Slavery in the 21st Century

Slavery still exists today. Whether it is called human trafficking, bonded labor, forced labor, or sex trafficking, it is present worldwide, including within the United States and, increasingly, in your local community.

An estimated 12 - 27 million people are caught in one or another form of slavery. Between 600,000 and 800,000 are trafficked internationally, with as many as 17,500 people trafficked into the United States. Nearly three out of every four victims are women. Half of modern-day slaves are children.

Essay Contest Winner Announced

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in partnership with The Jean R. Cadet Restavec Foundation, announced student winners for an essay contest on modern-day slavery. The contest was organized in conjunction with author Benjamin Skinner's visit to the Freedom Center and The Restavec Foundation on October 21, 2008. The essayists met and interviewed Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous and a modern-day abolitionist.

Joanna Pogue, a senior at Summit Country Day School, took first place while classmates Sophie Lawson and Brandon Sharp were runners up. Both the Freedom Center and The Restavec Foundation would like to congratulate the winners and all contestants for submitting impressive essays which exhibited both passion and energy to combat this grave human rights violation.

Here is Joanna's winning essay.

Slavery Defined

Contemporary slavery has been defined and banned in international treaties and within nations around the world. But outlawing slavery has not prevented its expansion into a multi-billion dollar global industry on a par with drug trafficking and illicit arms sales. Efforts to combat slavery will have only limited effectiveness unless anti-slavery laws are recognized, implemented and enforced by law enforcement officers, courts, and political leaders. Public awareness is also critical: slavery will remain an invisible scourge unless or until an informed public becomes actively engaged and committed in helping identify situations in which some form of slavery is suspected. An aroused public also can bring public pressure to bear those in power to address those cases.

These are widely used definitions of modern slavery:

• Forced Labor: "all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself [herself] voluntarily." -International Labour Organization
• Trafficking in Persons: "recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation." - United Nations
• Trafficking in Persons: "the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery." - United States

Slavery: Past and Present

Slavery today is similar to forms of slavery that have existed for centuries in that these characteristics are found:

• Control through violence or threat of violence
• Exploitation for profit
• Loss of free will

Modern forms of slavery however, are much different in several important ways:

• No longer a need for legal ownership
• People caught up in slavery today can be purchased and sold for as little as $100 (compared to 10 times that much in the 1850s). As a result, people become "disposable;" i.e., easily replaceable.
• Slavery cuts across nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, age, class, education-level, and other demographic features.

Slave Labor Uses

• Prostitution, pornography, stripping
• Domestic servitude (e.g. nannies and maids)
• Agriculture (e.g. farms and dairies)
• Hard labor (e.g. construction, landscaping, and mining)
• Sweatshops
• Child soldiers
• Peddling and begging
• Hospitality industries (e.g. hotels and restaurants)
• Other poorly regulated industries

Slavery in the United States

Contemporary slavery/human trafficking remains a reality for many victims in the United States, where both American citizens and foreign nationals are trafficked into and within the United States for forced labor. Victims are men, women, and children and are from diverse nationalities, ethnicities and religions. They are found in any situation where another person is willing to exploit another for profit. Victims have included, among others:

• Members of a Zambian boys choir who were forced to sing to earn their traffickers a profit and withheld from obtaining an education were promised;
• Hearing-impaired Mexicans (men, women and children) who were forced to peddle items on the streets of New York to earn money for their traffickers;
• South Asian women forced to work in a textile factory without pay and with constant physical and sexual violence against them
• Young American girls forced to prostitute themselves on the streets of Los Angeles (and dozens of other cities) while under constant physical and sexual violence from pimps and those purchasing the sex;
• Latino men forced to work on farms without pay, long hours, under armed guard, and constant violence or threat of violence against them.

http://www.freedomcenter.org/slavery-today/

Modern Slavery 101

Contrary to popular belief, slavery didn't end with Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Experts estimate that today there are 27 million people enslaved around the world. 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.

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.

FAST FACTS

• 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.
• Slavery was officially abolished worldwide at the 1927 Slavery Convention, yet it continues to thrive thanks to the complicity of some governments and the ignorance of much of the world.
• 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.
• The four most common types of slavery are: chattel slavery, debt bondage, forced labor, and sexual slavery.

Types of Slavery »

http://www.iabolish.org/s...y_today/primer/types.html

Slavery is bad enough in itself, but so much of it is children sold for sex. Many times they're sold by their own families. Unfortunately much of the market for them is from here in the US. There are the kids on the streets here. Too often people rush to judge them as "slutty kids". They're kids. They're not called adults because they aren't yet capable of making the "adult decisions". We're supposed to protect children. How about getting the creeps that use these children, and castrating them and then killing them instead of judging the children as bad. Maybe we should all take more time to find out the circumstances. Maybe we should make sure where our clothes and other products come from and whose blood and sweat go into them. I think we're blind to a lot of this because we close our eyes to it. I'm not talking about you, sooz. I know enough of your heart to know you don't close your eyes to things. Many do, whether it be to war, hunger, illness etc or slavery.

Thanks, Lilly. I think I mentioned that slavery still happens, in one of my posts on the morality thread. It's a huge problem and we do way too little to stop it.