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Modern day slavery is rearing its ugly head in cities across the UK as reports of unscrupulous gangs targeting rough sleepers have started to emerge.
Homeless charity Thames Reach has come across 20 cases of people fleeing these gangs and seeking help back to their homelands, sometimes fearful for their lives.
London has in recent years seen a reduction in the number of UK rough sleepers but a large increase in the number of rough sleepers from Central and Eastern Europe who entered the country seeking work after European Union expansion.
These homeless people, often desperate to find work, are targeted by gangs who visit services such as soup runs and day centres in London where they congregate. The gangs lure people with false promises of paid work, to other sites across the UK.
Here they are often held against their will in properties and then shipped out in vans every day to work in factories, only for their wages to be withheld from them. Some are being made to work 12-hour days and their only reward is cheap alcohol.
Many have been the victims of violent assaults by the gang leaders - one man showed the Thames Reach worker helping him the burns on his wrist from where he had been handcuffed to a radiator.
Life on the streets as a rough sleeper can be extremely dangerous but the sheer criminality and brutal nature of these gangs has taken the threat of living on the streets to a new level.
Homeless charities will be working closely with the police in coming weeks and months to help the affected individuals and ensure slavery has no place in our society in the 21st century.
Follow Mike Nicholas on Twitter: www.twitter.com/thamesreach
Matt J. Rossano: Did Secular Morality Shame Religion Into Condemning Slavery?
Lifetime alimony. Or out-of-orbit child support payments.
Alimony is paid by men 97% of the time, child support is paid by men 84% of the time.
Either can last a few years or a decade - even a lifetime - and both can be increased by the receiving party at negotiation intervals.
The paying parties cannot back out or default without going to prison. (about 350,000 men are in jail at any moment for being late with their child support)
The money is TAX FREE to the receiving parties (who also get to use the child support deduction on their income tax) but the payees must pay taxes on the money as if it was their income, in essence costing them an additional 15 to 25%.
Who could deny that anyone caught in these positions (often both at once) is not basically a slave to the receiving party?
Or at the very least, a bonded servant?
Often we see studies claiming divorce throws women and children into poverty, Economic analysis like Wietzman's 1985 book ignore after tax consequencÂÂÂÂes and are fundamentaÂÂÂÂlly flawed. In the case of divorce there are great benefits for the custodial parent at the federal level: tax free income, favorable tax rate, child exemption deductionsÂÂÂÂ, and the $1,000 a child tax credit. Accounting for taxes, the difference in standard of living between fathers and mothers is a wash.