this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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[–] fizzle@quokk.au 85 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Whenever stories like this emerge I can't help but wonder how many thousands of people are enslaved like this.

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 58 points 2 days ago (1 children)

In the UK, the lowest guess (from the government) is "more than 10,000". Most anti-slavery charities agree on an estimate of about 120,000 - 130,000 in the UK.

Each year, about 10,000 - 20,000 are newly referred to authorities (and potentially rescued).

Though there's often a perception that it's only foreign workers in the UK that get trapped like this, 25% of those are British nationals.

Some sad (but important) links: antislavery.org

unseenuk.org

The Modern Slavery Act 2015: becoming world-leading again (PDF)

Yeah, my mom actually did some work to try and educate truckers about modern slavery, because truckers are often the ones who interact with victims the most. Basically, there is a thriving sex slavery industry in America (and I’m sure in most of the rest of the world), which is propped up by truckers.

Truckers are sort of the perfect John when it comes to sex work. They don’t have any local connections, they don’t have any evening plans, they’re often lonely because they spend lots of time on the road by themselves, and they’ll be leaving town in the morning so you don’t need to worry about them hanging around. So a large part of the sex trafficking industry is actually focused on prostitution for truckers. Truckers call the prostitutes who target truck stops “lot lizards”… And pretty much every trucker has a lot lizard story.

My mom was doing work to try and educate truckers on the signs of sex trafficking and slavery, because oftentimes the lot lizards are sex slaves. People tend to think of slavery as chains and hard labor, but modern slavery tends to use leverage and/or addiction instead. Kidnap a teenage runaway, (or fool her into coming into the country with the promise of a good job), take away her money and ID, force her into doing heroin or meth until she’s hooked, then tell her that she’ll only get her fix after she has fucked enough truckers to earn it. Keep her perpetually broke by charging her for things that she has no way of ever realistically repaying.

[–] cRazi_man@europe.pub 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One of the modern slavery support charities say that there is more slavery currently than there has ever been in history. But I don't remember where I read this and can't find the source now.

[–] fizzle@quokk.au 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah. These stats obviously depend on how slavery is defined.

[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

And if you're looking at absolute numbers or as a proportion of the total population.