Antislavery Usable Past

Sian Men

2016 (Narrative date)

The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates that on any given day in 2016 there were over 3.8 million people living in conditions of modern slavery in China. Included in the types of slavery prevalent in China is forced labour, with China's unprecedented rise to the world's second largest economy and its domestic economy specialising in the production of labour-intensive, cheap goods for export, increasing the demand for cheap labour. Forced labour occurs in both the manufacturing and construction sectors, as well as more informal industries such as brick kilns and garment facoties. Many women are also tricked in to forced labour as domestic servants, lured by the promise of good jobs with high incomes they instead find themselves confined to the house and forced to work long hours with little or no pay.

Sian Men Mawi legally worked as a maid in Singapore before moving to China, lured by the promise of a lucrative employment contract. She arrived in Guangzhou on a tourist visa. She was enslaved by her agent who locked a number of Myanmar girls in separate houses and rotated them through different jobs, holding their wages and never letting them pay off their debts. Sian Men managed to escape and returned to Myanmar by bus, evading the police who manned checkpoints along the route.

I never knew we could be treated as slaves before I went. I thought the agent would look after us and take care of us and give us a regular salary, and we would come back to Myanmar safely, but it was not as I thought.

One of the problems in China was that we couldn’t speak Chinese and the Chinese couldn’t speak English. So the communication was not ok. We were supposed to get paid after one month but we didn’t get anything. Later we found out that she was cheating a lot of girls. She would keep you in a job for the first month or two, then swap you with another girl so she could keep the pay.

We were worried, we didn’t know how to go back home. We were working there illegally and we didn’t have any money, so we called the agent but she didn’t want to come. She said if we wanted to go back home then we would have to use our own money and she would not help us.

Siang eventually escaped and made her way home with what little money she and her friend had saved.

I’ve only just come back from China, all my relatives – my Grandfather, Grandmother and Brother are working on the farm. So they ask me to take care of the children, which makes me so happy.

Narrative provided by Thomson Reuters Foundation

Country

Theme

Domestic slavery

Type

Narrative

Tags

VOICES: Narratives by Survivors of Modern Slavery

This is the world's largest archive of modern slavery survivor narratives. Across more than a million words spoken or written by survivors of modern slavery, we can see why slavery persists in particular hotspots, analyse patterns in trafficking routes, identify vulnerabilities, understand more about the challenges survivors face in liberation, and discover new antislavery solutions. These narratives offer the chance to systematically design new antislavery strategies based on the experiences, ideas and solutions of enslaved people themselves.

The database is searchable by country, name, theme, and narrative date. Narratives can be viewed in list or map form. A short introduction provides context to each narrative. Narrative provenance appears after the main narrative text.

For ideas on how to use this database, please see our accompanying guide.

Project Lead: Zoe Trodd. Team Members: Andrea Nicholson, Lauren Eglen, Rosemary Pearce, Olivia Wright.

Project Funders: AHRC Antislavery Usable Past grant (2014-19), ESRC/AHRC PaCCS Modern Slavery: Meaning and Measurement grant (2016-19), and AHRC-GCRF Antislavery Knowledge Network grant (2017-2021).

For any queries about the collection please contact: [email protected]. If you wish to cite a particular narrative, please acknowledge the survivor’s name, the provenance of the narrative and cite: Voices Database, the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham.

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