RedHanded - In Conversation With Emily Kenway: The Truth About Modern Slavery

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

Emily Kenway is a writer and activist. As a former advisor to the UK's first Anti-Slavery Commissioner she was at the heart of modern slavery action. She has written for a variety of publications including the Guardian and TLS. In 2019, over 10,000 possible victims of slavery were found in the UK. From men working in Sports Direct warehouses for barely any pay, to teenaged Vietnamese girls trafficked into small town nail bars, we're told that modern slavery is all around us, operating in plain sight. But is this really slavery, and is it even a new phenomenon? Why has the British Conservative Party called it 'one of the great human rights issues of our time', when they usually ignore the exploitation of those at the bottom of the economic pile? The Truth About Modern Slavery reveals how modern slavery has been created as a political tool by those in power. It shows how anti-slavery action acts as a moral cloak, hiding the harms of the 'hostile environment' towards migrants, legitimising big brands' exploitation of the poorest workers and oppressing sex workers. Blaming the media's complicity, rich philanthropists' opportunism and our collective failure to realise the lies we're being told, The Truth About Modern Slavery provides a vital challenge to conventional narratives on modern slavery. Emily's incredible book 'The Truth About Modern Slavery' is available via this link  Follow Emily on Instagram and Twitter  The video version of this interview is available on Patreon for all $10+ Patrons. For more information about our Patreon and to follow on social media please follow this link   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to our, what is this, our third interview? Second? I feel like maybe second or third. We'll go with that. All that all right excellent news and today we are welcoming stunning journalist and swanky published author deep friend of the show Emily Kenway welcome to Red Handed the interview series and Emily is going to change the world but she's going to do it firstly by changing the way we think about

modern slavery so thank you so much for coming to have a chat with us emily um where are you based are you a london person i am a londoner but at the moment i'm mainly living in wales actually which is oh rogue yeah lockdown um has sent me there because my partner lives there so um getting to be in the fresh air has been really nice yeah yeah I think I'm also out in the country um for lockdown staying with my mum uh I've been here since November I'm moving back to London on Saturday but it has I mean I'm sick of it now but initially I was like oh the rolling fields fantastic it's much better than being in a flat in London um but I'm itching to get back. So Emily if someone to give you were to give you a cursory

google one of the first things they see is that you were an advisor for the Independent Anti-Slavery Commission how does that happen that is quite the accolade that is quite the bullet point on your LinkedIn how does one get to be one of those? So the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner is a role that was created in the Modern Slavery Act in 2015 and it's this role this position that is supposed to encourage good practice in tackling modern slavery basically in the UK and so for that person who holds that role to do their job well they need to have expert advisors obviously um and i had spent the best part of 10 years working on social justice campaigns by that point all sorts of stuff like i used to be the living wage campaign manager and i worked on amazon warehouse workers and

lots of different things so um they um i was an advisor on the private sector there and how the private sector needs to think about exploitation and supply chains and that kind of thing and it was really interesting it was frustrating of course when you're working with government it's going to be frustrating but it was really interesting too. And what's your background like how did you get into that sort of position where you're like oh I'm going to work on policy? That's a really good question I am so I have a little bit of a weird background, but I feel like you guys will appreciate this because, you know, you've ended up doing slightly curvy paths. Wiggly and wonky all over the place. Yeah. When I left school, I actually trained and worked as an opera singer. I went to Royal College of Music.

Wow. Wow. like wow a few companies yeah but I um and that my like when I was a teenager it was like this twin love of like politics and wanting to make things better basically like seeing all this um suffering around and being part of different activist things and then also loving singing and performing and so I went in that direction first but I found I found it like quite boring after a while you do the same show like 30 times in a row you know and I just felt like it's quite elitist and I felt like I wanted to be contributing to change so I actually just in 2011 decided to quit got myself out of the contract and had left and was terrified I was like 25 at that point and I'd never done a normal job um so I've got internships and I basically worked really hard and worked my way up and stuff yeah wow that is incredible and I think

it's a story that definitely uh I guess no we can't claim to have such a higher calling as you clearly did to move in there but we can definitely appreciate the wonky paths into feeling like you need to be doing something that has a bit more of an impact. And I wonder, was it right from the beginning that slavery or the idea of modern slavery was something that was a cause that you particularly cared about? And also, you must have answered this question a thousand times in all of the interviews that you've ever done but could you describe to us and to our listeners what exactly modern slavery means and how closely it's related or how closely it's not related perhaps to our image of slavery that has been abolished yeah yeah totally so I mean for me it was less like wanting to get involved on this topic and more just being sort of caring about injustice and obviously exploitation being a really core form of injustice that happens to the most marginalized categories of people.

So it's injustice on injustice. But what is modern slavery? Yeah. So on a kind of basic definitional level, modern slavery is an umbrella term for a range of exploitative circumstances. And that's literally what it means. There's no legal definition in and of itself of modern slavery. So those kinds of circumstances under that umbrella include human trafficking, which involves movement to exploit someone, forced labor, which is forcing someone to work under threat essentially domestic servitude which is like forced labor but in a house so those kinds of circumstances so they all come under this moniker of modern slavery that is a relatively new term from like the 2000s really 2010s and um how it relates to historical slavery i think it's one of the things that I try to expose a bit in the book and really kind of make people think about a bit. Because the phrase modern slavery as a way of talking about exploitation has really popularized.

And it's popularized because it makes you sit up and listen, right? It's really shocking and it immediately makes you think about all the things you've heard about historical slavery however that's quite um problematic and it's problematic not because what's happening today isn't really awful there are horrific things happening of course and there are cases that would come under the monoslavery act that are less horrific but still shouldn't be happening but because historical slavery what we abolished in the first half of the 19th century was the legal right to own someone else. That's what in 1833 we had an act that said you can no longer legally own another person. That

was what Wilberforce and other people pushed through Parliament. We never abolished severe exploitation and in fact when we um like were part of abolishing the slave trade in the 19th century that actually gave rise to exactly the kinds of things we are now calling modern slavery so plantation owners um freaked out basically because suddenly they were being told they couldn't have slaves and they wanted free labor so they can make as much profit as possible. And that turned into a trade of millions of Indian and Chinese people that were shipped under the same conditions as historical slavery that we understand to colonies to work on plantations. In the Caribbean, men who'd been enslaved were redesignated as apprentices and not paid for many years so there's this weird thing happening now where you get like politicians and companies and so on being

outraged at modern slavery and you know we're trying to eradicate this scourge and all this grandstanding when in fact the thing we're now talking about is what our economy's always been running on in reality yeah I think that was one of the the things that really hit home for me about your book as how how new this like this terminology of modern slavery is like I could probably only started hearing it in the last 10 years like if that and I just hadn't confronted before that it is a new idea that it's like a new label and like one of the other things that um you cover in your book that I think people have a lot of ideas about that are maybe not as accurate as they are portrayed in the media possibly um is is human trafficking I think

that sort of conjures an image of women in developing countries being snatched from the streets and then sold off into brothels or nail salons or whatever. How common is that really? Is that like the majority of human trafficking cases or not? No, it's not at all. Yeah. And it's one of the major problems with this. It does happen, of course, because everything in the world happens, you know, you can always find an example of something if you want to. But the vast majority of trafficking is not abduction or kidnapping. It is people seeking livelihood options and lacking more acceptable ones. So that might be, for example, someone saying yes to deceptive recruitment. So that's what you see in Operation Forts. You have people in Poland who are homeless or have just come out of prison they don't have any other livelihood options someone comes along with a deceptive job offer and they're trafficked to the uk um that

essentially that kind of thing is like the commonality of it so what you really the best way to understand trafficking is as migration gone wrong because there aren't those safer pathways those ways of checking job offers are real and the problem that then happens with trafficking the reason why we've got this public imagination of the the kidnapping victim apart from um sensationalist uh films like taken you know like obviously it works really well for a Netflix thing or whatever, but it's also being deliberately used in that way by politicians. So to give you the clearest example that I talk about in the book,

in October 2019, as I'm sure people remember, there were 39 Vietnamese people found dead in the back of a container lorry in Essex and I remember that day really clearly as news was breaking and starting to get phone calls from journalists and producers who were looking for commentators on the news who could speak about trafficking and I was watching this and I was like why are you calling like we don't know that this is trafficking for it to be trafficking you would need to have the police would need to have evidence already that those people were being exploited. And all that I could see was that people were coming in and it looked like they were coming in undocumented, right?

Like no evidence of exploitation. So that would actually be a case of migrant smuggling, which is moving people across borders illegally. It does not involve exploiting people and then I realized the local MP and Priti Patel were already talking about this as a case of trafficking within like half an hour the local MP and a few hours Priti Patel and there is a really clear reason for that it's not because it was a case of trafficking it actually wasn't they were convicted of smuggling it was that um when they told the public and the media this is because of trafficking these 39 people are dead because of trafficking our imagination as the public blames the traffickers

we blame these people in our minds who are like baddies who are doing this bad thing to people and those are the reason they're they're why those people are dead and in reality if we instead were having a conversation about smuggling and why people need to be brought across borders in lorries instead of through safe and legal routes we'd be having a conversation about border policy killing people and to make it even clearer a month later 10 men were found in the back of a lorry in Essex, struggling to breathe. Those doors were opened on time, thankfully. What happened to those 10 men? They were all arrested on the spot on suspicion of immigration offences. And the only difference between those things at that moment is people being dead or people being alive. But then the difference becomes political and where blame

is trying to be pointed. Absolutely. And I think that's such an important point that you raise about when tragedies like this happen, especially when they of another truck and arrested on smuggling on trying to uh you know immigrate under false pretenses or whatever and I think that Hannah makes a good point as well that this idea of modern slavery is something that I've only really seen uh spoken about not that long ago and I think that people are more sort of socially aware and more aware than ever before of the impact of the things that we want in a sort of consumer driven, profit driven, or, you know, cheap driven culture that we exist in, that for us to have those things, that somebody else further down that chain has likely suffered in order for us to be able to buy a top at Primark for 299 or something. And I guess I just wonder one of the things that I've been struggling with, especially over the last year,

is the idea of with the current fast fashion economy that we're in, is ethical consumerism even possible yeah so this is this is something that comes up a lot of course because we all want to not be part of the problem and be part of the solution as much as we can and I wish the answer was um kind of cheerier really I think so there is one area in which I think ethical consumerism can be profoundly useful and impactful, and that is with your one off high street independent shops and services. So your hand car washes or nail bars or that kind of thing that feel they can feel that people aren't going in there if their prices are too low. It can have that direct impact in a different way and then there's other cases where you have parts of the world that clearly that are very geographically specifically obvious as having

a forced labor problem so parts of china at the moment having that problem yes um there can be work done to encourage brands to stop using supplies in those areas and for consumers to say hey are you in any way tied to that specific area but outside things that can be like pinpointed and localized in that way you know it's incredibly difficult and I think there's a bigger problem here with this which is the idea that it is the role of the consumer to do something about it of course I mean I would always advocate for us doing a bit I'm that weird person that randomly email companies as well um you know like it's it's always a good thing to do um and I know from working with brands a lot that often there'll be

someone working in a big big big brand who is trying to get the board to listen to the topic and the more emails they get from customers the more strength they have but the problem is like why is it the role of consumers right and so um so first if you take how many products we're talking about here they're just the array of things that there would be really severe exploitation in you're talking about like bricks sparkly makeup, tomatoes, sweets, clothes, like it's endless. And then Theresa May, this Monsaber is like Theresa May's big thing and Boris is continuing it. And she liked to talk a lot about consumers being the answer. And one of her speeches, she said, I want it to become a socially unacceptable to shop with a company that

has slave labor in its supply chain as it is to use a disposable coffee cup and the problem with that is how do you know if i'm using a disposable coffee cup because you can see it right it's pretty easy um how on earth are you going to know if it's okay to shop with company x y or z even if you do look into it are you going to look into the shop you're standing in the brand from that you're buying from or the manufacturer of that which bit of the supply chain how will you know if what they're saying is true you know there's research that even shows that um ethical certifications of like tea and chocolate and stuff um when people go down and do research on the plantations the conditions are often um no better or worse on the certified ones because none of these

mechanisms are working properly and there is one really clear reason why it's because everything is focused on maintaining business as usual and doing sort of superficial things like going along with a checklist you know checking everyone's all right it's not about reorganizing to make sure that workers themselves can come together can fight for their rights can protect their rights so it's we're looking at it all in the wrong way when we're trying to make consumers um the answer like we have to be part of it but we should really be calling on governments to regulate properly. Yeah, asking where the workers voices are in this. Definitely, I actually think that that's one of the struggles outside of this, but related to what you're saying about disposable coffee cups is one of the biggest things I've really been trying to change is like just plastic

consumption, and like my carbon footprint and stuff. But it is so difficult when the Tories all they want to do is sort of put the pass the buck back to the consumer and place it all about personal responsibility and you making the right decisions but it's like it cannot be left to individuals to make those changes because yes some of us might be able to spend loads of time researching it and have even the financial freedom to make more green choices it should come down to legislation not just being put on the shoulders of consumers and I think that it can feel really like um disempowering sometimes but I guess we need to reroute our energy into demanding legislative change I suppose would you agree? Yeah I think so and I think part of the problem that I describe in the book is that modern slavery as like a campaign slogan and a way of

thinking about exploitation is a really neat storyline it basically tells you there's a victim there's a baddie and we need to catch the baddie, and then we can rescue people into freedom. And the reality is far, far messier. And yeah, it doesn't a criminal justice approach only law enforcement approach only doesn't work as police themselves repeatedly are trying to say to government, you know, and of course, as I'm sure you know, in this economy, you know, when people are, when people are extricated from really exploitative circumstances in the UK, it's not like there's a brilliant job waiting for them, people just end up in a cycle of exploitation, because there's no better options. So it's like a very palatable story about how we can make the world a better place the idea of modern slavery and unfortunately it's messier than that but we if we want to make change then we have

to understand it properly and get real about it I think it's so difficult to like how I would not even know if I decided like right I am gonna work really hard on avoiding every brand that's ever touched modern slavery it's impossible how would I know where the supply chain begins or ends like I it's impossible um however one thing I do know about that you wrote about in your book is the Nordic model and please tell me if I have got this wrong I went to see when I was at uni I went to go and see a production called the sex workers opera um that like bounced around I think it's done like quite a few European tours now that worked with like local sex workers maybe in the show like talking about their experiences and one of the

things they covered in that is the Nordic model and my understanding of it is that the Nordic model criminalizes the punters rather than the sex workers themselves but that is problematic because it means that there is less work for the sex workers there are less people which forces them into a corner where they have to be in more dangerous situations they're more likely to be in more dangerous situations and that is like nobody wins there how about how wrong am i firstly um so i you're you're almost entirely right yes um there's one element so yeah the nordic model um is on paper um it criminalizes people who buy sexual services so like the men the punters uh in reality unfortunately and this this is just the like tweaky tweaky bit of what you said um

where it's introduced it doesn't actually decriminalize the women often it doesn't it decriminalizes selling sex but they tend to maintain other laws that criminalize other parts of the sex industry so for example working together for safety remains criminalized under brothel laws in most countries where the nordic model exists and in ireland in 2019 you had two migrant sex working women jailed for working together for safety one of whom was pregnant and they have the Nordic model there so so the idea that proponents of it will always say it doesn't criminalize the women it so far is in countries where they're still criminalized right plus it often will by proxy

effectively criminalize them because you'll have things like police waiting outside their premises to catch their clients so sure they're not being directly criminalized but their work is being criminalized and that's like let's remember that they're selling those services so that they can eat and pay their bills often so that they can pay for their children as well so um yeah and then exactly as you said um i mean the evidence on it is just resounding i find it one of the most heartbreaking aspects of this whole thing is women being divided on this topic because um the evidence is just so clear that the nordic model harms sex workers that it pushes them into harm's way that it

means that they have to provide services they don't want to for example not use condoms it's really bad for HIV rates you have less time to vet clients like just imagine that as a woman like it's just it's really horrific and there's such damning evidence of it now I think one of the problems that happens is that it's very hard for people to let go of wanting something which says it's not okay for men to you know treat women as consumable products and I completely get that of course like we live in a you know consumerist misogynist world obviously um there's a huge amount wrong and i would love to live in a world where no one needs to sell sex but they do and so what we need to have is um we need to decriminalize that sector so that everyone in it has rights and can enforce

those rights isn't under threat of being criminalized in various ways can work together for safety which I just don't understand how any woman could suggest is a bad thing and then alongside that you can have an anti-trafficking strategy so it's not to decriminalize trafficking or rape or child sexual exploitation any of those things it's purely like an adult consensually choosing to sell sex needing to be decriminalized because if you think about it we have trafficking and exploitation in loads of legal labor sectors too um and the people it happens to in those sectors are those who are lacking rights in various ways right so like undocumented migrants in cleaning for example um and it's the same thing in sex like where you create a pool of people who don't have rights

whether it's a legal labor sector and they're undocumented or an illegal sector sex work you will have exploitation so the question has to be not like our moral distaste about women selling sex but how do we give people rights and make sure they can protect themselves absolutely Emily can you run us through what raid and rescue actually means and what the specific problems are with it yes I can um that's good that's a relief raid and rescue yeah raid and rescue is a way of describing the approach taken by um policing and also by certain kinds of ngos around the world and in the uk too the us has a lot of this india has a lot of this that specifically targets the sex

industry and it's like their prescription to solve um modern slavery in the sex industry is to raid brothels premises and rescue the women and in in India like put them into rehabilitation centers and there's some corkers of exposés out there on that, which I really recommend looking into. But essentially, there's a number of problems with it. Firstly, what you find, very sadly, is that whilst these manoeuvres will ostensibly be trying to identify victims of trafficking and extricate them, they will be targeting consensual sex workers and when I say consensual sex workers obviously I recognize there might not have been loads of

better options it wasn't like shall I be a lawyer or shall I be a sex worker but it was a choice within the constraints of what the economy in the world is offering someone so in the world is offering someone. So in the UK there have been some really awful cases of for example police raids in Soho taking press along with them and those press photographing women dragged out onto the street half-clothed yet allegedly these women are victims of trafficking so it's a very odd way to treat people that you're apparently saying are victims. I did freedom of information requests that I describe in the book of some raids that were described by senior police or media as trafficking rescues and I FOI'd how many women were referred into a national support system for victims of trafficking because if that was what that raid was and it was effective you should see women going in none were that's not to say none

ever are but i think um there's a huge number of these raids being portrayed in a particular way and what's actually happening is they're being used disingenuously to disrupt a sector that people don't like um one of the clearest examples, I think, comes from the Olympics, where the Metropolitan Police were given 500k to crack down on trafficking ahead of the Olympics. There's this big myth that sports events lead to more trafficking. And there was research done by the London Assembly member on what actually happened around the Olympics and

trafficking and it found there was no evidence of an increase in trafficking and that the police the police source said they purposefully used that money just to target brothels under the guise of targeting trafficking so what you have to understand with sex work and trafficking is that trafficking does happen it happens in all sectors where you have any people who don't have access to rights and don't have better options but when it comes to the sex sector it's used as a rationale to crack down on the sector as a whole which just harms marginalized people working in it even more and really doesn't help anyone in the long run at all. Absolutely.

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a lot of years in policy and a lot of years in opera singing. Did you have like a defining moment where you're like, this shit needs to be a book? What a great question. I think probably not a single moment but just several months of essentially working on on these topics for so long uh prior to working on modern slavery just working on things around exploitation and rights and justice and then on this topic this like as you say this phrase that we hadn't heard before and suddenly it's how everything's being talked about um and starting to understand how it was being used how it was a story about exploitation that was portraying a particular picture that wasn't really getting to the deep structural changes that are needed once i'd understood that i was then you know in meeting after meeting for months and months and months with say large companies for example who um

you'd I'd bring up they talk about how good their audits were which is like a way of going into their supply chain um every so often and taking like a snapshot of the situation so you've got like a checklist of things you're looking for they talk about how good their processes are with that and they haven't found any cases of slavery and they're doing really well and they kind of want to be patted on the back um but if you deign to raise the idea that maybe they should check there's an independent union in their supply chain factories which is you know the best possible way of making sure workers can protect their rights they'd be like oh no um that's got nothing to do with modern slavery because modern slavery is like this separate crime that's caused by like

intruders infiltrating the supply chain right so they have it in this totally different category in their head rather than trying to ensure that everyone can protect themselves and has has decent work opportunities and i was seeing more and more how this thing that seems good that we want to campaign on that we want to stop that from happening you know you feel like you're doing the right thing on it was actually being used by businesses to avoid making the deep changes they need to make that means people aren't like endemically underpaid and overworked and pushed into slavery cases and again the same thing in lots of meetings with um you know home office personnel and that kind of

thing just seeing that whenever you mention the hostile environment it being like no nothing can change there it's the problem with non-slavery it's the slavers, it's the traffickers, it's not our policy. And just to explain that, why that's so problematic, the hostile environment as a collection of immigration policies makes people in the UK who don't have the right paperwork illegal, effectively. And so what that does is create this pool of people who are terrified of the authorities that people

looking to exploit people they will directly use threats of denouncing them to the authorities as a way of coercing them like it's so well documented that this is what's happening you even have dodgy employers purposely recruiting people who are undocumented because they know they can get away with paying them like two quid an hour and treating them like crap like this is all really well documented so so to solve modern slavery you'd have to stop having that happen right you'd have to not have these populations of people that um have no rights and are terrified of police and everyone but when you raise these issues oh it's but that's you know modern slavery it's a crime it's caused by the criminals and i think it was just thing after thing after thing of that and then compounding that was I've

obviously been in like activist world circles for for a long time and seeing that sort of other lefties so to speak weren't realizing how this narrative was being used and were swallowing it uncritically like modern slavery is terrible thing we must fight against it without understanding that it was actually stopping us from having the conversations we need to have you know if you think that modern slavery is just caused by criminals infiltrating a company then you're not going to start asking questions about that company's business practices as a whole and how it's making its profits you can see that really clearly I think with the boohoo stuff in Leicester I don't know if you remember last year it all came out

that like fast fashion in Leicester was um like a sort of absolute cesspit of abuse and exploitation because people were being forced to keep going to work through lockdown even with positive Covid tests someone. Now this was not news to anyone who's been working on this for a while like Leicester's been known about as a problem for you know a decade or more and you can say there are criminals there operating dodgy factories overworking people underpaying people, causing modern slavery. And some of that is true. But what is also happening is that fast fashion companies are making their suppliers have to give them garments for such low prices that there is no way that those workers are being paid the minimum wage or working acceptable hours or any of that it's it's like literally economically impossible so for me it was really frustrating to see that those segments of those like political spaces that I thought should be really on top of this and should be like hang

on I see what you're doing Priti Patel hang on I see what you're doing big brand we're just like all modern slavery is terrible yeah let's like join in the campaigns and so I think for me I just wanted to write this book that it's accessible for anyone who doesn't know that much about this that's there's loads of really amazing academic work on this in the same vein as mine but it's not accessible so I wanted there to be this accessible book but it's also like if people are like politically aware you know they they get what you're saying when you say not in this economy that they also would then not just swallow modern savoury as an idea uncritically and like stop and think why would Teresa May be really keen on protecting the rights of people at the bottom of the economy when that's not really been her thing you know why might that be the case absolutely I think it's so aligned with like

what we talk about on true crime which is if somebody's doing something think about what their motivations were before you're uh damning them off to having done something and I think it's such an interesting point that you raise is to not be hoodwinked by the by the narrative that feels like a knee-jerk reaction fits with your general view of the world we need to always be thinking about people's true motivations behind the things that they do especially our current government so I think the idea of writing an accessible book on this is um it's fantastic and we're obviously going to talk about the book and please go buy it we'll leave a link to where you can purchase it it is there Emily was kind of cover art by the way it is excellent cover art um The Truth About Modern Slavery by Emily Kenway please get it it's an

it's not over the interview is not over I'm just taking a quick segue to part of the book in the book you talk about Operation Fort and we are actually going to be covering operation fort um yeah i don't know when this is going out at some point not this one next one so we've got sweden coming on thursday and then operation forts the one after that the week after so whenever this goes out you may already be listening to operation episode by red-handed emily we would love it if you would give us a rundown of Operation Fort and in the episode that we're going to do what we must absolutely include and what we must not be hoodwinked by. Please tell us so that we don't

make those mistakes. Yeah, okay. So Operation Fort is one of the biggest ever cases of trafficking, possibly the biggest ever prosecution in Europe. And it involved potentially up to 400 victims. It's not totally known how many people were victimized because some of those people had been through the victimization and been out of it by the time it was discovered and uncovered. So in July 2019 a number of people were sentenced for this organized crime ring essentially that had been strategically bringing people from Poland into the UK and doing two things with them to make money basically. One was putting them into forced labor and supply chains of kinds of products that we use like from spring onions to fences to waste recycling and the other

was forced criminality so things like opening fake bank accounts and doing benefit fraud. The people that were recruited by this Polish gang, and a lot of them were family members in this gang or kind of friends or family members, that kind of thing was quite tight-knit, which is not always the case with these things at all. The people that were recruited were people who were lacking better options right and I think that's one of the most important points is that they deliberately targeted destitute people

or people who had recently been released from prison and this happens in the UK as well so essentially if you were someone who wanted to make money from exploiting other people you're going to need to find people who are going to say yes to your rather dodgy job offer. If I came up to you and said so, what what they said to people was they came up to people and said, look, I've got work for you in the UK. They said, you know, it's this much money a week. It's like 300 quid a week. One of them was told there's accommodation but um you've got to decide in the next hour because the bus is leaving in the next hour that's they put that kind of pressure on a lot of them to leave really quickly now you're not going to say yes to that if you've got an

established life and better options so clearly one of the major things for me in this case and generally in trafficking is like why are people vulnerable in the first place and that is never talked about in the press what you will always see is they were enticed by the traffickers they were lured by the traffickers well a different way of saying that is so and so had no other options so said yes to the only job offer as we all would and then you start to need a conversation about why there isn't support for people when they come out of prison or why there aren't, you know, what's going on with so much homelessness, etc. So they were brought to the UK in various ways. One tactic that was used is very common with trafficking, where they were then told, well, you have accrued debt to us because of the bus fare, because of work finding fees. You have to pay for your

accommodation your food so that's all going to be docked from your pay so essentially you're not going to be paid some of them were kept for long stretches of time without work which is a tactic that's used quite often to essentially build up this big fake inflated debt so that then when they are put into work and not paid that's the rationale for them not being paid they're put in houses of multiple occupancy that weren't legally houses of multiple occupancy so meant to be like for you know just one family and it was like loads of people absolutely squalid conditions no hot water no heating and completely out of date food of very little nutritional value. They had forced fatigue. And so they were, you know, like exhausted and all sorts of things,

basically, and physical threats and violence as well, of course. And so all the kind of most horrible things you find in trafficking cases in that case, and it was an absolutely enormous example. I think for me, one of the things aside from what I already said about most horrible things you find in trafficking cases in that case and it was an absolutely enormous example I think for me one of the things aside from what I already said about why are people vulnerable being missing all the time and like this is a real bugbear of mine where you have the government for example in 2018 the cabinet office spent 12 grand lighting up UK landmarks red for anti-slavery day to show, you know, we're raising awareness to end modern slavery, whilst they've overseen an exponential rise in homelessness. And it's that kind of hypocrisy that I find really annoying if it's not like exposed in these stories. often gets missed in operation fort is so when these people were put into the supply chains of various things so like spring onions for lots of the supermarkets we shop in they were they were

on a farm some of these people and um the way that they are fed into the supply chain is by temporary labor agencies so um a uh a farm or a factory will hire will have a maybe have a core staff of very few actual employees and will mainly rely on temporary workers from agencies so that they can upscale and downscale how many workers they have in line with demand or like the season that it is or whatever um and so that is a high high risk thing for workers being put into supply chains who are under duress in various ways it's very common and very very well recognized now we can say there oh well you know well then the solution there is to train up the staff to spot the signs of whether that person is a slave to like double check someone's paperwork to check their bank account isn't the same as someone else's bank account like it's not all their money's not

going somewhere else so there are these things you can do but the real deep question we should be asking is why is temporary work so common in the UK today because it didn't used to be and we've had a huge rise in use of temporary workers and agency workers who are some of the poorest most precarious workers in the country who are often migrants who don't necessarily know their rights don't necessarily have any kind of solidarity network and are abusable for those reasons and the reason why that's become really popular is because it's cheaper for businesses so your supermarket is not paying fair prices to your farms your farms are trying to cut corners

they're going to labor agencies so that they can have that constantly fluctuating number of workers and it's that kind of structural thing that is never brought up so then the um you know there's people convicted in operation fort rightly so they did horrific horrific things but the brands and the farms all get to just be like oh goodness me how absolutely terrible that this occurred as if it's got nothing to do with the economy um and i think that's why like the the chief constable who's kind of oversees modern slavery in the uk a man called sean sawyer gave evidence to parliament a couple of years ago and he sounded very frustrated in it to be honest and he said um modern slavery is because of the economic contract of the uk that he was very clear that for the police it's extremely frustrating because

they're basically mopping up the symptom of how we're running the economy so yeah I think there's those kind of deeper things that can often get missed on this on this case I can't wait honestly I've been thinking about it all week obviously reading your book and I can't can't wait to rip some arseholes of some Tories coming up in this episode I'm really primed on this one another thing I really enjoyed about your book apart from changing my paradigm to be honest um is the alternatives you offer so what does a more viable anti-trafficking policy look like than the one we currently have yeah yeah um i think the first thing to say is that because modern slavery feels like a singular thing it's that fairy tale thing i was describing earlier

we often look for a singular solution like a silver bullet like um and and charities sort of peddle this in a way by being like buy this wristband to tackle slavery or go on this march or whatever and in reality the solutions are going to be plural because the problem is different you're talking about forced begging uh farm work sex work you're talking about men women children all around the world everywhere you're talking about everything so it's going to have to be like um a multiplicity of things there's some stuff with regard to immigration and borders no shadow of a doubt if you want to tackle modern slavery and trafficking you repeal the hostile environment also no shadow of a doubt if you want to do that you put a firewall between immigration enforcement on the one hand and police and labor inspection on the other which means that anyone

no matter what their immigration status which may may be legal, but they may be scared still, which happens a lot, they can go for help to those agencies without fearing being deported. At the moment, that is not the case. So those are like basic, basic things that if the government's not doing that, they don't care about this topic. It's that that simple there's some other stuff that I think is really important that you know people can be coming to the UK or within the UK already for work that is legal like that it's not a case of undocumented but nobody's supporting them to know whether that job is real or not so there's a case I talk about in the book of a man who ended up in forced labor in a hotel in Scotland and he'd been it had been a deceptive job advert were in his native Bangladesh

for this for this job now the problem there is that when he's coming through our borders he's not going to be seeing the staff there as people to rely on who want to support him in any way so again it's that thing of like not having that environment where if you're a person from the wrong kind of country according to our kind of national politics you're basically afraid of agencies and we need better ways of checking that job offers are real really that's quite a straightforward thing it should be quite simple really with the internet you would think um i think aside i mentioned decriminalizing sex work earlier um one of the the kind of thing underlying all of this that we should be talking about is about getting rid of those vulnerabilities that's what this conversation should be about

sure there are perpetrators let's not let them run around doing what they want but if you look at information on perpetrators of crimes under the modern slavery act they are generally generalist criminals so for example um it's not like someone who's a you know like a forger that's like their skill right that's what they do again and again um these criminals will um they're just trying to make money and so they're looking for the door that's open that they can go through to make that money when we make people vulnerable by immigration policy or by not having proper housing provision, whatever it might be, we open the door for them for the criminality.

So how do we close those doors? How do we stop people being vulnerable? So then it's a conversation about rights. It's about not having populations of people in our society who don't have any rights, who don't have better alternatives. And that's not a sexy slogan right it's actually multiple slogans it's workers rights it's sex workers rights

it's like you know refugees welcome all of these things are actually part of the solution but they're just multiple oh gosh and i feel like everything you have said I feel like I could possibly predict the answer to the question I'm about to ask but I'm going to ask it anyway because I want to hear it from your own mouth. What do you wish you could say to Miss Preeti Patel if you had the opportunity? Apart from why have you blocked me on Twitter because she did block me she blocked me last year and I actually have never added her because I don't like the like you know that like twitter kind of fighting like she doesn't care what some random is saying to her so I had never even added her but I think I wrote an op-ed somewhere about her putting victims of trafficking in detention which she does do

um yeah I just found I'm blocked so apart from that um that is incredible that's incredible you're preemptively blocked I know I love that she's on it but um anyone who doesn't know which is weird because if you listen to the show you we talk about Priti Patel all the time but just to clarify Priti Patel is the UK's home minister that she's the home secretary and she has blocked Emily Kenway because she's got the time to do that apparently so yeah apparently I think you know the thing like she this week we've just had really horrific announcements about immigration policy so it's it's one of those things where you know sometimes things just make you shake with anger. And she's just ruining lives isn't even an evocative enough phrase for what she's doing. And I actually think I wouldn't bother saying anything to her at this point, because it's not just how horrific her policies are, but she seems to enjoy it too.

And I would rather say to someone else, I do think she needs a psychiatric assessment like the fact that she seems like in joy yeah what is effectively um going against international law repeatedly and genuinely just ruining lives herself from a migration background you know her own policies would have meant her parents couldn't come into the UK it's just utterly bizarre and I think with someone like that there's no point there is no point even trying to talk to I think we just have to find a way to get her out of office as soon as possible absolutely no I completely agree with you on the point of like I feel like she genuinely enjoys or takes some sort of weird sadistic pleasure she just comes across like a bully whether she's speaking about immigration policy or whether she's talking about anything else covid whatever she just has this such a weird uh like tilt to her

personality where you look at somebody like a trump and i always you know he is like an empty vessel of a person who i don't believe has like very strongly held ideological beliefs he's just like what are people who support me want to hear and what will make me really popular amongst them hashtag culture wars I'm gonna say it because I don't care and I certainly don't understand the consequences Preeti Patel is so much more insidious than that because she has I genuinely she believes in the horrendous things that she is doing she has such an evil ideology and she is like yeah I fucking love it I love this shit I'm doing and that's what scares me about her so much she takes pride in her work

it's terrifying and like I think you know it's it's maddening and on the ground it's causing these terrifying things I don't know if you remember a immigration lawyer was attacked a few months ago after the government had put out stuff about you know lawyers doing like lefty lawyers protecting asylum seekers it's it's really frightening and I went to the the Calais camp a few years ago and every time these things come out I think about the people that I met there and that you know they it's just yeah I kind of I would love to drop her down somewhere like that without any of her stuff any you know no it's just yeah I kind of I would love to drop her down somewhere like that without any of her stuff any you know no forms of protection no forms of safety just leave her

there for a few months and then like you know talk to her after that because yeah like you say there's a glee to to her that is just despicable really should we start a go fund me to take priti patel send priti to cali and she's not allowed to come back i would love to put my money behind that um maybe let's start it and see if we can get priti patel to block red handed on twitter by the end of the year that can be one of our new goals we want to have a goal list followers on instagram and we'd also like to get blocked by prudy patel on twitter so here we go right i feel like that is super achievable in the next like 48 hours let's do it excellent news um i i think yeah i agree i think the only thing to do with um prudy patel is a swift metaphorical kick in the nads to be honest like I don't really understand like why anyone engages with her at all so Emily

Kenway double name I just I don't think I can call you Emily I'm sorry um you've done you've done the book the book on modern slavery tickety tick what is next what is next for Emily Kenway uh I am writing a second book that I'm not allowed to say what it's about yet it's going to be announced in the near future maybe when this comes out I'm really excited about that it's something that um matters a lot to me so that'll be good for you amazing congratulations book writing extraordinaire that is I mean we know the pain now so we got all the respect in the world for anyone who's writing a book ever again um so congratulations and thank you Emily so much for joining us uh we are just such big fans of your work we love the book and

speaking of the book if you would like to get your hands on Emily's book like we said we're going to leave a link where you can get it um on the Pluto Press website and also Emily being a big fan of the show and friend of the show if you use code REDHANDED I'm just gonna say it just in case all caps one word you can get 30% off your book because why the hell not because it will honestly it will change the way you think about loads of stuff i'm thinking very differently i'm thinking in bigger words also so that's definitely definitely get that 30 off because we all need that and get this book in your brains because you need it and we hope that you have enjoyed this interview with us and the lovely emily kenway you should also go follow her on twitter we will leave the twitter handles

such great social media twitter handles in the link so you can go follow her because uh especially because pretty patel blocked her so you know that's fantastic so go do that and uh we'll be back very soon with another interview like this with somebody we don't know yet but we'll see you then bye bye they say hollywood is where dreams are made a seductive city where many flock to get rich be adored and capture amer's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death.

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