Poor Banished Children and Modern Day Slavery

A reviewer on Amazon recently posted a comment about Poor Banished Children in which she mentioned modern slavery in the form of trafficking. Not many people have drawn that parallel but it was in fact learning about the evil of trafficking that made me all the more determined to write the book.

I am ashamed to say I knew very little about the subject until I was at my parents' house flicking through a copy of the Wonersh Seminary Magazine and came across an interview with the sister who founded The Medaille Trust to help women escaping traffickers. I was appalled to read about women being bought and sold for sex in cities like London and Birmingham. The horrors they went through were not so very different to the accounts of slavery in the seventeenth century I was reading about; being lured away from home, abducted, sold, beaten, raped, humiliated... the list goes on and on. I looked up The Medaille Trust's website and read more.

One of the things that most struck me when I was conducting my research into the Mediterranean slave trade was how much more material was available about men's experiences, partly because more men escaped than women but also because the suffering they went through was more public and is perhaps also more obviously horrific. One question I ask on radio interviews sometimes is: "If I say the words 'galley slave' to you, what images spring to mind?" Most people have quite a vivid picture in their minds (usually taken from the feature film Ben Hur but never mind) and appreciate how terrible such a fate would be, but say the word 'harem' and it still has an exotic, slightly cheeky sense to it. I wanted people to consider that a woman sold for sex would face a fate just as brutal and humiliating in spite of the pretty clothes and trivial bodily comforts.

Because in the end, if we do not take an evil seriously, it will never be eradicated and the sexual exploitation of women is a long way from being eradicated.