Jon Bright (London, OK): openDemocracy has recently launched blog coverage of the annual "16 Days against Gender Violence" movement, which marks a period of activism between the tongue-twisting International Day Against Violence Against Women on the 25th of November, and International Human Rights Day. There's a particularly interesting article by Rahila Gupta, who argues that, on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, the number of people forced into work in this country is higher than ever.
She argues:
An individual is powerless while her/his passport is in the hands of somebody else whether it is an ‘employer', a ‘spouse', an ‘agent', a ‘trafficker', or indeed the government as in the case of failed asylum seekers. The defining feature of modern slavery is entrapment - physical, psychological and financial - often sustained through violence. While no human being legally owns another human being today, men, women and children continue to be bought and sold. Current immigration legislation plays a central role in keeping people trapped in slavery.
Like Phillippe Legrain, she calls for all immigration control into the UK to be dropped to end this practice. But with a media climate extremely inhospitable to any talk of relaxing migration control at all, it is hard to envisage any swift solution to the problem of Britain's new slavery.
