In February 2023, the BBC’s Panorama programme aired a documentary called Sex for Work: the True Cost of Our Tea. The joint investigative journalism of BBC Africa Eye and Panorama uncovered “widespread sexual abuse on farms which supply some of the UK’s most popular tea brands including PG Tips, Lipton and Sainsbury’s Red Label”… while sexual exploitation
is endemic in many industries, the tea sector has certain specific characteristics which enable the perpetration of sexual crimes against women workers and allows them to go unpunished. This paper aims to outline those characteristics so that the industry and its stakeholders can focus their efforts on the right areas so that they can significantly reduce the risk of sexual exploitation of women tea workers and ensure that where it does occur (because it would be naïve to assume that it could ever be completely eliminated) the perpetrators are punished and the survivors are protected and given remedy.