How a Nigerian girl was incacerated and exploited as a domestic slave by a wealthy family in the UK
26-year-old Cynthia is one of the thousands of modern
slavery victims whose suffering has been highlighted in a report published by
the University of Hull and YouGov on Tuesday, October 18th, about the lack of
awareness of the scale or nature of modern slavery in the UK.
However, walking away from slavery was terrifying for
Cynthia. Enslaved at the age of 13 after being tricked into leaving her home
and school in Nigeria for a better life, she had spent a decade incarcerated
and exploited as a domestic servant at the hands of a wealthy family in Essex.
"I knew I had to leave," says Cynthia. "But I
was very afraid. I didn’t know where I was going or where my future lay. My
head was all over the place."
During those 10 years at the mercy of a rich, well-connected
and seemingly highly respected family from Nigeria, not a soul batted an eyelid
at the young girl in their community who would take other pupils to school,
then pick them up, but at no point attend classes herself. In most respects,
she was invisible to the outside world.
The study finds that just eight per cent of the UK
population understands the true extent of slavery in this country, while more
than 55 per cent admit to not being aware of the most common sign. This lack of
awareness about modern slavery among the British public is highlighted in Cynthia’s
story.
As a young teenager she would walk the family’s children to
school each day and then return home again, without neighbours voicing any
concern. When she was 15 she started attending evening classes at the local
school, but none of the teachers questioned why a teenager was studying in the
evening and not during the school day.
"People didn’t care," Cynthia recalls. "It’s
one of the things that really bothers me. I was only 13 years old, but nobody
took issue with the fact that I shouldn’t be doing these things. I didn’t speak
about it because I was told not to talk, but it’s sad that it took 10 years for
anyone to say something."
A report published by Kevin Hyland OBE, the UK’s Independent
Anti-Slavery Commissioner, recently revealed “chronic weaknesses in modern
slavery crime reporting,” pointing to a lack of intelligence reporting and
evidence-based action, leading to victims such as Cynthia being failed by the
system. In response to Cynthia’s story, Mr Hyland said:
"There are many girls and women being brought over and working in the shadows. Cynthia was taking the children to school at the age of 13, and people didn’t take notice. She was clearly a child being treated differently from the other children, but no one spoke out or took action. It’s a problem with the law as well. It needs to be dealt with like any other crime of abuse."
Before she moved to the UK, Cynthia was attending school in
the village where she grew up in Lagos State, Nigeria. Although she was in
school her family was poor, and when the offer came up through a distant family
friend for her to move in with a rich Nigerian family in Britain, her parents
didn’t want to turn down the opportunity for her to escape poverty and gain
access to a better education. But on arriving in the UK Cynthia quickly
discovered the reality was very different.
"The day after I moved here the man of the house
threatened me," Cynthia says. "He said I had to wake up at 5am every
morning to clean the house. I wasn't allowed to go to school. I had been told I
would take the kids to school and then go to my school for the day. But they
said after I did the school run I wasn’t allowed to leave the house – just do
the chores. That blew my mind."
Cynthia became one of the 13,000 victims of modern slavery
suffering in silence in the UK. She realised she had left behind a much happier
life in her home country, but she found herself trapped and was unable to break
out. She says:
"In Nigeria I had friends and I would play. But when I came here I had to become an adult even though I was a child. I had to take on loads of responsibility. It was a lot to cope with and I had no privacy at all. My bedroom door was always kept open so they could call me at any time. Sometimes at 1am I’d have to get up and work."
As time went on her treatment became worse. Several weeks
after her arrival Cynthia wrote a letter addressed to her parents, telling the
reality of what was happening, but kept it in a closed notebook.
"The woman somehow found it," she says.
"That’s when I realised I was really afraid of them and I couldn’t do
anything. I had to beg her for forgiveness. She wouldn’t talk to me. I became
like an enemy in the house. I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have anyone to
talk to. I tried to tell my family in Nigeria but they didn’t believe what I
was saying. The woman told them things that weren't true – that I wasn't
behaving."
While struggling with her deep loneliness, Cynthia pined to
go to school again. After a year of living in the UK she got another chance at
education.
"The family realised I was constantly crying about not
going to school," she remembers. "I would have swollen eyes at the
end of every day from crying about it. The woman spoke to a friend who worked
in a college and I was enrolled onto evening classes." But succeeding in
her studies while completing her daily domestic work was no easy feat.
"Before going to classes I had to finish all the housework, The woman
would inspect it before I went. Sometimes I would be late for school, other
times I couldn't go at all. But I couldn’t talk to anyone there about what was
happening. I had to pretend everything was okay."
Despite missing a year of classes and studying only in the
evenings, Cynthia passed her GCSEs just a year late. After that she was hungry
to continue her education.
"I wanted to do a Business qualification, but it was
full-time," she says. "The woman said I had to look after the kids,
so I couldn’t do it. I had to do evening classes again. Accounting was the only
evening class available, so I took that. I had to put so much effort in. I was
determined. I had to do the housework too. I had to make sure everywhere was
clean before I went to the library or anything."
Despite missing a year of classes and studying only in the
evenings, Cynthia passed her GCSEs just a year late. After that she was hungry
to continue her education.
"I wanted to do a Business qualification, but it was
full-time," she says. "The woman said I had to look after the kids,
so I couldn’t do it. I had to do evening classes again. Accounting was the only
evening class available, so I took that. I had to put so much effort in. I was
determined. I had to do the housework too. I had to make sure everywhere was
clean before I went to the library or anything."
At around the same time as she began her college studies,
Cynthia met someone who made escaping seem possible.
"I met a woman in town. She was Nigerian but not within
the right-knit Nigerian community," she says. "I was sitting in a
bench and she came over with her kids and started talking to me. She could see
that I was worried. We got talking and she gave me her number. I called her a
few weeks later. Gradually I was able to open up to her. She said the best way
was to move out of the house. From there I was able to make that choice. I knew
it was the right time for me to move."
By talking with someone about her situation, Cynthia
eventually grew the confidence to tell the family she was leaving.
"I was very afraid of the future. I didn’t know where I
was going," she says. "I made up my mind that I wanted to go, but it
was really scary. I had been in there for 10 years."
Cynthia found a room to rent with the help of the woman who
encouraged her to leave. The family reluctantly agreed she could leave, but
kept her passport. She did not initially report them to the police. She thought
she could swiftly move on from what had happened, but soon found the experience
was causing her distress, heightened by financial pressures. She recalls:
"It was a stressful time, and I found it hard to pay the rent. I would
clean for people, I would iron clothes. But I was drained emotionally and
physically.
"I couldn’t sleep for the fear of what was going to
happen to me. Then I started hearing voices in my head at night, shouting
orders at me. I got to the point where I was sleeping for one hour a night. I
thought if everything got that difficult I would pack my bag and go back to my
country, but I couldn’t even do that. They still had my passport and I had no
visa, nothing. That’s when I decided I had to tell the police what they had
done to me."
Cynthia reported the abuse to the police in December 2013, a
year after she escaped, and her case is currently in its final stages. Just 28
per cent of modern slavery crimes in the UK that get recorded; despite there
being 3,146 potential victims identified by the National Referral Mechanism
(NRM) in England and Wales last year, only 884 crimes were recorded by police
forces.
Three years after escaping from the labour exploitation she
was subjected to, Cynthia has just won her asylum case last week and is now
working for a charity alongside her Accountancy studies, with plans to work as
an account in the future. But her relief and hope for the future are infused
with a sense of frustration and sadness in knowing that that there are
thousands of other victims in the country who are still suffering in silence.
“A lot of people in the UK don’t even know what child trafficking is," she
says.
“It saddens me that even though I’ve come out of it there
are still thousands of people out there in the position I was in. The victims
are kept inside the house. They’re crying but people aren't listening out for
their voice."
Source: The
INDEPENDENT
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