A most vile trade

It is going to take a cultural and attitudinal shift to eradicate human trafficking, and neither is on the horizon.

A British couple of Pakistani origin were jailed on October 23, having been convicted of a string of crimes involving a deaf-mute girl who was discovered in the cellar of their house in Salford. The girl had been trafficked into England illegally by Tallat Ashar, now aged 68, when she was about 10 years old. She spent almost a decade as a virtual stave of the family, was repeatedly raped by Ilyas Ashar since before puberty, until she was discovered and rescued in 2009. She never attended school in the UK or Pakistan but was taught to sign her name in order that she could fraudulently claim more than 30,000 pounds in benefits, an operation in which the couple’s daughter Faazia Ashar was also involved. Ilyas Ashar, now aged 84, was sentenced to 13 years in prison, his wife Tallat to five years and their daughter ordered to carry out community service. Sentencing the couple, the judge commented that they did not treat the girl as a human being and had subjected her to a life of degradation and misery. She was sexually abused, beaten and slapped and forced to live in conditions of extreme squalor. The young woman, now in her early 20’s, is in the care of the local authority social services department.

Horrific as this case is, it is unlikely to be isolated, nor confined to the international movement of trafficked people. In 2012, Sindh reported a sharp rise in human trafficking, particularly of children and women, from Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The floods of 2010 and 2011 greatly increased poverty in Sindh and parts of Punjab, forcing more people to sell their children. There is a ready market for them both at home and abroad. The police are largely untrained in the detection of people trafficking and it is low on their list of priorities. Children as young as five may be seen carrying shopping and working as house cleaners in large cities. It is going to take a cultural and attitudinal shift to eradicate this vile trade, and neither is on the horizon.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 26^th, 2013.

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