As reported by CNN, British police have arrested a couple on suspicion of
holding three "extremely traumatized" women captive for more than 30
years, Scotland Yard announced Thursday.
One of the women -- a 30-year-old Briton -- "appears to
have been in servitude for her entire life," Metropolitan Police Detective
Inspector Kevin Hyland said. She and the other two women, a 57-year-old from
Ireland and a 69-year-old from Malaysia, have been taken to a place of safety
and are being cared for by a charity, police said.
The man and woman in custody are both 67, police said. They
were arrested at their home in the south London borough of Lambeth and are
being held as part of an investigation into slavery and domestic servitude,
police said. Their names were not released, and police said only that they are
not British nationals.
Hyland said it was an unprecedented case for the Met's Human
Trafficking Unit.
"We've seen some cases where people have been held for
up to 10 years, but we've never seen anything of this magnitude before,"
he said.
Police said they'd been alerted in October to the situation
by Freedom Charity, which got a phone call from a woman saying "she had
been held against her will in a house in London for more than 30 years."
Freedom Charity spokeswoman Aneeta Prem said the organization had taken
"immediate action" to plan a rescue after learning of the women's
situation.
"Facilitating their escape was achieved using utmost sensitivity
and secrecy and with the safety of the women as our primary concern," she
said, describing the work of those involved as "outstanding."
A television documentary on forced marriages relating to the
work of Freedom Charity prompted one of the victims to call for help. CNN's Max
Foster said police had told him that the women had been released in October
after sensitive negotiations by the charity.
The charity had worked to gain their trust and coax them out
of the house, communicating through prearranged phone calls.
"Over time they built up that trust, the police
gathered outside the house and then they had the confidence to leave the
house," Foster said. "It seems to have taken place in a suburban area
of south London, in an ordinary street."
News of the couple's arrest first spread on Twitter.
Hyland praised the actions of Freedom Charity and said
police were working with the organization to support the victims.
"They are extremely traumatized, which explains the
discrepancy between when the Freedom Charity were contacted and the arrests
were made," he said. "It would be wrong of us to move at a pace that
would further traumatize any victims."
The women had "some controlled freedom" during
their captivity, Hyland said. Investigators have seen
no evidence of sexual abuse, he said.
"We're very early in the investigation. We're not
investigating offenses of a sexual nature. There haven't been any arrests of a
sexual nature, so that's the circumstances at the moment."
UK Special Envoy for Human Trafficking Anthony Steen told
CNN he was not surprised by the case as there were likely to be many cases of
domestic slavery in the country.
"We don't know the number but we know it's pretty huge.
Domestics are hidden away," he said.
"The difference between slavery when it was manifest in
America -- as it was in England -- was that you could see it everywhere,"
Steen said. "Since then having abolished it, it's grown, it's got bigger
and bigger -- in fact they say it's between 10 and 20 times the size it was in
the 1800s."
Steen said the largest number of people involved in slavery
in Britain were in brothels, and that group was followed by men held against
their will in debt bondage.
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