Personal Profile: Interviewing Alicia Kearns

My initial intention whilst sourcing interviewees was to find those that has made a big impact in the world of modern-day slavery. Alicia Kearns is currently a conservative candidate for Mitcham and Morden, but previously saw slavery in the UK go under the radar whilst working in the Ministry of Justice. Her role included launching the modern slavery helpline, which you will hear more about in my final two minutes of audio that will be submitted with my finished project.

But, for now, I wanted to share some exclusive clips of my interview with Alicia to give you a sense of what is to come and to share her opinions about a variety of modern slavery issues.

One aspect of Alicia's job role was to increase awareness of support services for those that have been trafficked into exploitation. Alicia met a number of victims in her role which opened her eyes to the improvements that need to be made to help support them.

Alicia saw first hand the development of modern slavery through the years, alongside the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Before this time modern slavery was unknown and it was more commonly known as kidnapping or human trafficking, but the act of exploitation after someone is trafficked was not identified. Thus leaving the issue of contemporary slavery to, fall off the radar.

In the 2017 July - September quarterly National Referral Mechanism (NRM) statistics, the UK was the highest reported number of modern slavery victims. However, following this was Albania and Vietnam, which shows that some people are being moved by human traffickers into the UK. Consequently, they are brought into the UK and exploited, which is the act of modern slavery. Alicia believes that, however the recent Brexit referendum could be beneficial for sufferers of what has been described as a "crime against humanity."