Slavery in the 21st Century

Article 4, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Videos:
http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY

It’s happening in countries on all six inhabited continents. And yes, that includes the United States. The CIA estimates 14,500 to 17,000 victims are trafficked into the “Land of the Free” every year.

The International Labour Organization estimates at least 12 million people are in forced labour around the world; more than six million of whom are children. Slavery exists on every continent of the world and affects most countries. UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from West and Central Africa are sold into slavery each year.

Why hasn’t more been done to end a dehumanizing, universally condemned practice? One challenge is that slavery today takes on myriad, subtler forms than it did during the Atlantic Slave Trade — including sex trafficking, debt bondage, forced domestic or agricultural labor, and chattel slavery — making it tougher to identify and eradicate.

• Slavery today is defined as forced labor without pay under threat of violence.
  
  
• 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked internationally every year. Approximately 80% of them are women and children
  
  
• In the 2000 Refugee Report, “Trafficking in Women and Children: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calls human trafficking “the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world.”
  
  
• Slavery is an extremely profitable, international industry. Experts estimate trafficking in the US yields $9 billion every year. Around the world, trafficking in women for commercial sex purposes nets $6 billion per year. The trade of human flesh is so lucrative that authorities complain that even as they close in on one smuggling ring in the US, another one pops up
  

Slavery takes many forms and affects people of all ages, sex and race. It is: bonded and forced labour, descent based slavery, early and forced marriage, worst forms of child labour and trafficking of people into forced labour.... At this moment, millions of men, women, and children—roughly twice the population of Rhode Island—are being held against their will as modern-day slaves.

A slave is:

• Forced to work -- through mental or physical threat.
  
  
• Owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse.
  
  
• Dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property'.
  
  
• Physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.
  

The four most common types of slavery are: chattel slavery, debt bondage, forced labor, and sexual slavery.

CHATTEL SLAVERY is closest to the slavery that prevailed in early American history. Chattel slaves are considered their masters’ property — exchanged for things like trucks or money and expected to perform labor and sexual favors. Once of age, their children are expected to do the same. Chattel slavery is typically racially-based; in the North African country of Mauritania, for example, black Africans serve the lighter-skinned Arab-Berber communities. Though slavery was legally abolished there in 1980, today 90,000 slaves continue to serve the Muslim Berber ruling class. Similarly, in the African country of Sudan, Arab northerners are known to raid the villages in the South — killing all the men and taking the women and children to be auctioned off and sold into slavery.

DEBT BONDAGE, or bonded labor, is the most widely practiced form of slavery around the world. In Southeast Asia, where it is most prevalent, debt bondage claims an estimated 15 to 20 million victims. The staggering poverty there forces many parents to offer themselves or their own children as collateral against a loan. Though they are promised they will work only until their debt is paid off, the reality is much grimmer. Thanks to inflated interest rates and fresh debts incurred while being fed and housed, the debt becomes impossible to pay off. As a result, it is often inherited by the bonded laborer’s children, perpetuating a vicious cycle that can claim several generations.

SEX SLAVERY finds women and children forced into prostitution. Many are lured by false offers of a good job and then beaten and forced to work in brothels. In Southeast Asia, however, it is not uncommon to find women coerced by their own husbands, fathers, and brothers to earn money for the men in the family to pay back local money lenders. In other cases, victims pay tens of thousands of dollars to get to another country and are then forced into prostitution in pay off their own debts. In still others, women or girls are plainly kidnapped from their home countries. The sex slavery trade thrives in Central and Eastern Europe and in North America. An estimated two million women and children are sold into sex slavery around the world every year.

worst forms of child labour:
Children are bonded, trafficked or forced to work as soldiers or domestic labourers, on plantations or in commercial sex work. Their physical vulnerability and lack of voice make children especially prone to danger in conditions which risk damaging their safety and psychological health. An estimated 179 million children are in the worst forms of child labour, with more still working full time at the expense of their education, leisure and personal and social development.

early and forced marriage:
Women and girls who are married without choice. They are forced into a life of servitude, often marked by physical violence.

FORCED LABOR often results when individuals are lured by the promise of a good job but instead find themselves subjected to slaving conditions — working without payment and enduring physical abuse, often in harsh and hazardous conditions. Victims include domestic workers, construction workers, and even human mine detectors. Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable, as their constant changes of location make the organized crime rings that traffic them difficult to bust.

People are forced to work through the threat or use of violence, they are bought and sold like objects, work for long hours often for little or no pay and are at the mercy of their employers. A key difference between slavery today and that in the past is that now, thanks to the struggle of abolitionists in the late-18th and early 19th centuries, slavery is illegal in every country.

... Slavery has not been eliminated because these laws are not enforced. Even in Europe and North America, where slavery appeared to have been consigned to history, it has returned in the form of human trafficking and forced labour.

Sudanese slaves await redemption in Madhol, Sudan, in December 1997. An Arab trader sold 132 former slaves, women and children, for $13,200 (in Sudanese money) to a member of Christian Solidarity International. (AP Photo)

Sometimes referred to as bonded laborers (because of the debts owed their masters), public perception of modern slavery is often confused with reports of workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working conditions. However, modern-day slaves differ from these workers because they are actually held in physical bondage (they are shackled, held at gunpoint, etc.).

Modern-day slaves can be found laboring as servants or concubines in Sudan, as child "carpet slaves" in India, or as cane-cutters in Haiti and southern Pakistan, to name but a few instances.

Where does this slavery take place? Who are the faces behind these atrocities?

Sources:

Free the Slaves:
https://www.freetheslaves.net/

Videos:
http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=316&srcid=375

American Anti-Slavery Group:
https://www.iabolish.org/

Not for Sale Campaign:
https://www.notforsalecampaign.org/Default.aspx

Wikipedia.org:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

National Geographic:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0309/feature1/index.html

Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy
by Kevin Bales

From Amazon.Com:
The horror of slavery, says Kevin Bales, is "not confined to history." It is not only possible that slave labor is responsible for the shoes on your feet or your daily consumption of sugar, he writes, the products of forced labor filter even more quietly into a broad portion of daily Western life. "They made the bricks for the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and the blade on your lawnmower.... Slaves keep your costs low and returns on your investments high."

The exhaustive research in Disposable People shows that at least 27 million people are currently enslaved around the world. Bales, considered the world's leading expert on contemporary slavery, reveals the historical and economic conditions behind this resurgence. From Thailand, Mauritania, Brazil, Pakistan, and India, Bales has gathered stories of people in unthinkable conditions, kept in bondage to support their owners' lives. Bales insists that even a small effort from a large number of people could end slavery, and devotes a large chapter to explaining the practical means by which this might be accomplished. "Are we willing to live in a world with slaves?" he asks. As a sign of his commitment, all his royalties from Disposable People will go toward the fight against slavery. --Maria Dolan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Unspeakable The Hidden Truth Behind The World's Fastest Growing Crime (Paperback)
by Raymond Bechard (Author)

From Amazon.Com:
Available now, UNSPEAKABLE: The Hidden Truth Behind the World's Fastest Growing Crime, the new book by Ahava Kids Founder and Director, Raymond Bechard, will finally bring the dark world of Child Trafficking into the light of day. Exposing this global attack against children is one of the most important missions of Ahava Kids and a lifelong passion of Raymond Bechard. With UNSPEAKABLE, you will experience what it is like to walk through the back alleys, the brothels, the battlefields, and even the magnificent mansions where children are being bought and sold into modern day slavery. Most people do not want to go where this extraordinary book will take them. But, to save children from the most horrible abuse imaginable, we must all find the courage and go. Together, we must speak for the children who are trapped in a life of silent torture. All proceeds from the sale of this book support the work of Ahava Kids.

Raymond Bechard has traveled across the globe to save the world s most valuable and vulnerable citizens: children. From the United States to Israel, Russia, Europe, Haiti, Latin America and beyond, he has built a network of dedicated people who devote their lives to protecting children from evil and providing them with a better, safer life. Today, Raymond is the Founder and Director of Ahava Kids, a human-rights organization dedicated to rescuing orphaned young people from the crime of child trafficking, enslavement and exploitation throughout the world. For more information, please go to AhavaKids.org

Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery (Hardcover)
by Gloria Steinem (Foreword), Jesse Sage (Editor), Liora Kasten (Editor)

From Amazon.Com:
Twenty-seven million people are estimated to be held in slavery around the world today. This collection of first-hand accounts will raise awareness and show how slavery is thriving in the twenty-first century. From poverty-stricken countries to affluent American suburbs, slaves toil as sweatshop workers, sex slaves, migrant workers, domestic servants, and chattel slaves. This groundbreaking collection includes accounts written by ten former slaves and slaveholders in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. From Micheline, a Haitian girl who wound up as a domestic worker in Connecticut, to Abdel, a Sudanese slave owner turned abolitionist, these are stories that will heighten awareness of a global human rights crisis that can no longer be ignored.

From the Back Cover
"Just as 19th century slave narratives forced readers to admit the humanity of slaves, the stories in Enslaved force us to admit that slavery still exists." --Gloria Steinem

"Slavery still exists--hidden and virulent--in many countries, including this "land of the free." In Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten of the American Anti-Slavery Group--an organization I know well as a reporter--offer a riveting illumination of this most under-publicized human rights abuse." --Nat Hentoff, Columnist, The Washington Post, Village Voice and Wall Street Journal

"Poignant, powerful, and deeply disturbing. The voices of these survivors resonate loudly with The Museum of the African Diaspora, a first-voice museum, committed, as one of its goals, to sharing stories of enduring courage in its Ernest A. Bates, M.D. Slavery Passages exhibit. This book is important in that it not only gives voice to victims of modern day slavery, but also because it provides steps that the active reader can take to help eradicate these modern day enslavement practices." --Denise Bradley, Executive Director, Museum of the African Diaspora

"As was true before our Civil War, nothing is more important than the abolition movement. It is no longer domestic; it is now international. The darkness of the slave trade and the brightness of the concerned human spirit is made clear in this volume--for all who would know how far we have come and how far we have to go." --Stanley Crouch, Columnist, New York Daily News