UK: Modern slavery exhibition telling the stories of human trafficking victims opens in St Paul's Cathedral in London.

A new photographic exhibition of modern day slavery victims reveals the reality for thousands of people smuggled into Britain every year. Most of the victims are believed to be of Eastern European origin. Two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, trafficking in human flesh is still thriving, according to anti-slavery campaigners. The tragic stories of a handful of the estimated 4,000 people smuggled into Britain each year to satisfy the sex trade is being told in an exhibition at London's St. Paul's Cathedral. "Slave Britain", which runs from Wednesday (February 21) to the end of March, features a series of photographs and stories of women trafficked into Britain from Russia, Lithuania, India, Nigeria, Uganda and Nepal. They are just a tiny fraction of the total number cited by campaign organisers Amnesty International, Anti-Slavery International, Eaves and UNICEF. "This exhibition, it's highlighting the extent and nature of trafficking for forced labour and sexual exploitation into the UK. It's describing, bringing a human face and just what's the scale of the nature of the problem is. And in the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade it's showing in quite stark terms that slavery is still with us and still a significant problem today," said the director of Anti-Slavery International, Aidan Mcquade. Many of the victims are lured to the country on the promise of a job -- some sold even by their own lovers, family or friends. The caption on one of the posters illustrated with trafficking victim, Jiera from Lithuania holding a vodka bottle, reads: "Even if my friends don't judge me for what happened, they will always know what I did. They will never forget, and neither can I." Further into Jiera's story she tells that she was angry and that her life was ruined by the two friends who trafficked her to Britain at the age of 17. Kristina Misiniene is the programme coordinator for "Aid to the Victims of Trafficking and Prostitution" for Caritas Lithuania, and she visited the exhibition on Tuesday (February 20), before its official opening. She told Reuters her organisation alone had been working with 365 cases of human trafficking victims from Lithuania since 2001. "If we believe Interpol numbers, every year about one thousand, one thousand and a half (1500) women are trafficked from Lithuania. This is tremendous number for Lithuania. And the problem of trafficking sharply, the problem of trafficking became very actual for Lithuania after we joined the EU in 2004," Misiniene said. Across the world some 2.4 million people -- half of them children -- are sold into slavery every year, according to the International Labour Organisation. "I think that really you will be shocked reading the stories of 15 years old girl who was re-trafficked for seven times. In a week, she had more than 50 men raping her, abusing her. Stories of lonely mothers who wanted to gain some money for the children, they believed the false promises of the traffickers. I think these stories really are shocking and they are happening today, nowadays, they're happening in our communities," Misiniene said. British prime minister Tony Blair said in January Britain would sign the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings that commits signatories to giving victims legal rights. However, it still needs 10 more countries to ratify the convention before it comes into effect, a spokeswoman for UN children's fund UNICEF said.

ITN Source | February 22, 2007

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