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.
In December 2013, a year after she escaped, Cynthia, then 23, reported
the abuse and exploitation to the police. Her case is currently in its
final stages. And three years later, precisely last week, she won her
asylum case and is now working for a charity alongside her Accountancy
studies.
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.”