Enslaved on a British cannabis farm: ‘The plants were more valuable than my life’

Minh was 16 when he was kidnapped, raped and trafficked to the UK, and then locked up and forced to grow cannabis. But when the police found him, he was treated like a criminal rather than a victim. By Annie Kelly

More from this series: Exploitation in focus

It was still dark on the morning of 25 October 2013, when police smashed down the door of a seemingly empty two-floor house in a rural corner of Chesterfield. Once inside they found that their tip-off had been correct: the house, which at one time would have been a comfortable family home, was now a fully-functioning cannabis farm, complete with dozens of fully-grown cannabis plants, thousands of pounds’ worth of lights and equipment, and one terrified Vietnamese boy.

The boy had been asleep on a mattress in the living room when the police raid started. He had been jolted awake to the sound of loud banging and splintering wood as the front door gave way. The house, so long devoid of air and natural light, was suddenly flooded with flashlights and the noise of shouts and stamping boots. Minh (not his real name) scrambled backwards into a corner as he was surrounded by men in uniform asking him questions in English that he couldn’t understand. “I was very, very scared of these men,” he recalled recently. “But then I let myself believe that maybe they had come to rescue me.”

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