Emily Parker spoke with editor Peter Stanley about what slavery looks like today and what is being done to bring an end to it.

Peter Stanley

In recent years, a dramatic increase in human trafficking has given rise to one of the most tragic blights on contemporary society, 'modern slavery'.

With over thirty years combined experience in fighting human trafficking, the editors of Fighting Slavery: Faith In Action found themselves inspired by certain individuals who sought to combat this evil. Many are unsung heroes, caring little for profile, yet they are motivated by their faith and compassion, to respond with action. Thus Nick Kinsella and Peter Stanley wrote a book in which 22 modern day slavery fighters got to tell their stories from the cutting edge of combatting human trafficking. Emily began by asking Peter about the work that he is involved in.

Peter: I live in London and have been involved in a number of different causes, fighting human trafficking for about the last 10 years or so. I work with mentoring troubled teenagers in my locality and we've just written a book to encourage people about fighting slavery.

Emily: Can you paint a picture for us of what modern day slavery looks like?

Peter: For a lot of people, I think we look back 200 years and we think of the slave ships and plantations. It was all very open and people knew what it looked like.

Today slavery can be in the back of a transit van, or it can be in a nail bar, or it can be in an illegal brothel around the corner. Just recently the police raided a couple of houses in my own street and they were walled up as cannabis factories. They brought in young Vietnamese boys to run the dangerous cannabis farms.

It takes many forms. Quite often there have been stories of supermarkets chains with daffodils and flowers that have been picked in farms and then they found out that people picking in the farms have been trafficked and kept under really tough slave conditions.

The key thing is that it is happening here in our country, in the UK and it is happening in virtually every town or city that we live in. It's just that often it's not as obvious as it was 200 years ago, it's more subtle, but it is there. The good thing is that people are now seeing it and are waking up to it. People are beginning to come against it and the fight is on and a lot of good is being done.

Emily: So how did you and Nick Kinsella get involved in putting together the book 'Fighting Slavery: Faith In Action'?

Peter: Nick and I worked together at the UK Human Trafficking Centre. He set it up for the Government and he asked me to come on board as the National Prevention Co-ordinator. We would meet quite regularly and talk about well-known people. Everybody knows about Wilberforce and Shaftsbury and people like that, but we were talking about priests and nuns that we'd read stories about in Italy, Albania and people in this country who were risking their lives to help the victims of slavery.

They are aware that the traffickers are out there and they may well know where they live and all of them were motivated by their Christian faith. We got talking and we said that there are some real heroes out there. Quite often if someone does it for their Christian faith, other people could be a bit critical and say, "Oh, well you're only doing it cause you're Bible bashing", but we know that there are vast armies of people out there that are doing it day in and day out, to help people.

It struck us that faith is such a wonderful motivator as it gives us value in human life and it gives us compassion. We thought that if we wrote a book and we asked people to write chapters about their own stories that were easily read, then people could associate with that and say, "I think my faith could be my motivator and I can do something like that too".

Emily: Which account in the book did you feel inspired by?

Peter: Sir James Ewing, who's a young London barrister. He got really impacted by International Justice Mission (IJM) who got people involved in using their own skills. In other words lawyers would volunteer to work with IJM, which happened to be out in India. They were able to help the local people use their skills to identify where victims of trafficking were and to help the local people to prosecute the traffickers and to keep the victims safe. They built up a care structure for them.