Traffic

You know those myths and rumours that run through every family, "your great uncle Ronald invented the spoon" - that type of thing. Well in my family the legend is that we're related to William Wilberforce. I'm not convinced myself, but having said that I've never tried to prove or disprove it.

Wilberforce, for ignoramuses out there, was a politician who is credited with abolishing slavery in the UK in 1807. But if we look around us today, how well did he really succeed? Illegal though it may be to trade in people, we cannot deny that it goes on all around us, and that society does little to prevent it.

It's never front page news, but occassionally a story will crop up about tales of domestic servitude full of grisly detail about people, often children, kept in conditions not fit even for the most hardy of animals.

What we hear less about is the trafficking of people by the sex trade. Again, there will sometimes be a story boasting of the capture of a trafficking ring, but in these stories the focus is always on the capture of the bad guys and never on the torment of the good. Victims of trafficking are glossed over, even by our own authorities, as commodities rather than treated as the vulnerable humans they are.

This is going on all around us, in every town, and I don't know what upsets me more - that the authorities are overlooking it, or that society is obviously making use of it's services. Police figures estimate 30,000 people (mainly women) are forcibly trafficked into the sex trade in the UK but experts believe the real figure is far higher. The chances are that someone you know will have played a part in the abuse of a trafficking victim.

I guess I'm probably not descended from Wilberforce. Maybe if I were I would feel like I could do something to stop it.