this has been on my mind for a long time now. please read my research essay and take part in ending slavery. someday i will finish my next cd as well, and anyone can purchase it to help fight slavery and help orphans. im at a loss of words of what to write about this horrific crime that has affected at least 27 million humans directly and the entire world indirectly. just read this.
Jordan Crider
A Forgotten Crime
How old are you? Not anymore, go back to the time in your life when you were 14. Imagine the town you lived in, your best friend, and your family. You are walking home from school anticipating the fresh home cooked smell of your grandmother’s cooking. But when you walk through the front door you smell nothing. Instead there is a visitor in your home. A family friend who has offered you an experience of a lifetime, to go back to the foreign country this “family friend” and take care of her children and do house work, in return she will send you to school where you will become accustomed to the language and culture! You and your family willingly accept the offer and within a month you leave home.
After arriving at the “family friend’s” home you are put to work. Everyday you wake up at 7 AM and do rigorous housework until sundown. You are beaten frequently for asking questions of the schooling you were promised, wanting to call home, performing tasks wrong, and just not working to your “family friend’s” expectations. You are threatened to be sold to pimps when you complain of hunger and sleep deprivation, but you are their slave, they do what they want with you and eventually, you will be sold. You will work in sweaty smoky brothels every night, get hooked on drugs, and possibly contract HIV. And when you are too much of a hassle to take care of or can’t be used anymore, you will either die, be thrown on the streets, or disposed of in any way your holders wish. This is your new life, your life as a piece of merchandise in the global economy, your life as a slave.
This is not the life anyone hopes for, or wants impressed upon others, unless of course you are a slaveholder. But the first time I became exposed to the horrors of human trafficking through movies and documentaries, my heart was crushed. How can there be so much suffering, so much slavery in this modern world when slavery is illegal in every country of the world? How can so many people in America, Europe and the “free” countries of the world not know about one of the largest organized crimes in the world? And surely if more people were aware of slavery and how they are linked to it directly and indirectly, and how easily they could help end it, they would.
So why aren’t more people aware of modern day slavery? Sure we’ve heard of child labor and workers with poor conditions that have no choice but to work a low paying job, but that is not slavery, they have the freedom to leave or to stay, and they are paid (Slavery). As unfortunate as their situation is, people are still aware and perhaps desensitized, so maybe people are desensitized by the act of slavery. I searched for an answer, yet I could not find a tangible reason as to why a majority of the world is ignorant to slavery. But with critical thinking I came to a conclusion, people don’t want to believe slavery is real. The problem is that in school we are taught that slavery has been eradicated, and in response we have little concern to pursue the matter any further.
In truth, the old slavery, the American plantation slaves, has mostly been eradicated but a new and more easily hidden form of slavery has emerged. In Disposable People, a book by Kevin Bale, Bale estimate, modestly, that there are probably about 27 million slaves existing in the world today, and estimate that he feels comfortable using (While other organizations claim that there are 200 million) (Bale 8). There are more slaves today than there has ever been before in history. Now why are there so many and so little awareness? This is the answer, Slavery today is easy.
First, legal ownership is illegal, so it is avoided. A slaveholder doesn’t need documents to own someone; all he/she needs is violence and some sort of control over the person. Many poor and overpopulated people are exploited because they are looking for work and get lured away with false promises of paying jobs. Slaves aren’t chosen based on race, but rather their vulnerability and desperation. Second, it is cheap to get slaves, and they return high on the profit. With such an abundance of potential slaves and no need to maintain their wellbeing, it is easy to obtain a slave, work them until they can no longer function, and then do away with them. Unlike old slavery where it was expensive to purchase slaves and important to keep them healthy for work, now there is no need to care about the lives of slaves when there are so many to take their place, “its cheaper to let them die” (Bale 15).
Now with so many slaves, where do they come from and what types of new slavery are there? First, there is Chattel Slavery: according to Bales it is “the form closest to the old slavery. A person is captured, born, or sold into permanent servitude, and ownership might be asserted.” (Bale 19). Second, there is Debt Bondage: when a person gives himself or herself as payment for a debt or loan. This debts repayment is decided by the employer, this type of enslavement may last 3 generations or more. Third, there are Domestic Slaves: Slaves that are kept hidden from society and forced to do domestic work in the homes of their employers (Slavery). Fourth, there is Sex Slavery: probably one of the most well-known and horrific forms of human trafficking, yet a relatively small portion of the worlds slave market. Siddharth Kara breaks sex Slavery down with two terms, “slave trading” the trafficking and supply of slaves to pimps, brothels, and other clients, and “slavery” the demand of sex and girls being used on average 20 times a day. He also divides sex trafficking into 3 steps acquisition, movement, and exploitation (Sex Trafficking 5). One last slavery type is Contract Slavery: where an employer lures a number of people into a job with promises in a contract, but once at the job they find themselves enslaved. The slaveholder can produce this contract to authorities if questions are asked, but in reality the person is forced with violence to stay working without pay (Bale 20).
With so many types of slavery and slaves on every continent in the world, who organizes this global crime? In order to get down to the truth of this question we would have to directly meet with the leaders of trafficking and exploitation, and lets face they aren’t willing to come out into the news and have debates on the matter. But if they did they would probably behave and respond like the middlemen of a slaveholder did in a secretly filmed interview from the documentary, Slavery. In the interview the men denied the work of children in their carpet looms. They offered excuses such as the children having been graduated from school and working there as their own choice (Slavery). These men weren’t about to compromise integrity for the free labor that gave them a high profit.
And that profit, that precious money is the main reason for human trafficking and slavery. It links each and every single one of us to slave holders and the exploitation of free humans. It is inevitable that the global economy is connected to and even causes slavery. Slaves make the basic products of the world. They do the lower end work such as cotton, sugar, cocoa, clothing, coal, and even fireworks (Slavery). These products are what we are benefitting from, since they can make cheaper goods with free labor and provide cheaper products to us.
Take chocolate for example. The UK imports 50 million pounds of cocoa a year, with the average person eating about 200 bars of chocolate a year. All this chocolate needs to come from somewhere, the Ivory Coast. 90% of the cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast have slaves. Men are trafficked 3,000 miles away from their homes. They are penniless, have nowhere to go, lost, and then economically exploited. Forced to work from dawn to dusk, these men are trapped with nowhere to go. They are beaten when they don’t work hard enough with leather whips; sometimes they have their hands tied behind their backs then pulled above their heads while a man beats them from the front and another from the back. A victim from a cocoa plantation was once asked if he had anything to say after his five years of slavery, his response was that “there is so much I want to say but I can’t find the words.” But after being asked if he had ever tasted chocolate, the answer was no, and when told of the millions around the world that eat chocolate for pleasure, this was his message to the consumers: “ If I had something to say to them (the consumers) it would not be nice words. They enjoy something that I suffered to make; I worked hard for them but saw no benefit. They are eating my flesh.” (Slavery).
Consumers are indirectly benefiting from slavery. Slaves may be harvesting or creating a product that is used to create another product elsewhere in the same country and then exported to other businesses around the world. Just like Bale explains coal produced by slaves in Brazil creates steel and steel creates the car parts in Brazil that are exported around the world, about $1.6 billion in goods in Britain and even more in the USA (Bale 23). This absence of workers and replacement of slaves either drives the price of the goods down or just increases profit. Potentially, consumers buying cheap products are indirectly supporting slavery (Bale 24). Even the lack of moral leaders in business supports slavery, they aren’t looking for slave-free markets, but trying to get the cheapest good to be able to compete in the market. The government doesn’t bother to interfere because they benefit from the tax on the industry. Instead they use the excuse of the letting the market drive itself (Bale 235). Consumers don’t care where their goods are coming from they are just looking for the best deal, a far too small benefit to pay for the theft of millions of individuals’ lives (Bale 24).
Slavery affects our lives, and the economy, but how are the real victims affected? What suffering do they go through psychologically and physically, and what help is out there for the survivors? Domestic slaves are psychologically abused and physically beaten, often called names like slave and creature, forced to sleep in basements or outside, wear dog collars, and forced to kiss employers’ feet. These domestic slaves may work for years without leaving a house. In one case study, by Bale, a 22 year old girl had been a domestic slave in Paris since she was little( no age given), the psychological effects it had on her are astonishing, She had an understanding of the world that compared with that of a 5 year old. With so much work she only noticed the temperature change but never had an understanding of seasons, no knowledge of weeks, months, or years. She had forgotten her birthday, and was blown away by the idea of “choice.” The psychological injuries match that of physical and emotional injuries. This is just one case study and one can only imagine the millions of other who have been sexually exploited, taken as children, and locked in one room for years at a time (Bale 3).
With all this negative news of slavery is there any hope for the slaves? It led me to look for some comforting news, and I found multiple organization that were united for the same cause to help the victims of human trafficking and ending slavery all together. One such organization is Free the Slaves. Free the Slaves is an organization that birthed after the book Disposable People was published. They have come together to bring awareness to chocolate companies of the slave plantations in the Ivory Coast by making agreements to not purchase slave made cocoa. Free the Slaves has ways to get the community involved in helping fight slavery and even has a 25 year plan to end slavery (Free the Slaves).
This was an enlightening experience that gave hope and actual action against slavery and human trafficking, and also provided ways for the rest of the world and me to get involved in the abolition of global slavery. Here a few things you can do to help out!
1. Educate yourself. Free the Slaves and I recommend the book, Disposable People, by Kevin Bales. All profits from the book go to fighting slavery. And once you’re done reading give it to some one else to educate themselves! (Free the Slaves- How You Can Help).
2. You can adopt a liberator by providing financial aide. (Free the Slaves- How You Can Help).
3. Volunteer! Host an event to raise awareness and money for the victims and rescue of slavery and human trafficking victims. (Free the Slaves- How You Can Help).
Slavery is real, and it is happening in a modern world where many people are too concerned about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest but few realize that slaves are the ones doing the destroying (Bale 4). 13 year old girls are being used as objects 20 times a night, children have their childhoods replaced by dank rooms with the company of a carpet loom, and mothers and fathers are robbed of their kids. We are all linked to slavery, and therefore we all have the duty and responsibility to act out to stop it and ensure the right of every human being, to be free.
Works Cited
Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Rev. ed. Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California, 2004. Print.
Free the Slaves - Home. Web. 22 Sept. 2009. .
"Free the Slaves - How You Can Help." Free the Slaves - Home. Web. 22 Sept. 2009. .
Kara, Siddharth. Sex trafficking inside the business of modern slavery. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Print.
Slavery: A Global Investigation. Dir. Brian Edwards and Kate Blewett. Perf. Brian Edwards and Kate Blewett. True Vision, 2001. Google video. Web. 25 Sept. 2009. .
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