Three rescued women—a Malaysian woman (69), an Irish woman (57), and a British woman (30)—were held in horrific conditions until Freedom Charity found them fortunately. The women were held as slaves for at least 30 years and were not exposed “to the outside world”, Detective inspector Kevin Hyland said.
A married couple, a 67-year-old man and his wife, were responsible for torturing the women in their residence.
If the Irish woman (57) did not secretly gain the access to phone and call the charity, three women most likely could never set their feet outside. All three women are safe and adjusting slowly to everything.
The founder of Freedom Charity, Aneeta Prem, told BBC, “In a very busy capital city we often don’t know our neighbors. We’re looking at people who were kept against their will in an ordinary residential street in central London.”
Normally people do not even fathom that slavery is still going around us but according to the new record conducted by Walk Free Foundation, there are approximately 30 million slaves in the world.
Most of the slaves are governed by gangs for sex trafficking and unskilled labors. According to the report, India topped the chart with 13.95 million slaves and “by far the largest proportion of this problem is the exploitation of Indian citizens within India itself, particularly through debt bondage and boded labor.” China followed with 2.95 million slaves and Pakistan with 2.1 million. The report said, in China “includes the forced labor of men, women and children in many parts of the economy, including domestic servitude and forced begging, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and forced marriage.”
Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, Thailand, Congo, Myanmar and Bangladesh were on top of the lists as well.
This is the first annual report of the global slavery index and the researchers were hoping that this could increase awareness of modern day slavery. Researcher Kevin Bales said, “Consistently when we analyzed the statistics we found that corruption came out as more powerful than poverty in driving slavery.”
The countries with the least slaves are Iceland, Ireland, and Great Britain. There are no countries without slaves sadly.
아주경제 MJ Kwak 기자
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com