There’s a fun game to be played with The New York Times’ coverage of British crime. It’s very simple and you can play along at home: how many paragraphs will it take the paper to tell you what the sympathetic victim of the legal system actually did?
Take this recent piece on modern slavery. The article lists the restrictions on a man recently released from prison. After eight paragraphs, it reveals that these were imposed due to ‘a novel interpretation of a 2015 law that was written to prevent the trafficking of Vietnamese women and children’, after he sent ‘a 16-year-old-runner to sell drugs’. Beyond this, the author is curiously reticent, preferring instead to focus on the ‘disproportionate’ impact of the law on Black communities.
“The man in The New York Times article was one of three drug dealers jailed under modern slavery laws”
If you turn to contemporary coverage of the convictions, you will find slightly more detail. The man in The New York Times article was one of three drug dealers jailed under modern slavery laws. They used three boys and three girls aged 14-19 as drug mules, who were sometimes ‘forced to stash drug packages in body cavities’, kept ‘in squalid conditions at the homes of local drug users’, had their movements ‘controlled’ by the dealers, ‘had to ask permission’ to use money to buy food and were forced to stay far from home until the drugs they held were sold.
