gunpoint. In short, many of those criminalised as smugglers and traffickers in the UK are people whose lives have been lived at the crunch points of globalisation, in countries where poverty is commonplace, expectations and life chances are structured by gender, class and ethnic divisions, conflict is acute, and the protections offered by authorities are weak. Some are destitute but nevertheless enterprising people, fluency in English offering a competitive advantage among insecure migrant workers that enables them to collaborate with British nationals more accomplished at working illicitly.
Conclusion
Trafficking, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2006: 5) notes is ‘a process comprising a number of interrelated actions rather than a single act at a given point in time’. What we learnt from the people we interviewed was that crimes of exploitation perpetrated within the UK were rarely orchestrated by international mafias. They were more routinely organised by global and local markets, including unregulated cash-based ones for sex, drugs, underpaid labour, and undocumented travel, alongside the obligatory commitment of returning favours to those who had helped vulnerable migrants along the way. The modern slavery agenda has obscured this reality, while distracting attention away from the ‘interrelated actions’ of the British state which render some people more susceptible to exploitation.
In facing the folk devils, we discovered that few of those convicted of crimes that might be flagged as modern slavery see themselves as exploiters, most never having heard of the term before their arrests. In outlining what these offenders did and did not do, typically in collaboration with those who, through a series of interrelated process not entirely within their control, became their victims, we hope our research reorients attention back towards the structural inequalities, legal systems, failures of safeguarding, regulation and worker protections that explain why acute exploitation persists. To paraphrase Hall et al. (1978: 221), moral panics about different types of modern slavery became ‘the principal forms of ideological consciousness’ through which a ‘silent minority’ was won round to supporting hostile environment policies that legitimized the British government's ever more punitive treatment of the world's poor, recementing ‘an authoritarian consensus… crosscut by the virulence of a lingering racism’ that obscures the unsavoury legacies of Empire and harsh realities of twenty-first century capitalism (1978: 339). While Conservatives claimed to have led the way in ending both transatlantic and modern forms of slavery, the truth of the matter is that British governments also instigated and sustained the various forms of labour exploitation that over two centuries of colonial endeavour required. In its attempts to detain and deport many who have attempted to settle in Britain because the British were once in their home countries (Sivanandan, 2008) – building empires, doing trade deals or waging war – the British government reveals its unwillingness to come terms with its own chequered past, paradoxically orchestrating new international crimes, as both the Windrush scandal and the Rwanda policy both underline, that are just as scandalous as those attributed to foreign ‘criminal gangs’. In exposing the fallacies of official claims about how the modern slavery agenda is protecting victims from amoral traffickers, we hope our study helps unravel the ideological obfuscation this project has engendered, rooted, as it is, in a powerful but misleading narrative of British greatness that overstates the UK's role in abolishing forms of exploitation upon which its fortunes were founded.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all those who participated in the interviews depicted in this article and the various people who helped facilitate them. We are grateful to Jon Spencer, Steve Collett and Joshua Findlay for constructive comments on an earlier draft and Elisa Bellotti and Carly Lightowlers for their work on the wider project which informs our analysis. The authors would also like to thank the ESRC for supporting the research undertaken for the purposes of this article (ES/R004471/1).
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, (grant number ES/R004471/1).