Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. That figure was first announced in a meeting with the Joint Committee only in March or April last year. That was the best available evidence at that time, and I am sure that the situation has moved on since then. It is hard to estimate the numbers of unaccompanied minors, people in private fostering arrangements and children. The police told us that 10 years ago 85 per cent. of sex workers working in brothels in the United Kingdom were from the UK. That has now been completely reversed: 10 years on, 85 per cent. are from outside the UK. We visited the POPPY project. I agree with the hon. Member for Totnes that it is a wonderful project, but it is also far too small to cope with the huge demand and the huge and complex needs of the victims. I hope that the signing of the convention will mark the beginning of the end of such problems. The UK is doing some things to combat the modern-day slave trade of human trafficking. I mentioned in my intervention on the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks the fingerprinting work done by consulates and embassies in highly vulnerable countries. That fingerprinting—and the collection of other biometric data—gives the UK authorities something to go on; if a child presents themselves to social services, we can trace them back to their country of origin. I am also interested in the work that the Home Office has done with PunterNet, a website for men who use prostitutes. I must admit that until I participated in the inquiry I was not aware that such sites existed, and I have not dared to surf for it on the internet because I am worried that access might be denied on the parliamentary network. Conflicting advice is coming from the Home Office—on the one hand men who have sex with women who have been trafficked and therefore do not consent could be prosecuted for rape, while on the other hand, there is an encouragement on PunterNet to men to come forward if believe that the women they are sleeping with may have been trafficked. That is a confusing situation to put such men in, and we need clarification so that more so-called punters come forward. I pay tribute to the Home Office for setting up Reflex, the multi-agency task force to tackle immigration crime, as well as the human trafficking centre and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. However, more victims in the recent period have been arrested and deported than traffickers have been prosecuted. Recommendation 136 of our report is that more should be done to bring such people to justice and to seize the assets of traffickers. There is nothing more criminal than profiting from the trade in, and movement of, another human being. There is also no central database of victims and no clear statement of what should happen to them once identified. When our action plan is published, I hope that it will deal with many such issues. We met the women at the POPPY project. They talked to us about what happened when they were involved in the court process to bring their attackers or imprisoners to justice and they were promised that they would be able to give evidence from behind a screen: in one case, the judge decided not to use a screen and the victim, who had been forcibly imprisoned, had to give evidence facing her enslaver, which was highly traumatic, of course. I also ask the Government to look at making trafficking one of the police performance indicators. We all know that what gets measured gets done. Italy provides a shining example of what can be done, with good will and with investment, to tackle the trade and to stem it. We have heard a lot of analysis of some of the problems, but when we visited Italy we heard the beginnings of some of the solutions in terms of tackling the modern-day slave trade. Italy has a convention called Article 18. It is a legal framework that gives victims protection under the law. It was introduced in 1998, so Italy has had almost 10 years of offering, effectively, asylum—a residency permit for six months—to people who come forward and co-operate with the police, and provide information about their captors. The Italian authorities have a centralised database, so they were able to tell us that between 2000 and 2004, more than 7,000 women claimed a residence permit under the scheme. That is a huge number. Some 4,000 gained a permit, and nearly 6,000 got vocational training. The authorities were also able to tell us the country of origin of these women: 52 per cent. were from Nigeria, and the rest, as we would expect, were from Romania, Moldova, Albania and Ukraine. Interestingly, the authorities said that the women from Africa and Nigeria were the least likely to co-operate with the police in bringing their attackers to justice. I do not know whether that is for cultural reasons, or because of a particular power in their home country, but there certainly seemed to be a problem with getting women from Nigeria to co-operate. In 2003, the Italian authorities also increased the legislative penalty for ““selling or purchasing slaves””, as they call it, from eight to 20 years in prison. That penalty can be increased by up to 50 per cent. for trading in minors aged under 18. We have heard today from Opposition Members about the number of such people arrested in Italy. In 2004, there were 412 arrests, and in 2005 there were 356 arrests. There is a single, central, national free-phone number for victims—or to enable ordinary citizens to provide information—which is printed on bus tickets. More than 500,000 calls have been made, but more than two thirds of them have come not from victims or punters, but from ordinary citizens. Such people include those living in apartment blocks who have seen or heard something, or those who have done so while driving past, and who believe that some form of dodgy dealing is going on behind closed doors or on the streets, and that that information should be passed on to the police. That shows us what ordinary citizens can do when the authorities empower them to show awareness and to say, ““We will have zero tolerance of trafficking—this modern slave trade—and we will have justice and social justice for victims.”” That advice line gives 24-hour legal, psychological and medical information, and it monitors what happens to such people after the calls are made. Help is also provided by the International Organisation for Migration in the form of grants to help victims return home. However, it is very important that those women should not be sent home and straight back into the hands of their traffickers. While we were there, we heard some anecdotal evidence. When the UK was deporting nationals, the police would be phoned at the airports. Sadly, however, in some of the countries to which we were deporting people, the traffickers would be telephoned to be told that a particular person was on her way back. She would then be met at the airport and her bonded debt would be paid out in a brothel in Albania, Romania or Moldova. We also saw the various awareness campaigns that were being run. Such campaigns are happening in the UK, which is also funding them in the countries of origin. Super-8 film clips are shown of children growing up and being looked after by their mothers. The mothers are then shown standing on the streets of Rome in their underwear. Such footage is very hard-hitting. The campaign slogan was, ““Don’t burn your life””. Research was also conducted in the countries of origin. Of course, nobody thinks that they are going to be a victim of traffickers; however, it emerged that 85 per cent. of women did think that they would travel to another country and get a job there. Given the huge numbers of people who are looking for work in western Europe, they are extremely vulnerable. When the Joint Committee was in Italy, the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) and I went for a night out with a local non-governmental organisation representative in Rome, a city in which I lived for a year as a student. I know some of the main prostitute runs in Rome, and in fact, I was propositioned myself as a 19-year-old, standing on the main Christopher Columbus boulevard outside Rome. There is a long tradition in Rome of street prostitution, and as a 19-year-old it was terrifying to have someone stop in a car next to me and invite me to accompany him. What shocked me on my recent visit to Rome was the situation regarding children. I went out on the streets with three people—a driver, a social worker and a cultural mediator. Such mediators come from eastern Europe or from Africa, and they talk to women from their home country, reassure them and discuss living in Italy with them. We went out with a big box of condoms, and leaflets printed in every African and eastern European language that one can think of that gave the addresses of sexual health clinics. However, that is a ““softly, softly”” approach to these women and girls. When they go to the clinic in town, they are immediately told, ““You have rights under article 18. You can claim residency and social justice in this country.”” They can claim protection, and many of them do. We also heard what happens to such women afterwards. They are given shelter in a network of safe houses and, crucially, information on finding work. Most of them have transferred to the work permit scheme. So Italy adopts an holistic approach to the victim, and it offers the UK and the rest of the Europe the beginnings of a model. However, investment and commitment are also needed, and it takes a long time to gain the trust of these women. Each generation and century has its own challenges and has to defeat the dark forces that challenge our common humanity. Wilberforce, as we have heard, introduced his first Bill against the slave trade in 1791—in the 18th century. It took him 16 years finally to get the slave trade abolished, in 1807, but even that Act did nothing to free those who were already enslaved. They had to wait until 1833—until the Slavery Abolition Act, which granted freedom to all slaves in the British empire—another 26 years. Between 1791 and 1833, a whole generation of people were enslaved, born into slavery, and lived and died in slavery before Wilberforce’s great achievement and the achievement of the 1833 Act. Human progress may be slow, but when it comes, it comes for good and stays for good. In the 20th century, it took the campaigner against genocide and holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin many years before his term for the great crime against humanity—genocide—was accepted by the new United Nations and recognised and confirmed in law in 1951. He wanted to impose on nations a duty of responsibility to protect those who suffer genocide, and a responsibility on other UN nations to protect them. Yet still no action has been taken collectively by that body on all the huge and terrible genocides of the 20th century—be it Cambodia, Rwanda or Bosnia—or of the 21st century, in Darfur. Will human trafficking be the great challenge to our still young 21st century? The forces of globalisation of trade, and the availability of ever easier and cheaper flights, raise endless possibilities for communication and leisure, but also for abuse, criminality and modern slavery. If human trafficking is not to define our century as slavery defined the 18th and 19th centuries and genocide defined the 20th, we must act now. Strong laws, strong protection and recognition of our shared and common humanity across borders, gender and race are indeed principles of which Wilberforce himself would have been proud. They are the principles of human progress, for which Members in all parts of the House will doubtless continue to fight.