Interview with Eve McMullen about Advocacy Against Modern Slavery
You work at one of the big organisations in the UK that provide support for victims of modern slavery. What exactly does your role encompass?
People come to us when they have entered into the NRM – the National Referral Mechanism – and, according to legislation, they are only supposed to be in that system for 45 days, but our clients are actually with us for an average of two years while they are waiting for their decisions. So, we have become a much broader support system than was intended. Primarily, we’re supposed to be signposting, connect them to all the support systems they need – mental health referrals, the GP, homelessness applications. But because we are often the only support service who’s meeting face to face with these individuals every month, we end up providing a broader support than that. I help my clients with various needs, including accommodation, health, mental health, financial education, if they want English classes and finding them a lawyer for their immigration case.
How often do you see your clients?
We have to see them a minimum of once a month face to face, but clients that are higher risk are on a higher contact plan, so I might see them every two weeks instead.
You focus on working with victims of modern slavery, is that right?
Yes, only victims of modern slavery. It’s only if they are in the NRM that they’ll come to us – because we are sub-contracted by the Home Office to provide the support that they’re supposed to give. modern slavery is a ridiculously broad category though. It basically encompasses most forms of exploitation that you can think of. Most people think of human trafficking because of the traditional connotations of the slave trade – but lots of our clients chose to move and were exploited in the process or are actually British victims. There are plenty of people in the UK who have been part of drug trafficking, county lines, forced criminality. We cover domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, forced labour, sometimes even organ harvesting.
Are there any types of Modern Slavery that are more particular to the UK than other countries?
There are definitely themes that I see. With British victims, it’s often about drug trafficking and forced criminality. They maybe were already in the social care system, or were groomed from a young age into gangs, and if you did my job in another part of the country, maybe in Nottingham or in Liverpool, you would probably come across these cases even more. Because of where I’m based in the South East, we end up with a lot more asylum seekers. It’s just where they arrive. And between them, the highest portion of our clients, so a third of our clients are Albanian. Most of the Albanian cases that I deal with are women who are victims of sex trafficking. Increasingly, though, we are also seeing young Albanian men being tricked into work in the drug trade or forced into unpaid labour in the construction industry. We hear a lot about the Albanian exodus on the News in the UK but it is deeply troubling on the ground.
We then have another quite large contingent coming from North African countries. Sometimes women who were fleeing persecution or young men escaping conflict. Often they have been trafficked through Libya, where a standard part of the route appears to be forced labour and torture at the hands of the smugglers. These are certainly some of the most horrific stories I have heard, frequently involving torture and rape.
Even if people make it to the UK, they are not guaranteed safety as a lot of modern slavery is well-hidden here. For example, we see a lot of Filipino ladies being exploited by, often very wealthy, British families as nannies and domestic servants. Obviously not all of these businesses are illegitimate, but I really struggle now to walk past a hand car wash or a nail bar without wondering about the migrant workers inside.
In those cases, how did these people manage to break free from the trafficking? And in the case of the Albanian women, were they victims of sex trafficking in Albania and came to the UK for refuge, or do these things happen to them in the UK?
We have a whole mix. I can’t emphasise enough how often these Albanian cases are just ordinary women offered seemingly legitimate employment, imprisoned to pay off their husbands’ debt, tricked by a person they thought was their boyfriend or literally kidnapped off the street. Two comparative cases: There’s one lady I worked with who got recruited in Albania by men who drugged and blackmailed her. She was then trafficked all across Europe. They tend to move them around countries – Germany, France, Switzerland – all for the same work. They were in the process of moving her to the UK. When their lorry arrived in the UK, she managed to escape instead of continuing her work in the UK. You hear a lot about people travelling through ‘safe’ countries like France or Germany before arriving in the UK to claim asylum, but I’ve had lots of cases where they felt that only an ocean was enough to protect them from re-trafficking across Europe.
I also had a minor, about sixteen or seventeen at the time, who came from Albania. She thought she came to the UK to escape domestic violence at home. She thought she was coming with her boyfriend. But her boyfriend deserted her as soon as she was put on the boat to go to the UK. That is one of the methods that they use: ‘lover-boy’. They pretend to be their boyfriends and then recruit them into prostitution. I’m not easily shocked at this point, but once there was a case where a minor was kidnapped from their Home Office hotel in the UK to be forced into prostitution at a local brothel. It was heart-breaking to discover.
How frequently do people notice signs of modern slavery? How difficult is it to break into the cycle as an outsider?
It’s really difficult. Primarily because there is not much awareness. Part of what our organisation is doing now is some outreach work, to big companies and to communities for education on recognizing modern slavery. But the lines are blurred. In cases of forced prostitution and sex trafficking it is really obvious that that’s a crime, but a lot of the time it involves workers who don’t have immigration status, and the people who might be employing them might not be bad people, or they might be. If their working conditions aren’t good, they can’t go to the police, they can’t go to the union, they can’t do anything. They know they don’t have any status and that they will be deported if they go to the authorities. So there are employers who get a lot out of that.
Do people who arrive in the UK as illegal immigrants have any real alternative to work that makes them vulnerable to modern slavery?
[Laughs.] I’d like to say yes, but I’m not sure that’s the reality. A lot of the modern slavery legislation doesn’t really focus on preventing it or recognising it. Not a single case I have had has come to court or a police investigation. The legislation primarily focuses on stopping immigration, supposedly as a means to stopping trafficking. And a lot of the rhetoric that they are using at the moment is: if we stop the boats, we are stopping traffickers. The new Illegal Migration Bill means that anyone who arrived here by ‘illegal’ or irregular means has no right to make a modern slavery claim, or an asylum claim. Because of how they entered. But, fundamentally, someone who has been trafficked is always going to enter by illegal means, by definition surely?
So, there is a legislative framework in place, but I don’t think the goal of that framework is to help victims. I think it’s primarily around immigration control. There is also no separation, really, between the police and immigration enforcement officers, unlike in other countries such as the Netherlands. So, if you do go, it’s quite likely you’ll be reported.
Has Brexit strongly affected the legislation?
I don’t know what EU legislation was in place surrounding modern slavery. Because it’s a relatively “new” issue that we are dealing with, si for a lot of it there isn’t international legislation. But certainly, since Brexit, the Home Office has had more free reign in terms of their immigration policies, of which the Nationality and Borders Bill and the Illegal Migration [Bill] are the two flagship policies. From my perspective, what they’re doing does contradict international law, in that you shouldn’t be able to stop people from making an asylum claim, regardless of how they arrived in the country.
So, the Home Office supports you, but at the same time they don’t really want people arriving…?
Yeah. We are quite worried that the impact of the new legislation, when it comes into force, will just be that we have no victims [pauses, laughs] in our service. Because if people arriving illegally can’t make a modern slavery claim…probably 80 percent of my clients, if not more, are asylum seekers and none of them arrived by what we’d call regular means. None of them came here with a visa, or on a plane. So, I’m kind of worried. And you’re right, it’s contradictory. The Home Office is where we get our funding from, but the legislation is not really designed to help the people we work with.
Once the new legislation is enforced, will people still be able to come to your organisation as a safe place then? Obviously, in reality, new people will still arrive in the UK…
The problem is that people come to us through the National Referral Mechanism, which is what you go into when you make a modern slavery claim. You are usually referred in by a Home Office official, a police officer or a solicitor. There isn’t really a way for people to come to us when they first arrive in the country, as a sanctuary or whatever you’d like to call it. Basically, unless someone is referred into the NRM then they won’t come to us.
You mention sanctuaries. Your organisation provides safehouses in and outside of London. How do these work?
The safehouses are part of our NRM provision for individuals who don’t have any other accommodation options. If someone has a modern slavery claim but not an asylum claim, then they won’t be entitled to Home Office accommodation – usually hotels. They have no recourse to public funds, so they can’t claim benefits or universal credit. So, if they don’t have any friends or family in the country to stay with – which a lot of them do – then their only option is a safehouse. We can always offer them a safehouse place but we can never guarantee where that safehouse place is going to be. There are safehouses all over the country; they might end up in Birmingham, or in London. They [the houses] are quite small, they are run by people who do my job, essentially. They [the victims] can stay there as long as they need to, but safehouses are supposed to facilitate them coming up with a move-on plan. You usually find that more high-risk clients end up in safehouses because there aren’t many other options for them.
Does this include people who might have escaped from trafficking and are worried that their traffickers might find them again?
Yes, that can be the case. Sometimes a British client might have access to public funds, but they might be unsafe in the borough that they are being housed in currently. That happens more often with drug trafficking and forced criminality, where we will literally have cases where people have a hit to kill on them.
Is there any significant overlap between homelessness and a vulnerability to modern slavery?
The housing situation in London right now is [laughs] insane. A lot of our clients classify as priority need. They might have health conditions, or they are vulnerable to exploitation. We’re working with the people who you would assume get priority when it comes to housing. But so often they don’t. When the local authority have a responsibility to house, they have to give one offer of suitable accommodation, and if they turn down that one offer of accommodation, then they make themselves intentionally homeless. Which is a really dangerous term. I had a family where the woman was six months pregnant. She has got a life-limiting health condition, which means she can only get treatment at one specific hospital in London. They’ve got a four-year-old son. And both husband and wife are victims of modern slavery. She had to leave her Home Office accommodation because she got her refugee status, so they went to the local authority, as they should, and the local authority said, the only property we can give you is in Bradford. Which is by Leeds. Despite her needing hospital treatment in London. And when they refused that offer of accommodation, the Local Authority said, well, that’s your one offer, you’ve made yourself intentionally homeless. We can’t do anything else for you. Which is an extreme example, but it is the way the housing situation is headed.
Your work, and probably also the work of other people at the charity, provides you with a lot of details of personal stories and the reality of what it’s like to be in any of those situations. Do you manage, as an organisation, to turn that knowledge into campaigning efforts or to raise awareness in the government, that might not know the details of just how complicated it is?
We do try to. Resources are sometimes a problem. We have some lobbying power. There was an Anti-Slavery Coalition, which is us and a bunch of the big anti-slavery NGOs, [and we] formed a lobbying front against the new Illegal Migration Act. The Lords repeatedly approved our amendments, which would have been, essentially, to exclude modern slavery victims from some of the harsher terms of the Bill. That entered ping-pong with the House of Commons. And the House of Lords, if it [the Bill] is repeatedly rejected by the Commons, can’t override that, unfortunately. So our amendments were turned down.
We do try to do some social research as well. Every year we havea research project, which focuses on a different theme each year. This year, for obvious reasons, it focused on Albanian victims. I was partially involved in that project, which was about interviewing our Albanian clients about their stories, picking out the common themes, surveying our clients – because, realistically, we have one of the biggest untapped databases on modern slavery victims in the country. The project is due to come out in October or November, and that gets quite wide publicity.
I look forward to seeing it.
It’s useful. I had some of my clients interviewed for that so that their stories could be used.
Do you ever have problems with language barriers?
[Laughs.] Basically, none of my clients at the moment speak English. I use interpreting services. But you have to be sensitive whenever you use translators because there is cultural misunderstanding. If you communicate something legal and important about their case and it is not communicated clearly, then you can cause the client a lot of distress. I use a lot of Albanian interpreters. Most of the ones I work with are very good. But there is also a lot of mistrust, even within the Albanian community, so you have to be careful. Some people will only work with one particular interpreter because of their relationship, or the distrust they have for others in their community. It [language] is definitely an interesting part of the job. Obviously, I have to message my clients a lot, and I have to rely on Google Translate a lot more than I should.
People tend to forget that this understanding across languages is often the make or break of any human rights situation…
Absolutely. And I often get angry on behalf of my clients when I’m trying to signpost them to other support services, and we are trying to facilitate their independence, but the other support services just refuse to use an interpreter. How do you expect them to access the support? Sometimes you even have to argue with the GPs. The NHS has free access to telephone interpreters whenever you need them, and you still have to argue with a GP to try to get them an appointment with an interpreter. How do you expect them to discuss their concerns or their mental health with you?
Maybe as a last question. During your work on modern slavery, have you noticed any repeated misconceptions that people have about what modern slavery is?
Most people just don’t know what it is. And I think with good reason. My opinion is that it’s a bit of a constructed category that doesn’t acknowledge the diverse array of exploitation that people can experience and be a victim of. But I work with social workers, I work with housing officers, I work with doctors and mental health teams, and I will find myself explaining to them at least once a week what modern slavery is, what the NRM is, what it means that our victims have experienced, what it means about their immigration status. There is just no professional knowledge, let alone public knowledge. And, on the public level, I guess the misconception is that they only ever hear about modern slavery or human trafficking when it comes to immigration policy, and so they think that everyone who is entering on a boat is being trafficked. When they don’t realise that modern slavery is something that can happen in the UK. It’s something that takes all these different forms, and it doesn’t just have to do with immigration.
So, the media also distorts the image…?
The media have furthered a certain political narrative that doesn’t actually focus on victims. Nothing about it is victim-centered.
Eve McMullen left the organisation in October 2023 to pursue work in Human Rights law. Opinions expressed in the article are her own and nothing in this article should be taken as a reflection of the organisation’s views or policies.
