Slavery and Human Trafficking

Posted by Benjamin on: 03.02.2007 /

There are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world today (Sourced by the UN, New York Times, Amnesty International, The Christian Science Monitor, and Free The Slaves, among others), more than at any time in world history.
The U.S. State Department estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. 80% are women and girls and up to 50% are minors. This number includes 14,000 people trafficked into the United States every year. ( U.S. State Department)
In the last five years alone the press has reported 131 cases of forced labor in the United States involving 19,254 men women and children from a wide range of ethnic and social groups. (Hidden Slaves)

Many people find it hard to believe that slavery still exists. Whether it’s bonded slavery with men, women and children toiling on plantations, in rice mills, brick kilns and many other industries; or, the deplorable and prevalent trade in humans to serve as sex slaves, slavery is flourishing in many parts of the world. It is still every bit as ugly as it was 200 years ago and it must end. (Amazing Change)

I believe that modern-day slavery is ignored because it’s not ”our” story: the middle-class public finds in neither its victims nor its oppressors people like themselves. Slaves are prisoners of commerce, people from the lowest rungs of their often pre-modern societies, hard for first-world activists to bond with.
The fight for a single standard of human conduct will be the fight for humanity’s future. If ”universal human rights” means anything, it will mean that Americans, who nearly tore our nation apart over the issue of slavery, will not rest until this ancient scourge is no longer practiced anywhere by anyone (CHARLES JACOBS, President, American Anti-Slavery Group).

Free The Slaves and The Amazing Change both have some great ideas about what *we* can do to help end slavery worldwide

Questions

How do you feel in response to these facts about modern slavery?
What are our obligations as wealthy powerful westerners (relative to the whole world) in response to modern slavery?
Have you been involved or do you know someone who has been involved in ending slavery and human trafficking? Share your stories and knowledge!

21 Responses to "Slavery and Human Trafficking"

Comment by: Julie Clawson
1 03/2/07 3:29 PM | Comment Link |
But we as rich westerners are the oppressors. we are the ones insisting on buying cheap stuff made by slaves. We fund the chocolate industrry that trafficks children to work on the cocoa farms. We support businesses that throw in a night with a brothel slave to “sweeten” a deal. We are the source of the majority of sex tourists.

It is our money, our convinience, our choices that cause modern day slavery. Until the middle class realizes this nothing we will done to end the horror.
Comment by: benjamin ady
2 03/2/07 4:57 PM | Comment Link |
Julie,

Indeed. But it’s a by-degrees thing, don’t you think? It’s difficult to radically change one’s lifestyle in one fell swoop. But surely if we are moving that direction, that’s a good thing.
So have you stopped eating chocolate, or can one buy fair trade chocolate which doens’t support child trafficking? Tell us more.
Comment by: Rachel
3 03/2/07 5:43 PM | Comment Link |
Thanks for this post, Benjamin. I’m still struggling to get my mind around the reality that 27 million people are in slavery today and to figure out what that means for how I live my life.

I recently read an excellent essay about slavery by Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission and I highly recommend it.
Comment by: Rachel
4 03/2/07 8:42 PM | Comment Link |
OK guys, I just placed my very first order with Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates! All their products are organic and fair trade certified. No slavery! I ordered semi-sweet chocolate chips, bittersweet baking chocolate, hot cocoa mix and baking cocoa. Yummy! I will give an update when my order arrives.
Comment by: Jim
5 03/3/07 1:15 AM | Comment Link |
You guys are doing a great job with this blog - we should see some new visistors after this weekend

Thanks for caring and for showing up
Comment by: Julie Clawson
6 03/3/07 9:54 AM | Comment Link |
I’ve bought only fair trade coffee for a few years now and have recently discovered sources for chocolate and sugar - the three biggest industries to use slave and/or child labor. Yes it takes small steps. What I really don’t get are the people who don’t see why they should care about others. its not a matter of changing their lifestyle - they just don’t care that others suffered to bring them cheap stuff.
Comment by: Rachel
7 03/3/07 10:21 AM | Comment Link |
Julie, where do you get your sugar? Because when I’ve looked online, the only fair trade sugar I could find for sale in the US was just white sugar in little packets. I found plenty of fair trade sugar for sale in the UK but I’m sure the shipping would be outrageous.

BTW, I’m learning that the fair trade movement is much further along in the UK. Gotta give a shout out to our friends across the pond! Hopefully we will follow your lead.
Comment by: Julie Clawson
8 03/4/07 3:58 PM | Comment Link |
honestly, I get sugar from Amazon.com - just type in “fair trade sugar”
Comment by: Seren
9 03/4/07 8:07 PM | Comment Link |
Chocolate, sugar, and coffee.
That is not a huge change in my life, if I commit to getting these things from fair trade companies. Oxfam is good for coffee and they import the most DELICIOUS chocolate, for anyone in australia. I think most of our sugar comes from Queensland.
So the only hurdle for me is self-discipline.
-s.
Comment by: benjamin ady
10 03/4/07 8:22 PM | Comment Link |
Hey Seren, Welcome!

I actually bought my first ever fair trade coffee for home use not that long ago. It wasn’t that much more expensive. We mostly avoid chocolate anyway, but I shall have to make sure next time we get some it’s fair trade.
I never thought about sugar before. Thankyou Julie
Comment by: Jim
11 03/5/07 12:21 AM | Comment Link |
Hey - I read an article in the NYT Sunday paper today about how child slavery continues in the big cities of India. Village parents sell their kids to middle men who re sell them to families.

8 year old girls do the housework.
When we lives in India in 1983 I remember visiting a family who had a maid who couldnt have been older then 10. She slept on the floor.
Comment by: Joe
12 03/5/07 4:11 PM | Comment Link |
I am sorry to lower the tone, but I’m in the mood for hard truths tonight. The majority of trafficked people in the UK (and presumably similar in the USA) are enslaved into forced prostitution.

Some estimate that there could be up to 10000 slaves in the UK today. These people do not register on any known official document and exist almost permanently in the shadows beyond the reach of the authorities. This is partly due to fear - even if they could escape their oppressors, they are very likely to be treated as illegal migrants and be expelled from the country.

The problem with many of the campaigns is that they do not engage with this truth. It is easy to write petitions and lobby governments asking them to make changes.

I am involved in a very small campaign group called The Truth Isn’t Sexy and our brief is to try to engage with those who use prostitutes and to ask them to consider whether the people they are having sex with might actually be enforced slaves.

When up to 10% of men use prostitutes (an amazing statistic as you’ll probably agree) that is potentially a lot of people.

We’ve already got into lots of trouble with all kinds of churchy people because we make no statements about prostitution as a whole, but stick to our guns on talking only about enforced sexual slavery of trafficked people.
Comment by: Anna - age 11
13 03/5/07 6:41 PM | Comment Link |
Wow! I didnt know that slaves are alive now! So like what we can do to help that is to buy fair trade stuff?
Comment by: benjamin ady
14 03/6/07 9:36 AM | Comment Link |
Joe,

Please don’t apologize! I think that’s awesome work that you and The Truth Isn’t Sexy are doing. I love the beautiful practicality of it.
10% *is* an amazing statistic.
I’m thinking that unless we are getting into trouble with “church people”, we are probably not being Christ-like.
Tell us more about the group’s activities. How forward are you? How well financed? I can see you maybe getting in ugly trouble with some of the people who are running the trafficking and slave based sex trade, if you became too successful. Does this concern you? Or perhpas if you became successful enough, public sentiment would mostly be on your side, thus kind of protecting you?
Comment by: benjamin ady
15 03/6/07 9:47 AM | Comment Link |
Jim,

That must have been strange–kind of seeing Les Miserables come alive in modern times.
Do you suppose we’ve moved forward or backward, over all, since, say, Wilberforce’s time, or since, say Hugo’s time? Or is the picture too complex to answer such a question?
The scary thing is that, along with Joe’s forced sexual slavery that is taking place all over the United States as we speak, there is also actualy forced domestic servitude by trafficked women in the U.S., although perhaps not to the same extent.
I have an article around here somewhere about an M.D. in D.C. who was busted for this a couple years ago. One rather suspects that for every case that gets found out about and tried, there are a hundred that don’t.
Comment by: joe
16 03/6/07 11:19 AM | Comment Link |
Well, basically we are having a launch event at the British parliament in a few weeks time with support from various politicians.

The main student group in the UK has taken on the idea and is distributing the beermats throughout the universities in the UK. We are working to try to get others involved. Some members of our group were talking for a long time to breweries in the hope that they might distribute the beermats widely in bars across the UK. Unfortunately, they decided that the issue was too uncomfortable for their ‘family friendly’ image.

So, we’re going a bit deeper - to the places where angels fear to tread. Strip joints, casinos, nightclubs - anywhere that will have us.

Financing is almost non-existant. We’re not worried about trouble from those involved in the trafficking, maybe we should be.
Comment by: benjamin ady
17 03/6/07 11:19 PM | Comment Link |
Joe, this sounds kewler and kewler. Do you know of any similar campaign in the U.S.?
Comment by: joe
18 03/7/07 2:11 AM | Comment Link |
Not exactly the same, but there is a thing happening out of California called Freedom Day

I don’t know an awful lot about it..
Comment by: Justice and Compassion
19 05/2/07 2:34 AM | Comment Link |
[...] something smallish and been encouraged in both of them.� First of all I finally followed up on a suggesstion from Julie Clawson, and bought fair trade sugar from Amazon. We had run out of sugar (probably not [...]
Comment by: swisserikin
20 10/27/07 8:52 AM | Comment Link |
I thought ’slaverly’ is defined as forced/bonded labour without pay? Meagre pay is a choice.
Comment by: David H
21 10/27/07 4:39 PM | Comment Link |
I thought �slaverly� is defined as forced/bonded labour without pay? Meagre pay is a choice.

Watch the movie “Matewan,” read about the mining towns in the United States at the turn of the last century. Workers were paid, but the company owned the land on which they lived, the only stores in which they could shop, the doctors, the civic leaders, etc. etc. I remember a song from my youth growing up in Pennsylvania coal country. The refrain said: “I owe my soul to the company store.”

Economic slavery can be virtual. And the poor and uneducated frequently find they have no choices because it costs more to live than they can ever make.