Time Magazine After Darrell Simester, then 30, went missing on vacation at a south
Wales seaside resort in Aug. 2000, his family didn’t see him again for
almost 13 years. They never gave up trying to find the “vulnerable” and
“timid” Simester — and their perseverance eventually paid off. In March
2013, an anonymous
tip-off led Simester’s family to a two-berth caravan in a stable yard
just outside Cardiff, Wales’s capital city. There they found him, now
aged 43, in dirty, torn clothes and with teeth missing – but otherwise
okay.
Simester’s case sparked a major police operation codenamed Operation
Imperial. In police raids in September, two other men (one Polish, one
British) were also found living in poor conditions at or near the same
site where Simester had been found. Three men have subsequently been
arrested and released on bail, all charged with false imprisonment,
conspiracy to hold a person in servitude and conspiracy to force a
person to work. A 42-year-old woman has also been released on bail.
Rather than being an isolated incident, the U.K. Home Office said in a
statement that the case serves as an “appalling reminder” of the extent
to which slavery has reappeared in the country. A report released on
Oct. 17 by the Global Slavery Index says that it is estimated there are
as many as 4,000 people enslaved in the U.K. – and that more could be
done to help them and others from sharing their fate. While slavery — or
human trafficking — is often thought of in terms of female victims of
sexual exploitation, the statistics suggest that the gender distribution
is relatively even. Of the 2,255 potential human trafficking victims
identified in the U.K. in 2012, 40% were male. And in addition to sex,
the trade in human beings for financial gain can involve forced labor,
domestic servitude and even organ harvesting. In 2012, some 87% of the
507 potential victims of forced labor exploitation in the U.K. were
male.
To put human trafficking in its international context, it is the
third most profitable business for international organized crime after
the drugs and arms trades – and is globally estimated to generate profit
margins of billions of dollars per year. As of June 2012, the
International Labor Organization estimated that 20.9m people are victims
of forced labor and sexual exploitation worldwide. And the 2012 U.N. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons
says that men and boys are estimated to account for approximately 25%
of trafficking victims detected worldwide. But as the report points out,
official statistics represent only the “tip of the iceberg” as
criminals generally go to great lengths to conceal their activities. [...]