Domestic slavery is a crime the police struggle to combat

When cases of domestic or sexual slavery are uncovered they generally attract sensational headlines. And the case of the three women rescued from a house in south London after 30 years of alleged captivity has attracted more headlines than most. It is shocking because of the appallingly long time these women have apparently been denied their freedom, and chilling because this was an ordinary house in an ordinary street that drew no attention to itself.

From time to time police carry out high-profile raids to rescue victims of trafficking, often targeting brothels. But these raids, sometimes with the media in tow, have resulted in very few convictions. And these convictions are not openly published. Freedom of Information requests have revealed that in 2010 there were just three convictions for trafficking into the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation. In 2011 there were also just three convictions.

It seems that police may be looking in the wrong places when it comes to identifying possible victims of trafficking or slavery.

Most cases only come to light when the women (for it is almost always women who are victims of slavery) manage to escape from their captors and raise the alarm once they are safe.

One case involved a 15-year-old girl from Guinea in west Africa. She was sold to a man by her family and was promised a well-paid job in the UK looking after children. The man took her to Sierra Leone where he obtained a false passport for her and then brought her into the UK. No questions were asked as the pair passed through immigration checks at Heathrow. The girl was taken to a house in London, locked up and forced to work as a domestic slave. Her captor regularly invited round several male friends who raped her.

The girl spoke no English so her opportunities to raise the alarm were even more limited than the three women rescued in this latest case. She became pregnant by one of the men who raped her and managed to escape through the garden of the house when she was hanging washing there while her captor was out. Because she was unable to read or write and was very unfamiliar with London, she was not able to help the police with street names, or a useful description of the part of London she had been held in.

In another case a divorced woman from Uganda was wooed by a man she met in the capital Kampala. He offered her a holiday in London and promised to show her the London Eye and other sights. She agreed to the three-week holiday he was offering, left her children with her mother and jumped on a plane with him.

As soon as they arrived in London the man told her they were going somewhere else and boarded a bus with her to Birmingham where he lived. She was locked in a flat and treated as his personal domestic and sexual slave. After a few months she was joined by another woman who suffered the same fate. Both women became pregnant within a few months of each other and when the other woman went into labour and started screaming the man rushed her out of the house, terrified that the neighbours would hear that something was amiss. The neighbours had no idea that anyone other than a single man lived in the flat. The pregnant woman saw her chance and escaped, giving birth a few months later.

In the police’s defence, investigating possible instances of slavery going on behind closed doors is not a viable option unless they have clear intelligence that something is wrong. And the right to privacy is a vital one, so fishing expeditions that are not intelligence-led are unacceptable. The more vulnerable the victims the less likely it is that these cases will come to light.

The women rescued from alleged slavery in Lambeth sought help last month because they had seen a freephone number for Freedom Charity on a television programme. More publicity about support services for those who are enslaved may help eradicate this all too often hidden suffering.

Diane Taylor is a writer specialising in human rights