Three women were freed from decades of domestic servitude inside a secretive Maoist commune in London, exposing modern slavery in a UK urban setting.
Key Facts
- Date of rescue
- 25 October 2013
- Victims rescued
- 3 women
- Ages of victims
- 69, 57, and 30 years old
- Arrests made
- 21 November 2013, two suspects
- Born into sect
- Katy Morgan-Davies, had never known outside world
- Commune leader
- Aravindan Balakrishnan, 73, ran Workers' Institute sect
By the Numbers
Location
Cause → Event → Consequence
Aravindan Balakrishnan led the Workers' Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought commune. Following a police raid in the early 1980s, he moved the group underground, progressively tightening his control over followers until the commune functionally became a place of imprisonment and servitude for its members.
On 25 October 2013, Metropolitan Police from South London's Human Trafficking Unit rescued three women from the Lambeth commune: a 69-year-old Malaysian woman (Aishah Wahab), a 57-year-old Northern Irish woman (Josephine Herivel), and a 30-year-old London-born woman (Katy Morgan-Davies), who had been born into the sect and had no prior experience of the outside world.
On 21 November 2013, police arrested Balakrishnan and his wife Chanda Pattni on charges of slavery and domestic servitude. The case drew widespread attention to the existence of modern slavery within an urban UK context and highlighted how isolated cult environments can be used to perpetuate long-term human trafficking and abuse.