Scourge of slavery

These days it is a cheap riposte to an imperious demand: "I thought slavery had been abolished." But, as witnessed by a number of recent articles in The Herald, a particularly insidious form of human slavery persists in modern Scotland. The International Labour Organisation estimates that human trafficking is worth more than £14bn a year to global crime syndicates, for whom vulnerable people are as much tradeable commodities as arms or drugs. Trafficked people end up on farms, in sweat shops and domestic service, working for a pittance or nothing, and in Scotland it is estimated that up to 700 trafficked women and girls have been deceived and coerced into prostitution.