Slavery Today

1
Slavery Today

• Those who do not remember the past are condemned
  to repeat it.
• -George Santayana

2
The Legal Battle

• The 1927 Slavery Convention outlawed slavery
  worldwide. Article 2 states that the members will
  take the necessary steps to bring about,
  progressively and as soon as possible, the
  complete abolition of slavery in all its forms.
• Slavery is defined as forced labor without pay
  under the threat of violence.

3
However

• When a ship carrying hundreds of people was
  recently turned away from Benin, Africa,
  officials suspected that the children on board
  were human slaves. The incident once again
  brought attention to the problem of slavery.
• Though most Americans believe slavery was
  abolished with the Emancipation Proclamation more
  than a century ago, the horrors of human beings
  held in bondage flourishes today.

4
Slavery Is Illegal Worldwide

• Yet, during 2001, at least 700,000 and
  potentially as many as 4 million men, women and
  children worldwide were bought, sold, transported
  and held against their will in slave-like
  conditions, according to the U.S. State
  Department.
• By a conservative estimate, 27 million people are
  enslaved today worldwide, more than at any time
  in history.

5
How Is This Possible?

• Studying ante-bellum American slavery, the Civil
  Rights Movement, and the Holocaust educates us
  about past evils and suggests that we must learn
  lessons from past horrors. Today, slavery thrives
  around the world.
• Yet, governments, police, international agencies,
  civil rights and human rights leaders, the media,
  and educators have largely been silent.

6
Chattel Slavery

• the classic form, in which slaveholders maintain
  ownership no longer through legalities, but
  through the use of violence, persists to this day
  in a few countries. In Sudan, a radical ruling
  regime has revived a racially-based slave trade,
  arming militia forces to raid civilian villages
  for slaves. In Mauritania, slave raids 800 years
  ago began a system of chattel slavery that
  continues to this day.

7
Debt Bondage

• the most common form of slavery, in which a
  human being becomes collateral against a loan.
  With a massive population boom in regions of
  staggering poverty, some families have nothing to
  pledge for a loan but their own labor. With
  inflated interest rates, debts are often
  inherited, ensnaring generations. 15 to 20
  million slaves are in debt bondage in Bangladesh,
  India, Nepal, and Pakistan.

8
Forced Labor

• where individuals are lured by the promise of
  good jobs, and instead find themselves enslaved.
  Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable, and
  small organized-crime rings fuel a booming
  international trade in human beings. Trafficking
  often flows from developing nations to the West.
  For instance, Secretary of State Colin Powell
  stated that 50,000 women and children are
  trafficked into the U.S. each year as slaves.

9
Sex Slavery

• the most common form of slavery in South Asia,
  where girls forced into prostitution by their own
  husbands, fathers, and brothers earn money for
  the men in the family to pay back local
  money-lenders. Others are lured by offers of
  good jobs and then beaten and forced to work in
  brothels.

10
Are We Complicit?

• Slave labor produces goods we use every day.
  Examples include
• Sugar from the Dominican Republic
• Chocolate from the Ivory Coast
• Paper clips from China
• Carpets from Nepal
• Cigarettes from India

11
Current Hot Spots

• ALBANIA Teenage girls are tricked into sex
  slavery and trafficked by organized crime rings
• BRAZIL Lured into the rainforest, families burn
  trees into charcoal at gunpoint
• BURMA The ruling military junta enslaves its
  own people to build infrastructure projects, some
  benefiting U.S. corporations

12
Current Hot Spots

• DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Haitians are rounded up at
  random, taken across the border, and forced to
  cut cane in sugar plantations
• GHANA Families repent for sins by giving
  daughters as slaves to fetish priests
• INDIA Children trapped in debt bondage roll
  beedi cigarettes 14 hours a day

13
Current Hot Spots

• IVORY COAST Child slaves forced to work on
  cocoa plantations
• MAURITANIA Arab-Berber masters hold as many as
  one million black Africans as inheritable
  property
• PAKISTAN Children with nimble fingers are
  forced to weave carpets in looms
• SUDAN Arab militias from the North take
  Southern Sudanese women and children in slave
  raids

14
Current Hot Spots

• THAILAND Women and children become sex slaves
  for tourists
• UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Bangladeshi boys are
  transported and exploited as jockeys for camel
  racing
• UNITED STATES The CIA estimates that 50,000
  people are trafficked as sex slaves, domestics,
  garment and agricultural slaves

15
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
16
It Can Happen Here

• "Here's what he said to me he has my life,
  he can do as he pleases with it. He can choose
  to send me to school, he can choose not to. I
  was being told if I did tell someone I would go
  to jail," a former Cameroon slave named PB told
  Newsweek magazine (December 18th, 2000). PB was
  enslaved for four years in Detroit's affluent
  suburb of Farmington Hills.

17
References

• Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, Modern Slavery,
  Infoplease.com _at_ http//www.infoplease.com/spot/sl
  avery1.html
• Free the Slaves _at_ http//www.freetheslaves.net/
• U.S. Gov Info/Resources _at_ http//usgovinfo.about.c
  om/library/weekly/aa061202a.htm
• Anti-slavery _at_ http//www.antislavery.org/
• Preston Peet, Modern Slavery Who Will Be The
  Emancipator?, Disinformation _at_ http//www.disinfo.
  com/pages/dossier/id686/pg1/
• IAbolish _at_ http//www.iabolish.com/slavery_today.h
  tm
• Globalaware.org _at_ http//www.globalaware.org/Artli
  cles_eng/slave_art_eng.htm
• The preceding slides quote liberally from the
  sites referenced above