CR spoke with CARE about their response to government strategy

Lydia Bowden

2011 saw the launch of the Slavery and Human Trafficking Review by the Centre For Social Justice (CSJ), which hopes to shed light on how much of a problem slavery is in the UK. Last year also saw the Government release their long-awaited human trafficking strategy. With some organisations estimating that worldwide more than one person is trafficked across borders every minute, Rebecca Duffett spoke Lydia Bowden, the Human Trafficking Policy Officer for the social policy charity CARE, to hear their hopes and disappointments with the publication of the Government strategy and what they believe needs to happen to deal with the problem in the UK.

Rebecca: What were the most significant things we can take from the report?

Lydia: First of all we're really pleased that the government has decided to release the strategy, because it gives us a framework to build upon. What they chose to focus on were the government's response to combating human trafficking. They talked about improving victim identification and better victim care. They are focusing on some other action at the border and more co-ordination of law enforcement both in the UK and abroad. We are very happy that they have decided to touch on the issue of victims and care, but we would like to have seen more of that out of the whole document. The document is about 30 pages and there were only two pages dedicated to that. It seems a pity that in a country that has such a big problem of trafficking, that it was more focused on the problem abroad and not as focused on the problem within the UK.

Rebecca: Do you think that with the publication of this report it will raise the awareness of how much of a problem slavery and trafficking are?

Lydia: Yes certainly we hope that this document will raise awareness and keep it on the agenda of the MPs and on the agenda of the ministers making the decisions on how to tackle this issue.

Rebecca: Do you think that in general the report will please people who are looking to work in this area, because there's also an ongoing CSJ review into this as well?

Lydia: I think it's great to have had so much coming out at one time, because just raising awareness of the issue and keeping it on the government's agenda is very important. But, unfortunately I think the strategy was pretty weak in its language and it didn't say anything that we didn't already know. What we hope is that the upcoming CSJ report will build upon it and use some of their ideas and perhaps make recommendations on ways that we can actually make the strategy even better.

Rebecca: Do you think the things outlined in the strategy are achievable?

Lydia: I think that they are achievable. A lot of the strategies focus on the future and how the UK is hoping to establish a new national crime agency, which they hope is going to strengthen the borders and help prevent human trafficking. There's a lot of emphasis on the governments plan. I think that a lot of the things written in the strategy were things we already knew were going on and it didn't necessarily point to ways that they're going to make things better, especially in the area of victim care and people who have already been trafficked into the country. It's not entirely clear how they plan on addressing the needs for people who are already here.

The other thing we're concerned about is that there's a lot of emphasis on preventing people from coming into the country, but there's not a lot of emphasis on checking identification of people leaving, which is very worrying because Britain is a place where people are trafficked in and out of. We would hope that there would be another push for even more border control, but not just for people coming in, but for people leaving.

Rebecca: How would you start trying to tackle the problem of internal trafficking of British people?

Lydia: I think there needs to be better police training. London has relatively speaking, a very big team of people within the Met working on this; as you get out into smaller towns and cities across Britain, (and this is a problem all across Britain), there needs to be more awareness of how the police react in these situations. If they see someone doing something illegal and think about arresting the person on the spot and criminalising them, it would be good for them to also look at the situation, stepping back and being able to think about how this person got into this situation and perhaps there's someone else involved. There needs to be working from a very local level and training police and teaching them about what to be aware of so that they can act and hopefully break down these larger rings of criminal networks that are operating across the UK.

Rebecca: What is the next stage? Do you think the government are going to continue to focus on this?

Lydia: With the recent decision by the government to opt into the EU directive on trafficking, they have until 2013 to implement that and put that into registration. Certainly CARE is going to be very involved in monitoring that implementation and ensuring that they raise their standards and meet the guidelines set out in the EU directive. With this strategy it just gives us one more piece to build upon and we are very hopeful with the new EU directive that things will change and that it will stay on the agenda of the government. Also there are a number of MPs who are concerned about this issue of trafficking and so we hope that pushing this new legislation through will keep that as a priority.

Rebecca: With this EU directive does that mean that other EU countries are looking at the same sort of strategies and focussing on trafficking as well?

Lydia: That's right. One of the great things about the directive was that all of the member states could opt in and it means that it offers the same amount of protection to any victim of trafficking across the EU. We hope that it will set a new standard of how victims are treated and how law enforcement officials react to trafficking and react to situations where they suspect there might be a victim of trafficking. It's just another tool in raising awareness around the EU, because there is quite a lot of trafficking that goes on between EU states.

Rebecca: So finally, do you think we can be optimistic that we can tackle this problem?

Lydia: Well we hope so. I think there's a lot of great people out there working on trafficking issues and with every strategy that comes out, every directive that comes out, it's just another building block into tackling this. We need to remain vigilant and we need to understand that it's a very complex thing and unfortunately there are a lot of smart people working on the other end and they're making these networks hard to tackle and hard to stay on top of. I feel there's reason to be positive and certainly reason to feel that the strategy is nothing to feel negative about. It's just something we need to monitor and we need to ensure that it stays on the agenda.