Reactions to the revelations by Mo Farah (Hassan Abdi) of being trafficked as a child to the UK from war-torn Somaliland in the early 1990s have combined amazement – at the story itself, and the fact that he has kept it a secret for a so long – and admiration, that he has had the courage to reveal it.
The account completely cuts across the story generally known of his childhood journey to the UK to join his father (who we now learn had been killed in the civil war). The reality is that he was passed amongst relatives and ended up with a household in West London where he was kept as a domestic slave, cooking, cleaning, childminding and doing other tasks. His bravery in revealing this story is all the more so because it is clear from media coverage that he was encouraged to revisit the house where he was enslaved, a process which will have undoubtedly reawakened the trauma which he has buried for so long
His revelations are courageous also because he will have feared that the public response to stories from high profile figures are increasingly met with scepticism, often underpinned by the perceptions that they are likely to be lies and/or people trying to increase their fame.
What, however, is important – beyond this tale of individual suffering and courage – is to learn its wider lessons. One very important lesson is that it has awoken very many people to the fact that child slavery still exists in this country, something very many people still find it hard to comprehend. Surveys of public opinion and awareness show that there is a substantial proportion of the UK population which believes that slavery is something which either happened many years ago, or happens now elsewhere in the world. We overlook our own complicity in it as we buy goods from companies which facilitate slavery elsewhere in their search for cheap consumer goods such as clothes and jewellery made by child slaves.
Secondly, Mo is not alone. Child slavery has been an established fact in this country for many years. It never went away, even after the work of the abolitionists was presumed to have been done. Each year the number of children identified by the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the official record of those officially accepted to be in slavery in this country, has been rising since the NRM came into being about 20 years ago, and amongst these the number of children (those under 18) is very significant. Last year there were about 5,500 child slaves in the UK. These are children trafficked either for labour exploitation, as Mo was, or for sexual exploitation. Many are ‘rescued’, although many are not. Some are freed from bondage by the police but go on to be victimised by the courts, who – not understanding the nature of slavery -charge enslaved cannabis growers, for example, as criminals, sending them to prison and then deporting them.
And what about the behaviour of official agencies? Within minutes of Mo’s announcement, the Home Office announced it would take no action against him although it is not clear what action they would or could take. To most people, he is an athletic icon of unimpeachable integrity. But consider this in the wider context. Some years ago the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, a coalition of expert organisations in the field, concluded that the NRM was institutionally racist on the basis that Black African victims seeking to be identified as such had about one third the chance of being accepted as victims as did white European victims. To put it another way, being Black severely increased your chances of being defined as a liar. Refugee appeal judges are similarly instructed to assume that appellants are lying. Mo revealing his story now is a very important part of both of his own healing process and perhaps also of raising public consciousness about slavery; and it may be that the timing is simply about his personal capacity to be able to cope with the strain of doing so. Set against the Home Office’s immediate response to him, why does it persist in disbelieving so many other trafficked victims?
And what about social services? Whilst child slavery may not have been in the public eye until relatively recently, there have been enough high-profile child abuse cases in the last twenty years to sensitise social services departments of the need to act against the family. But there is no evidence that they did. We are told that Mo alerted his teacher, who told the headmaster, who told social services who moved him to another family. But we have heard nothing however about action being taken against the family. Think of Jasmine Beckford for example, who died in 1984, a year after Mo was born; or Victoria Climbie, trafficked in almost identical circumstances in 2000, just after Mo moved families. Why are the police only now investigating the exploitative family: and what has that family been doing for the last twenty or so years? There seems on the face of it a clear case, not for an investigation into Mo’s statement, but into the circumstances around it.
So many child abuse enquiries over the past forty years have ended with the message that ‘lessons have been learned’. In Mo Farah’s case, these lessons are only just beginning to emerge and need a thorough investigation, not of Mo’s veracity but of the failure of official agencies to act, leaving it to the happy chance of a friendly and supportive teacher to get him out of slavery. Child slavery is everywhere in the UK and official agencies need to know how to spot it and take quick appropriate action for the victim and against the perpetrator.
Gary Craig is a Visiting Professor at the Law School, University of Newcastle upon Tyne and at the University of York, editor of Child Slavery Now, and co-editor of The Modern Slavery Agenda.
The Modern Slavery Agenda: Policy, Politics and Practice by Alex Balch, Hannah Lewis and Louise Waite is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £26.99.
Bristol University Press/Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 35% discount – sign up here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: Simon Balson / Alamy Stock Photo