It’s our addiction to cheap goods and services that is, indirectly, putting these men into slavery.
Assignment / BBC (11/17/18)
Modern slaves are all around us and many of them are men. They work in factories and private homes, unseen and unheard. Zita Adamson tells the stories of some of these men as they arrive at the UK’s first safe house for male victims of modern slavery.
She spent a year recording at the safe house, talking to men like Mo who ran away from a refugee camp in Bangladesh, only to be trafficked to London as a domestic servant.
“All my life I am running – running, running, running,” he says.
Wahib, forced into prostitution after losing both parents in the conflict in South Sudan, warns listeners that the streets of Europe are not paved with gold. And Kristof from Hungary admits that, even though he’s now free, it’s hard to trust people again.
Life at the safe house is about trying to give back the men a sense of their value as a human being, says Kate Garbers, managing director of Unseen, the UK-based charity that runs the house. Her view is that it’s our addiction to cheap goods and services that is, indirectly, putting these men into slavery. And she argues that it’s only by making better choices as consumers that we’ll end this hideous trade.