Shortly before 1:40 am on October 25 2019, a gruesome discovery was made by ambulance paramedics called out to a refrigerated lorry trailer at Waterglade Industrial Park on Eastern Avenue in Grays, Essex. The police arrived soon afterwards. The bodies of thirty-nine people, including thirty-one men and eight women, were found in a hitherto sealed refrigerated container. All of the victims, now believed to be from Vietnam, were pronounced dead at the scene. The trailer was found attached to an articulated red Scania lorry that had been registered in Bulgaria.
This tragic event set in motion an investigation, coordinated by Essex Police, that is likely to be both time consuming and labour intensive. The refrigerated trailer is owned by Global Trailer Rentals Ltd, an Irish company, and had arrived at the port of Purfleet in Essex from Zeebrugge in Belgium at around 12 30 am on October 23. The front section of the lorry-the lorry cab- had arrived at Holyhead on Anglesey on a ferry from Dublin on October 20 The 25-year-old lorry driver, from Northern Ireland, was arrested and has subsequently been charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people. There have also been other arrests, and more charges will undoubtedly follow.
People trafficking is a big and dirty business. The lucrative nature of the trade and the large numbers of potential victims have attracted unscrupulous international criminal gangs, who operate with impunity, protected by impenetrable codes of secrecy. This is a pervasive trade, with people being trafficked around the world, irrespective of age, gender, race or nationality. Most victims come from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. The trade in people is one of the major forms of international crime, alongside the illegal arms trade and drug trafficking. The US State Department estimates that there are 24.9 million trafficking victims worldwide.
People trafficking is not synonymous with people smuggling, which involves the illegal transport of people across international borders for a fee. Those smuggled are then free to operate according to their own devices. Trafficking, on the other hand, is an exploitative activity, comprising the acts of recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring and receipt of captive people, achieved by means of either force, threat or deception, for the purposes of exploitation.
The exploitation of trafficked people includes sexual exploitation (for commercial sexual activity, including prostitution and pornography), forced labour, forced criminal activity (such as begging and petty theft), and the forced removal of organs. Forced labour may involve working in construction, manufacturing, hospitality, domestic servitude, food packaging, drug cultivation-as in indoor cannabis farms, car washes, and the beauty trade-in hair salons and nail bars. Debt-bondage to the traffickers often locks the victims into long-term enslavement. There are many potential ways in which trafficked people can be marketed, and much demand for their services in certain sectors of the economy, especially the underground shadow economy. Women and children are more often used for sexual exploitation, while men feature mostly in forced labour.
There are a number of ways in which human trafficking can be recognised. For example, sexual exploitation may be suspected when many female victims are lodged together in the same property and rarely venture outside. The property may be visited by many men throughout the day, and sexual paraphernalia, such as used condoms and call cards, may litter the surroundings. Many lists of potential indicators of human trafficking have been produced by various law enforcement agencies throughout the world.
What can be done if people trafficking is suspected? The Modern Slavery Act 2015 has paved the way for action closer to home. In England and Wales, a number of First Responder organisations, including the police, local authorities, and voluntary organisations such as the NSPCC and the Salvation Army, can be contacted in the first instance. First Responders can then make referrals by e-mail, through the National Referral Mechanism, to the Single Competent Authority within the Home Office for further investigation.
Following on from this, what can be done about human trafficking? The US government’s “three Ps” include the prevention of trafficking, protection of victims, and the prosecution of traffickers. Prevention-the best strategy- poses a major challenge, as local economic, social and political factors in source developing countries require long-term solutions that may not be readily forthcoming.
Border controls in recipient developed countries are constantly being tested, as trafficked people continue to arrive in the backs of lorries, small boats, and, more recently, inside commercial shipping containers. There are nine major container ports in the UK and most processes for handling containers are automated, with limited inspections of shipping cargo, especially at smaller ports on the south and east coasts of England. Sniffer dogs, heat scanners (thermal imaging equipment) and carbon dioxide testing equipment can only go so far. Furthermore, it appears that thermal imaging equipment, normally used to detect hidden humans, may not work when used on refrigerated shipping containers.
Trafficked people are the unfortunate victims of desperate economic circumstances. These people often lack passports and other travel documents and are frequently too scared to seek help, especially since working in the UK without the necessary paperwork criminalises them under the Immigration Act 2016. An absence of labour and other rights makes them particularly vulnerable to the worst excesses of rapacious and exploitative employers.
Improved border controls and the sharing of intelligence across national borders will have to go hand in hand with the earlier recognition and humane treatment of those actually trafficked, alongside severe penalties for the culprits, where identified. Breaking up well-resourced international criminal rings remains a much bigger challenge, one that has yet to be cracked.
Ashis Banerjee