Victims of exploitation are worked like slaves

The Exploited is an investigation by Sean O’Neil exposing the prevalence of human trafficking and modern slavery in our communities where victims, and their abusers, are hiding in plain sight

Labour exploitation remains the most prevalent form of modern slavery within our society. In some cases, we have learned that construction workers in Aberdeen are being forced to work without pay and fruit pickers in Perthshire live in fear of the gangs who control their jobs.

At least 215 of the 387 cases of human exploitation referred to Police Scotland in 2020 contained some form of labour exploitation.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, despite a 41% drop-off in calls to the Unseen helpline concerning Scottish labour exploitation, the issue still remained the highest form of modern slavery reported to the charity.

Statistics show that labour has been the main problem area witnessed by the organisation since 2017 when their report begins. Within that fouryear period 128 calls were due to labour exploitation.

Urban industries like nail bars, car washes, construction and the hospitality sector are considered at risk for labour exploitation while rural industries such as agriculture, food processing, forestry and fishing can also be problematic.

As in criminal and sexual exploitation, victims in labour situations can often struggle to recognise themselves as such.

These people may also have been moved around and exploited like those in the sex industry and cannabis farms.

“Pre-pandemic we would see the car-washing industry, we would often see trafficking and labour exploitation, and nail bars as well,” said Detective Inspector Calum Smith in Inverness.

“More recently we had a young Vietnamese male self-report that he had been trafficked into the country.

“We have linked to him through staying at an address in Inverness (but) when you start looking at the intelligence picture back the way, you start to see links back into the labour exploitation market in nail bars about 18 months ago.

“Then you start to see links back down towards the Central Belt in terms of people of interest who (we) have known to be involved in trafficking and exploitation of victims.”

As well as working for little money and living in cramped and inhumane conditions, victims of modern slavery can also have serious health conditions brought about by their working environment.

Joy Gillespie, development manager at Survivors of Human Trafficking in Scotland, said vulnerable victims are often put to work without the correct protective equipment, leading to serious health issues.

“The serious physical and psychological effects of trafficking are horrific,” says Ms Gillespie.

“It’s common for people that have been trafficked to have serious health problems. “We’ve seen men that have had to have amputations because they have been working in car washes and don’t have the proper footwear and they are working in water all day.

“The trauma that they suffer goes on and is really profound and enduring and can be transgenerational.”

In recent months, human trafficking officers have been turning some of their focus to the fishing industry where there are fears that exploitation crimes are going severely under-reported.

The set-up of the fishing industry means the risk factors for exploitation are high.

Detective Inspector Caroline Gray, North-East division, explains: “The rationale (for underreporting) in the fishing industry is because it is an industry with a lot of migrant workers and it’s predominantly jobs which involve manual labour.

“Those two aspects lend themselves to the type of industry where there could be problems because they could have workers where there’s language barriers, where they’re a long way from home, and those types of vulnerabilities could potentially make them susceptible to being exploited.

“Something that we’ve been doing on an ongoing basis is visiting the ports throughout the Moray and Aberdeenshire coast and the harbour in Aberdeen itself.”

DI Smith, of the Highlands and islands division, recalled an instance around three years ago of a slavery situation within the fishing industry on the Western Isles.

A number of fishermen, that he believes were African, had their passports removed and were being “completely exploited” in Stornoway.

Unlike in the vast majority of victims discovered in other branches of human trafficking and modern slavery, the nationalities tend to be different within the fishing trade.

The most prevalent nationalities of potential victims being reported in fishing are Filipinos, sub-Saharan Africans, Portuguese and Spanish.

On April 30, this investigation joined an early-morning raid on an alleged Romanian human trafficking ring which had been operating out of the Blairgowrie area for a number of years.

Officers on a multiagency investigation burst down the doors of two properties.

Four people were arrested as part of the operation led by Detective Inspector Marc Lorente of Tayside division.

The suspects are all

“People are less visible – you don’t know what’s going on

alleged to have links to the fruit-picking industry in the region.

A number of potential victims of human trafficking were also identified.

While the raid in Blairgowrie might have shocked residents in Tayside, those working on addressing the issue know that rural communities have a hidden problem.

Investigators and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have highlighted the issue in identifying modern slavery crimes in rural communities due to a lack of reports from the public, who are unaware that such illicit activities can be occurring in their towns and villages and are therefore not looking for the signs.

Shan Saba, founder of Scotland Against Modern Slavery, says: “A typical victim in Glasgow may be very different from a typical victim in Perthshire or in the north-east of Scotland, but there are cases across the board, across the whole of the UK.

“What I always find is the bias that it doesn’t happen in Scotland, doesn’t happen where I live, it doesn’t happen here – but actually the shock is that in every local authority in Scotland victims have been rescued.

“That is victims that have recognised they are victims and have been referred to the system – because for every one rescued there’s five potentially that aren’t.

“When I think about rural areas or distance, people are far more dispersed, they’re less visible, so you don’t know what’s going on.”

MODERN SLAVERY: Some of the farming and fruit-picking workforce live in fear of the gangs which control their jobs.