I'm Julie Etchingham. I'm a journalist and a broadcaster and I anchor News at 10 for ITV. Where I lived was very close to where the National Missing Persons Helpline was first established, and there happen to be a woman who lived on my street who worked there and it was literally just around the corner from where we lived.
I just started a job at Sky News and I think she must have seen me on the street, and she just gave me a knock and said could I just talk to you about something new that we're doing at the National Missing Persons Helpline.
I said yes, sure. And in the course of which, she said I will take you to meet a victim of modern slavery. And it was a young Nigerian woman who was being held in Holloway Prison on Immigration Offenses.
So I went to meet Omosovie. And she spoke in a very soft voice and explained that she'd been brought here from Nigeria, which as many of us now subsequently know is one of the main trafficking routes into the United Kingdom.
She'd been brought here on the promise of working in a hotel, of working in the hospitality industry. She'd been taken on this journey through Africa up through Europe, probably through Italy that well-worn route.
She'd had her passport taken away by her gangmaster when she arrived in London. And of course, as many who work in the sector will immediately recognize she was not given a nice job in a hotel.
She was put on the streets for sex work. She was beaten by her slave master. She was infected with HIV and wasn't given access to any medication, and when we sat in the visiting area at the prison, she rolled her sleeve up and show showed me the scars on her arms where she'd been beaten with a belt by her gangmaster who was controlling her.
So it was one of those moments where you hear a story, and you sit in silence and listen and you're there with another young woman from another part of the planet who has been brought to your wealthy, comfortable country, to all extents and purposes with this great dream. And it is a dream which has been utterly ruined, exploited and it has left a human being who is sitting opposite you, in utter desolation, and in prison being treated as a criminal rather than as a victim.
And it was simply one of those moments where I thought, well, you can't pretend you haven't heard this story. You can't say you don't understand what it is for somebody to become a modern slave. You can't say that you don't know what trafficking is.
So it was just one of those moments where you thought right, okay and Juliet Singer, who was this amazing woman who'd started to cotton onto this issue and had brought me into that space to meet this young woman. I mean she and I... I mean I was totally galvanized at that moment around this story issue. I just have my first baby. I was trying to work out where I was going next with my career and all sorts of things.
But I just knew from that moment that raising awareness and shining a light on this issue would have to be part of it. The one thing that people can do is educate themselves on this.
But in the end. you've got to flag it to somebody and whether that's somebody in your local authority, your local council or just being aware enough to know that there are charities and agencies, that are there and are desperate to hear these stories, they're desperate for a lead. And you know, just quite straightforwardly going to the police.