Washington: Growing up in South London I didn’t put much thought into where the fish fingers on my dinner plate came from.
But fish sold in the UK and around the world could be being caught by slaves.
Reporting for CNN’s Freedom Project I met Samart Senasook, a skinny man who looked weak and lost.
He was convinced by an agent to become a fisherman.
He expected to be at sea for 12 months, but was gone for six years — trapped on a boat.
The men were held in virtual cages, forced to work up to 23 hours a day, given a boiled potato to eat if they were lucky.
They were locked in a freezer room for hours, or carried giant blocks of frozen fish that would smash into their bodies, breaking bones or even paralysing them.
“The captain kicked and punched me. My nose and mouth were bleeding. My jaw still hurts everytime I chew.”
He showed me his mouth – blood was clotted around his teeth.
Samart wanted to escape, but said the Captain held the workers’ documents and gave him a fake identity.
He and others like him were only discovered and freed by accident, when Indonesia cracked down on illegal fishing boats.
His boat was among many forced in to land.
Thousands of men from Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos emerged, with tales of being held as slaves at sea for months, years, even decades.
We met one of these fisherman’s elderly parents.
Living in a rusty tin shack, they picked through rubbish to find things to sell.
It wasn’t hard to understand why their son risked going to sea.
Thousands more may still be out in the ocean, or stranded on islands, waiting for their governments to bring them home.
Samart is still suffering.
The authorities refused to register him as a victim of human trafficking – the first step towards justice, and perhaps compensation.
A labour rights group claims the Thai government isn’t registering trafficking victims to manipulate figures and improve its status in a US report – an allegation Thailand’s Prime Minister denies.
Thailand will host a regional conference on human trafficking and irregular migration this week.
Samart broke down so many times during our interview.
His long pauses weighed heavy in the air.
I wanted to use more of his silence than his words, because they said so much.
I’ll never forget that he told me there were pet dogs on board, petted, loved and fed well.
“The captain treated his dogs on board better than he treated us.”
— The writer is a correspondent with CNN