Interview: Ann Hamilton, head of Human Trafficking Foundation

As she speaks, the 57-year-old conveys the passion of an intern and mentions a raft of reports on her organisation’s website, which details news about a criminal industry estimated to be worth £20 billion a year globally.

There is a report from China that some 40,000 people have been arrested since 2009. In Mexico, some 8,000 miles away, more than 1,000 arrests were made over a single weekend, when bars and hotels were raided by police in Ciudad Juarez. There are criminal investigations on-going in Britain too. In Bury, police are investigating massage parlours in the Prestwich and Whitefield areas, while a women’s refuge has been set up in Wrexham to support female victims. There is also a report, Hamilton points out, about the first successful prosecutions for the offence in Scotland. “Human trafficking is a significant problem worldwide. Here in Britain, it is also increasing but it remains largely hidden and difficult to prosecute, and that’s one reason why it took so long to get convictions for the crime in Scotland. We need to raise awareness of what is happening and take the issue to the policymakers and politicians,” says Hamilton, who is the new head of a London-based organisation called the Human Trafficking Foundation (HTF).

She is speaking about her role in combating the British end of the world’s thirdmost lucrative criminal activity. Human trafficking is escalating and HTF was created recently to support the scores of agencies operating across Britain that are trying to understand and deal with the issue. The NGO grew out of the work of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Human Trafficking, and was set up during the summer by former MPs Claire Short and Anthony Steen – with Hamilton being asked to head the pioneering charity shortly afterwards, a task she agreed to undertake in September. “To be honest, I was thinking of taking early retirement but the lure of this job proved too much, so I now find that instead of enjoying the easy life, I am commuting from Glasgow to London every week,” she says.

Originally from Edinburgh, Hamilton has a degree in community education and has spent all of her career helping marginalised women. In doing so, she has been trying to alter political mindsets and public perceptions with regard to the issues of prostitution, domestic violence and human trafficking, her expertise in the latter issue prompting the call from London. Hamilton’s CV stretches back to the 1970s and Glasgow, where she spent the early part of her career as a community worker helping women living in the East End. There, she worked in youth clubs, advising teenage girls from poorer families on issues such as health, pregnancy, careers and life choices. It was challenging, she says, but highly rewarding, and from there she branched out into advocating for equality for women in the workplace before becoming involved in a sea-changing campaign that focused minds across Scotland on the issue of domestic violence. “In 1994, there was a hugely successful initiative called Zero Tolerance, which highlighted the taboo issue of domestic violence.

“At that time, domestic violence was generally viewed as a private family matter, so police, social workers and society as a whole did not really view it as something they should become involved in. Zero Tolerance revealed the scale of the problem for the very first time and exposed the reality of what was happening behind closed doors: how domestic violence manifests itself in rape and murder, and how it can lead to mental health problems.

“We also showed how violence impacts upon children and, as a result, I’d argue that there is now a much deeper understanding of the issue across Scotland,” Hamilton says. She seems immensely proud of the campaign and her own part within it, but there is no hint of conceit and she makes clear there is still much to be done.

Prostitution was her next focus – in many respects, an issue closely related to Zero Tolerance – and for the latter part of the 1990s, Hamilton’s raison d’être was to help women working in red light districts. It was a particularly disturbing time to be addressing the issue, she says, as there had been a spate of murders of street girls in Glasgow. In fact, seven young women were killed between 1991 and 1999. Hamilton did not know any of the victims personally but recalls it was a “harrowing time”, adding quietly, “you cannot be unmoved by the awful stories you hear when you work at grass-roots level.”

Hamilton had set up the Routes out of Prostitution Partnership (ROPP), which supported girls working the streets and others with mental health issues who were forced to work for the sex industry indoors. ROPP, she says, was a radical but controversial approach that challenged the status quo on prostitution. “We caused outrage simply by challenging the notion that somehow prostitution was acceptable or inevitable, the idea that there was nothing you could or should do about the so-called oldest profession in the world. We wanted to stop men buying sex. Prostitution is fundamentally harmful to women, despite what the powerful sex industry lobby says. We supported women who were being raped, robbed, kidnapped and seriously assaulted on a regular basis. Others were murdered, of course. Prostitution is nothing like as portrayed in the film Pretty Woman. In all my time with ROPP, I never came across one woman who said she was happy to be on the street selling her body,” she says, sounding quite exasperated.

ROPP – “brave” and “ambitious”, Hamilton says – involved a multi-agency approach, with partnerships formed for the first time between health services, police, voluntary groups and the council, and it was this holistic strategy that she embraced again when human trafficking came to the fore in 2002. It was then that Hamilton and colleagues first came across foreign girls working in Glasgow’s saunas and brothels, and with the help of a government grant they started to investigate.

As a result, the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance (Tara) was established in the city in 2005, a service to women who had been trafficked to Glasgow for the sex industry. Tara was supported initially by Glasgow City Council but is now Scotland-wide, and the scheme provides victims with safe accommodation, healthcare and counselling. Hamilton says there are few projects anywhere in the UK that have been established for that length of time. “Tara was a new approach, co-ordinating the mainstream expertise of Glasgow City Council, police and the NHS. At the outset, there were only a few cases of women being trafficked but Tara now deals with 50 to 60 new referrals each year,” she says.

Although there is evidence that human trafficking has been increasing for some time, Hamilton’s appointment to HTF came as Scotland secured its first conviction for the crime. Stephen Craig, 34, and Sarah Beukan, 22, pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and admitted moving 14 men and women to various addresses in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff and Newcastle for the purposes of prostitution. Hamilton points out that three of the victims involved in the case – all women in their 20s – received support from Tara. The lack of success in prosecuting human trafficking in Scotland – in comparison, there have been some 150 convictions in England to date – has led to much criticism of law-enforcers and a number of major inquiries enacted.

In March, a report called Scotland: a safe place for child traffickers? said that at least 80 children have been trafficked to face sexual exploitation and other forms of abuse, including forced labour, benefit fraud and domestic slavery. Tam Baillie, the Scottish commissioner for children and young people and one of the report’s authors, said Scotland was failing trafficked youngsters and that the cases cited were merely the tip of an iceberg. The study followed an exclusive report by Scotland on Sunday, which told the story of a young Nigerian girl who had been trafficked to Scotland, held prisoner and gang-raped. Her case was just one of several documented by the Scottish Refugee Council.

Hamilton is reluctant to apportion any blame to law agencies for a poor detection rate, and says that trafficking is a crime notoriously difficult to police. She also rails against some academics who say that the scale of the crime has been exaggerated. “It is these types of horrendous stories that really put the issue into perspective,” Hamilton says referring to the Nigerian girl’s story.

Later this month, it is expected that the results of an 18-month inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission – led by Baroness Helena Kennedy – will further shed light on the true scale of the problem, but Hamilton says the major challenge facing every region of the UK is that people trafficking remains largely hidden and that victims are often terrified into silence by criminal gangs. “They are often threatened and their families are threatened. Witchcraft is also prevalent, usually when African girls have been trafficked. We dealt with a number of cases in Scotland where girls had been controlled by witchcraft rites, so getting them to speak proves highly problematic.

“The stereotype often portrayed by the media, she adds, “the image of a chained sex slave, is often far from the truth. The crime is usually much more subtle, whereby women – and men – are often coerced or duped, and debt is often involved. Trafficking is prevalent for the sex industry but it also exists in the fishing and agricultural sectors, she explains, which Tam Baillie’s report highlighted through evidence that some children brought to Scotland had been forced to work in cannabis factories and private homes, while others were made to pose as dependents for benefit scams. “Our main challenge as a society is to become experts in identifying it,” Hamilton argues.

She says a multi-agency approach is the way forward and that she understands the needs of victims from her time with Tara. She is only just in the saddle down south but can already see the need for a more coherent approach in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The problem is obviously on a much larger scale in England, with the Metropolitan Police’s anti-trafficking unit, SCD9, for example, currently processing 17 cases through the courts. “Already I’ve seen that there are some very good pockets of work on-going. In Gwent, some 25 groups have come together and there are excellent coalitions operating in Kent and Bristol. Likewise, in the North of England, where two organisations are doing some great work in helping victims of trafficking, both men and women,” she says.

But more support is required, she adds, because society is still not meeting the needs of all victims, and she points out that government cuts are impacting upon services such as legal aid. There is also concern about the coalition’s new strategy, which was announced in July. The approach involves a greater focus on tightened border controls but, despite the government also agreeing to opt in to the EU Trafficking Directive, campaigning groups such as Ecpat UK and Anti-Slavery International have criticised the new plan by arguing that it does not offer protection for trafficked people and seems more concerned with immigration control. Indeed, Anthony Steen, chair of HTF and Hamilton’s boss, said it was a matter of “regret” that the thrust of the coalition’s review seemed more focused on political concerns as opposed to helping victims.

Hamilton says she welcomes the new focus on prevention and prosecution but agrees that seeing human trafficking primarily through an immigration lens – which, she says, has been the case in the UK under the last two governments – fails to recognise the full nature of this complex issue. “It may also compromise identification and undermine victim care. It is worth remembering that the seventh-largest group of referrals of victims of trafficking during 2009-11 were UK citizens, so not all victims have any immigration issues.”

For now, Hamilton’s retirement plans seem a long way off.