So far we've focused on the victims and raising awareness about their stories, but to truly understand the extent of the problem we will try to understand the perpetrators' motives. And for that I sat down with detective inspector of the London Metropolitan Police's human trafficking and prostitution unit. His name is Kevin Hyland and I began by asking him to describe the people committing what are, let's face it, these horrendous crimes.
The sort of people we meet, they have no regard for human life. Because they are very happy to turn a human being into a commodity. To them, the human is a way of making money, and lots of it. The cases that we see, say from Nigeria, you know the horror stories that we see of children being picked up off the streets of Benin, and places in Nigeria, subject to juju and witchcraft, duped into coming to the UK with forced doctuments, and then sold into the sex trade or sold as domestics.
And the perpetrators of these crimes, these crimes against humanity, can oftimes be women?
They can often be women. And we have convicted a number of cases of women, a case that we dealt with, convicted this year, a remaining gang, where they brought in children, and specifically one child who was a slave in the house taken from her family when she was four, was in slavery until she was seven when we rescued her. But in the same household they had men that they would send out to commit petty crime. And they would threaten them with violence and sexually assault them if they didn't do as they're told. That gang was headed by a woman.
The global slavery index was launched this week. It's suggests or reveals that 29 million people are denied their freedom around the world. It talks about the risk factors and indeed the measures that might help going forward. What are the biggest challenges that you face? And what do you need?
One of the steps that's being taken in the United Kingdom is a review of legislation. And I think the creation of a human trafficking bill or human trafficking act is a step in the right direction because that is saying very clearly we are going to take this and deal with it. And the other thing we need to be able to do is tackle the finances and those finances need to be returned due to the investigation of trafficking and the support of victims. We need to make it easier to work internationally because it's source countries where people are brought from. We need to be able to respond quickly. A trafficker can get a person and book them on a flight as quick as they can book a ticket online. For the law enforcement to chase that up can take weeks, months, and even years.
Finally just describe the industry to me and its links to others. My sense is that trafficking is hooked up with drugs, which is hooked up with arms. These are some of the biggest industries in the world, aren't they?
They reorganized their limit of it. Those that are moving people in bulk, we know, are connected to other serious crime in the countries of origin. And we see cases where we've convicted people and the welfare amassed in other countries, for example, Thailand where we work with the Thai authorities to strip someone of their assets. they're really significant assets.
What are we talking about here? Millions of pounds?
We are talking about millions of pounds. If you look at, you take this in simple figures. We deal with women who are forced into prostitution. Sex on the streets of London may be between forty and a hundred pounds. They may be forced to have sex with fifty or sixty people a week. Easily. We have had cases where women have been forced to have over thirty a day. You've only got to work out the maths, if you've got ten women working for you, you soon become a millionaire.
