THE horrors of modern slavery are unmasked at a photographic exhibition being held at Forty Hall.

The pictures show the ordinary houses and streets where slaves were held and forced to endure a grim life of rape, beatings, starvation and gruelling work.

Other photographs show victims and their families, and are accompanied by a description of what happened to them in their own words.

The exhibition launched on Saturday with a small gathering of those who work in the field.

Joy Winterbottom of Enfield and Barnet Amnesty International, which is responsible for the exhibition, said her group wanted to raise awareness.

"It's something that's not really understood I think. Everybody has heard of the cockle pickers who died in Morcambe and people who are trafficked by gang masters.

"But a lot of others are brought in to work on people's houses as domestic servants and they disappear.

"The main thing is for people to be aware there's a problem. They could be in the house next door."

Sally Montier from the Poppy Project, which helps victims of sexual and domestic slavery, criticised local papers for running personals ads and said the charity had identified 53 brothels in Enfield and 45 in Barnet last year during a survey based purely on the advertisements in local papers.

Newsquest, the company which owns the Enfield Independent, stopped running such adverts early last year.

It is not clear if those brothels were part of the huge underground slave trade but Ms Montier said it was impossible to tell which were, before reading out harrowing case of women who her charity had helped.

She said women who came to the charity were extremely distressed and often suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, depression and were prone to self harm.

To make matters worse, they are often rejected by their families back home and could even be in danger from honour killings by their relatives if they had been forced to work as prostitutes.

In a letter read out at the launch, Amnesty International UK's gender policy adviser, Poonam Joshi, criticised the Government's lumping of the problem of human trafficking in with immigration.

"Police and immigration have an agenda to catch, prosecute and remove. Not an agenda to put victims first," she said.

Cllr Henry Lamprecht who himself rescued a distant relative from people who were enslaving her, beating her, starving her and forcing her to work as a domestic servant, said if people realised the extent of the slavery problem there would be an outcry on the size of that over MPs expenses.

He added: "Enough is enough we need action on this and we need it now."

The exhibition, in Forty Hill, Enfield, is free to visit and will be open during normal Forty Hall opening hours for the rest of June.