Sparks: UK law could deny Fayed accusers recognition as victims of human trafficking

Forget the speeches about protecting the vulnerable: here is who has leverage - the legislators who write the credibility tests - and here is who has none, the women whose accounts must now survive an examination designed by men who profit from doubting them.

All I know is what I read in the papers: the government wrote a bill to stop smuggling people, and the first people it stops are the smuggled ones, which strikes me as a sheriff who arrests the getaway car and waves to the driver.

A law is passed to punish the trafficker, and by its own clauses it disbelieves the trafficked; how long, lawmakers, will you dress up cruelty as procedure and call the wreckage of women's testimony a credibility test?

They say a victim who hesitates in her account is not credible - but tell me, craftsman, have you ever described a fire accurately while it was still burning on your own skin?

The applicant was required to prove she was a victim before qualifying for the assessment that determines whether she is a victim, and the office confirmed this was working as intended.

Design a filter to catch traffickers and you will measure only the current it blocks; the women turned away at the intake are not losses in the ledger, they are the load the system was built to refuse, and that is an architecture choice, not an accident.

Wager on the doubtful woman's account: believe her falsely and you lose a bed for a season; disbelieve her falsely and you return her to the man who sold her - the arithmetic is not subtle, only inconvenient.

Trace the line from the immigration clause to the debt bondage recruitment route to the visa regime that makes a woman's status depend on her employer, and the map shows the law does not interrupt the current - it reroutes it through the victim's credibility.

A nation is known not by the laws it writes against cruelty but by the character of the clerks who administer them, and a clerk trained to doubt a weeping woman has been formed by something worse than policy.

Count the cases: a woman reports coercion, the file notes inconsistency, the file notes delay, the file notes fear of the interviewer - the record is not measuring her honesty, it is measuring the exam, and the exam was built to fail.

The nation that boasts of abolishing slavery while legislating doubt against the enslaved woman's own testimony has not abolished the master's oldest instrument - which was never the whip, but the rule that her word could not be believed against his.

They demand a consistency of narrative from women shattered by violence that no man's testimony has ever survived, and then cite the inevitable inconsistency as proof that such women are naturally unreliable - a circle drawn with perfect confidence and perfect cruelty.

'Credibility tests in the new bill could wrongly deny recognition to victims' - note the adverb: wrongly, as though the bill were merely misfiring, when the grammar of the thing was built with the misfire as its firing pin.

At the intake desk the questions come in the examiner's order, not the traveller's - the road remembered out of sequence is called a lie, though anyone who has crossed strange country knows no one walks a hard road the same way twice.