From the New York Times:

Slavery Ensnares Thousands in U.K. Here’s One Teenage Girl’s Story.

By CEYLAN YEGINSU NOV. 18, 2017

… A report by a British government commission on modern slavery and human trafficking, released last month, described a sprawling practice that ensnares tens of thousands of people in Britain.

Many are immigrants. But the high number of victims from Britain was an unexpected shock — cases involving British citizens like the teenage girl were the third-largest grouping, after those involving Albanians or Vietnamese.

A majority of child-trafficking victims were also found to be British. …

“We kind of let it slip that we have vulnerable people in our own communities,” Kevin Hyland, Britain’s first independent antislavery commissioner, said in an interview. …

Then, during the school holidays in July last year, the teenager disappeared. It was not until seven months later, after her mother said she had resigned herself to the fact that her daughter might be dead, that a detective told her that she had been kidnapped and enslaved.

“Enslaved?” the mother, whose identity is also being concealed to protect her daughter, recalled asking the officer. “I just kept repeating that word. I didn’t understand it,” she said in a London park where she often goes to try to manage a panic disorder that developed after her daughter’s disappearance.

During the months when her daughter was missing, “I thought about every possible scenario that could have happened to her,” her mother said. “But slavery? I didn’t even know that happened in England.”

Britain recorded 2,255 modern slavery offenses across England and Wales last year, a 159 percent increase from the previous year. According to the government commission, the rise suggests that, while slavery might be increasing, so is awareness among the police and public. …

The man was grooming the teenager to “go country,” meaning that she would become a drug runner. While most British citizens are trafficked for labor or sex, an increasing number of young people are being drawn into the drug world because of the relatively new phenomenon of distributing narcotics from urban hubs to small towns. …

The man, whom she knew as Ziggy, took her phone and money. He then drove her to a dark, squalid garage with no windows, where she lived for the next seven months with various drug addicts.

“Everything changed,” the girl recalled. “Ziggy started to beat me and told me I wasn’t worth anything to them anymore.” …

When members of the gang and different drug addicts started to rape her every night, she finally decided that nothing could be worse.