Ukrainian refugee accuses Briton who sheltered her of modern slavery

Briton Hannah Debenham recalls how, during one of their first phone calls to meet a Ukrainian refugee she was about to take home, she hoped that together they could do something positive amid the armed conflict. “I told her that this is our opportunity to create something beautiful,” the woman recalls.

Today, writes the Daily Mail, this feeling for Hannah turned out to be saturated with bitter irony – just three weeks after she – like thousands of other kind Britons who have done the same – opened her house to a 36-year-old Ukrainian woman and her ten-year-old daughter . To her astonishment, Debenham found her charity subject to the most nasty abuses.

Surprisingly, a refugee Hannah, 44, and her husband sponsored under the Homes for Ukraine program, whom she gave money to, shared food with, and introduced to her friends, reported Hannah to the police, accusing her of modern-day slavery. . This accusation, if it is upheld in court, could lead the Briton to life imprisonment, says the Daily Mail.

The accusation was the start of a three-month nightmare for the married mother of two young sons, aged five and 11. “I started having endless sleepless nights, I was worried that I would end up behind bars, and my eldest son was injured,” Hanna says in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail. – It was terrible”.

Hannah’s story certainly illustrates the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished. It also shows the dark side of the scheme, which, while a lifesaver for a huge number of Ukrainian families, is not without its problems.

While many Britons have struck up enriching friendships with those to whom they have opened their homes, there are those who have begun to regret their hospitality. For example, in July it became known that 29-year-old Briton Tony Garnett left his longtime partner Lorna, the mother of his two daughters, for 22-year-old Ukrainian Sofia Karkadym after she moved into the family home. Others say they are overwhelmed with the responsibility of hosting frequently injured guests at home. “I really wanted to help someone, but the amount of support you have to give is overwhelming,” said one British woman.

Hanna admits that, perhaps naively, she was not worried about the prospect of hosting a Ukrainian family in her home. An occupational therapist by profession, she was raised in a philanthropic spirit. So when the British government announced its resettlement scheme earlier this year, Hanna instinctively knew she wanted to be a part of it.

According to the Daily Mail, she definitely had a place for it; A year and a half ago, Hannah and her husband, who works in the healthcare industry, moved into an eight-bedroom home in Uckfield, East Sussex, which they have extensively renovated.

After contacting a Ukrainian charity, Hanna was first matched with a refugee who had a six-year-old daughter, but no deal was reached. “I refused, because from the very beginning this lady constantly asked me for money in a slightly aggressive manner. It just didn’t feel right,” Hanna recalls.

Her next attempt was a well-known website advertising Ukrainian au pairs. “I thought that this way I could still relocate someone, but also give them a small weekly allowance for babysitting,” she says.

At the end of May, she came across a profile of a 36-year-old woman whom the Daily Mail calls Katya. An English teacher from the Vinnytsia region, a refugee, responded enthusiastically to Hanna’s initial message. “We chatted on whatsapp and she told me that she is an English teacher who is very scared because there were explosions 30 miles away.”

Hanna told Katya that she would help her apply for a visa to enter the UK and that she could also pay her for babysitting, as well as help her apply for a job as a teaching assistant if she so desired. At this point, Katya mentioned that she has a ten-year-old daughter with whom she would like to come to the UK in the future. “I told her she should bring her daughter,” Hanna recalls. She wrote back that she was crying for joy. Overall, she looked excited and grateful. I was excited too. I assumed they would become part of the family.”

After their visa applications were processed, Katya and her daughter took a late flight from Poland to Heathrow on 25 June and were picked up by Hanna’s husband. They were given a separate bedroom and bathroom and were free to come and go throughout the house as they pleased.

The next morning, Hanna met her new guests for the first time. “She seems very happy to be here. She gave me a bottle of Polish vodka and some fridge magnets, which I thought were very cute.”

During those first couple of days, Hanna did her best to help her new guests settle in. “I took an annual leave and helped her open a bank account and also get her daughter into school. I took her shopping for food and school shoes for her daughter and gave her 160 pounds in cash – equivalent to half the cost of her airfare – so she had money for various things… Katya seems to have made new friends on the spot – she went out for a few nights while we looked after her daughter.”

At first, everything seemed fine, except for a few moments. “Katya didn’t know how to clean up after herself,” says Hannah. “Whenever she came in, she just kicked off her shoes in the lobby and threw all her shopping bags all over the place — and she never cleaned up after herself in the kitchen.”

However, Hanna says that at first she tried to give Katya a break. “I knew they needed time to settle down. Ultimately though I wanted the relationship to be sustainable so after about a week I said it would be helpful if she could just put her shoes away and clean up after herself. “Every time she nodded, said yes, and then just did it again.”

When, by the end of the second week, Katya continued to leave behind crumbs and dirty dishes, as Hanna says, the hostess’s polite request to follow some rules of the house was met with hysteria. “I returned after a day of work and found that the house was in disarray, but when I told Katya that it was not ideal, she threatened that she would pack her bags and leave,” recalls the Briton. “I told her it was stupid and unfair to her daughter.”

After that, Hanna says, Katya “didn’t actually talk to me unless it was necessary. It was all pretty difficult.”

Things came to a head when, towards the end of Katya’s third week with her family, she had an appointment at the welfare office in Lewes, and she was dismayed when Hannah couldn’t give her a ride. “I was working from home that day, but I had appointments, so I said she would have to take the bus,” she says. “She slammed the door, and when she returned, she walked past my room without saying a word.”

In the late afternoon, Hannah went to Katya’s room to ask how her meeting about benefits went. “She told me they were approved but still seemed very unhappy. It was weird,” Hannah says. – At this point, I mentioned that it is not good to slam the door, and she again said that she was going to pack her bags. I told her not to be silly, but if she’s unhappy in our house, instead of threatening to leave, we should try to come up with something a few weeks into the future to give her time to make other plans. She just shrugged.”

Hanna left her guest to calm down, and did not see her until the next morning, when Katya got up unusually early. “She often didn’t get up until 8:15 a.m., so I used to feed her daughter breakfast and get her ready for school, but this time she got up at 6 a.m.,” the woman says. “I thought she might open a new leaf.” Hurrying to leave for work, Hanna hastily said goodbye, assuming that in the evening she would see Katya at home. But instead, when after several morning meetings in a row, Hanna turned on her phone, she found numerous missed calls and voice messages from her husband. “He tried to call me all morning to say that he was going to leave for work when the police arrived. They were still with him and said that I needed to urgently call back, ”recalls Hannah.

The stunned woman called back, and one of the police officers told her that they needed to talk to her about the charge of modern slavery.

“It seemed to me that the whole world collapsed on me. I literally couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Debenham recalls with tears in her eyes. “I asked him what the hell he was talking about.”

It turned out that the Ukrainian guest told the police that she was involved in forced labor, forced to clean the house and provide full care for the children.

“It was all a complete lie,” says Hannah. “We never once asked her to clean the house, and in the three weeks she spent there, she only looked after the children for a few hours, because my eldest was in school and the youngest goes to kindergarten. Despite this, the police officer told me that this was a very serious charge, for which you could get a life sentence, and that the next step would be a formal interrogation …. I hung up the phone, feeling sick.”

After working the rest of the day, Hanna returned home to find Katya’s room cleaned. “My husband and I were both in shock,” she says. “It felt so personal since we both sponsored her, but she only blamed me. I woke up every day with nausea in my stomach, praying for a message that the investigation was closed. I’ve spent my career caring for vulnerable people, and now that same career is in jeopardy because of these false accusations.”

An agonizing month passed before Hannah was called in for questioning by officers assigned to the anti-modern slavery police team. “From the beginning, the tone was confrontational,” she says. “At some point, the officer said, do I know that au pairs should not bring their children, and do I regret it?”

After a 90-minute interrogation, Hanna was told that the investigation would take longer than anticipated.

According to her, her eldest son, whom she had to tell about the accusation because he could be called as a witness, was also in disarray. “He asked if I was in trouble and kept asking about it after that,” she says. It took another two months until Hannah received an email from the police last month saying there wasn’t enough evidence to charge her: “The relief was huge, but it quickly turned to anger.”

This anger is directed both at the police, who, in her opinion, were unnecessarily tough, and, of course, at Katya. “Her daughter still goes to school here, which means she is still in the area,” says Hanna.

Despite all this, Hanna insists that she will not let what happened undermine her faith in charity. “I think about the new opportunities that Katya’s daughter has been given here, and it’s wonderful to be a part of it,” she says. “It’s good to be kind, but I won’t do that again.”