Europe Urged to Fight Modern Slavery at Home

LONDON - Governments are being urged to take tougher action against modern-day slavery after new data show a rise in cases of people-trafficking in Europe, with the victims including children as young as five.

In Britain, which on Thursday marked Anti-Slavery Day, established by Parliament in 2010, police estimate trafficked children change hands among criminal gangs for around $25,000.

Victims include not just children, sometimes sold off as street beggars or lookouts for thieves, but also women tricked into prostitution or domestic slavery, and men forced into hard labor at near-starvation wages.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-state European Union, earlier this year presented a five-year strategy to eradicate people-trafficking in Europe.

Cecilia Malmström, the commissioner for internal affairs, said at the time, “It is daunting…to see that trafficking cases rarely make it to court in European countries.”

She sai d convictions had gone down in recent years, from around 1,500 in 2008 to 1,100 two years later. “Every single E.U. country has a major responsibility to make sure that these issues are given the weight that they deserve,” Ms. Malmström wrote.

The European Human Rights Court last week condemned France for failing to protect two young war orphans from Burundi, forced into domestic slavery by a diplomatic family.

According to Sylvie O'Dy, vice-president of the French Committee Against Modern Slavery, one in five cases of domestic slavery in France involves abuse by diplomats.

The newly released British data show authorities identified 946 trafficking victims last year, an increase from 710 in 2010. A government study said criminal gangs were behind the trade and the majority of victims here were from China, Nigeria and Eastern Europe.

The London-based Anti-Slavery International defines human trafficking as “transporting people away from the commu nities in which they live and forcing them to work against their will using violence, deception or coercion.

“Because of its hidden nature, it is difficult to get accurate statistics on the numbers affected,” the organization acknowledged. “But the International Labor Organization estimates that at any one time there are some 2.5 million people who have been trafficked and are being subjected to sexual or labor exploitation.”

Europol, the European Union's criminal intelligence agency, estimates trafficked children can earn more than $200,000 a year each for criminal gangs who train them to pick-pocket, beg and rob, or who force them into prostitution. Torture and sexual abuse are used to control them.

Activists have urged that trafficking victims forced into crime should not be treated as offenders. Anti-Slavery International says governments must recognize that all trafficked people are victims of a human rights violation and provide them with a pr otection and support.

Anthony Steen, a British former Conservative parliamentarian who chairs the Human Trafficking Foundation, said in an interview with the Daily Express this week that modern slavery was a global phenomenon.

There was tremendous good will to tackle the problem but, in Britain at least, more could be done. “How many successful prosecutions were there last year in convicting human traffickers…in the U.K? We convicted just 8.”

“We are talking about an epidemic which we thought had disappeared in 1833 when [William] Wilberforce abolished slavery,” Mr. Steen said. “Instead what he abolished was what we could see, not what we couldn't.”