Most people believe slavery doesn’t exist anymore, but it is still very much alive.
All over the world hundreds of millions of women, children and men are forced to live as slaves. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in history. As in the past, most slaves are forced to work in agriculture, mining, construction, garment, and the sex industry.
Slavery is everywhere and in everything.
An integral part of our lives through the products we buy.

Slavery exists today despite the fact that The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery have prohibited slavery, the slave trade and institutions and practices similar to slavery.
Slavery is officially illegal in all the countries of the world, yet it is practiced in each one of them. Contemporary slavery takes various forms and affects people of all ages, sex and race. For example, women from Eastern Europe are bonded into prostitution, children are trafficked between West African countries and men are forced to work as slaves on Brazilian agricultural estates.

People are still sold like objects, forced to work for little or no pay at all and are at the mercy of their 'employers'.
This fact is generally not known, in part, because the modern-day slavery does not fit our familiar images of shackles, whips, and auctions.

In the past, there were slave-owners, now there are slaveholders.
In both cases, people are forced to work by violence or the threat of violence, they are paid nothing, they are given only what keeps them able to work another day and they are not free to leave.

An average slave in South USA in 1850 cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money. Today a slave costs an average of $90. In 1850 it was difficult to capture slaves and transport them to the US. Today, millions of economically and socially vulnerable people around the world are potential slaves. This “supply” makes today’s slaves cheaper than they have ever been. Since they are so cheap, slaves are no longer a major investment worth maintaining. If slaves get sick, injured, outlive their usefulness, or become troublesome to the slaveholder, they are dumped or killed.

The History of Slavery

Slavery exists since before the earliest known written records, which treat it as an established institution, meaning it exists as a human cultural and social phenomenon for at least 5,000 years and it is probably twice as old and began not long after the Neolithic revolution when humans began to live in a system of social stratification.

Please read our post about the real causes of the American civil war and the post about how the war didn’t really end slavery in the United States.

Consumption

Many people enjoy a high level of living largely because of modern slaves who make many of the products they buy and use every day.
Slavery is prevalent in different stages of the supply chains from the production of raw materials like cotton, cacao, coffee, iron, wood, cobalt and gold, to manufacturing every-day goods such as humans’ beloved mobile phones or cheap cloths made in sweatshops, and up to the crops we all eat.

Slavery is everywhere and in everything. We simply can’t not be enslavers nowadays. For some of us, slavery is a mandatory consequence of what we see as necessary consumption (that we try to minimize of course). We wish we could say the same for the rest of society, but unfortunately most humans are totally indifferent to the way the products they consume are manufactured. And of course, they have a few helpers…
Consumption is good for governments, economists and corporations, so they are doing everything they can, to make it as easy as possible for humans to consume as much as possible. The advertising industry is making enormous efforts to convince people that consuming is the best thing they can do in order to be happy.

People look for bargains or buy for fashionable reasons, they try to fill a self-void or consume out of conformity. They enslave each other for luxury commodities that are absolutely unnecessary. For people today shopping is the answer to all of their problems.

We can’t keep blaming the corporations for being evil, politicians for being greedy and selfish and the media for being shallow and cynical, nor can we blame the activists for not being smart enough or for not working hard enough.
The problem is much more rooted. Slavery exists from the beginning of civilization. Unfortunately it is a very natural and basic strategy. Slavery is so efficient and worthwhile for the exploiters, no wonder that it was never ended despite that it is not legal in any country in the world. Obviously most humans prefer to believe slavery was ended or at least that it is the work of particular evil people in the grimmest places on earth, a consequence of the wickedness of a tiny minority. The truth is that it is a consequence of the indifference of the majority.

Forms of Contemporary Slavery:

Forced Labor

Also known as involuntary servitude, describes all types of coerced work that an individual must provide against his or her will. It is often a result of employers exploiting workers, which are more vulnerable as it is by high rates of unemployment, poverty, crime, discrimination, corruption, political conflict, or even cultural acceptance of the practice.

Some are deceived into slavery through the use of a false employment contract that slaveholders create to lure individuals with promises of employment, yet once they arrive at the workplace they are forced to work for no pay and cannot escape. Migrants are particularly vulnerable, but individuals also may be forced into labor in their own countries, finding themselves trapped, with no papers, and unable to leave. The fear of arrest and deportation prevents many migrant workers from speaking out about labor rights abuses because they may be undocumented, or dependent on their employer for documentation that allows them to stay legally.

An estimated number of 800,000 people are illegally trafficked across international borders every year. When internal trafficking victims are added to the estimations, the numbers rise to between 2 and 4 million. In terms of profit, human trafficking is ranked as the 3rd largest international crime industry after drugs and arms trafficking. Most of it comes from the sex industry.

Sex Trafficking

Describes women, children or men that are trafficked in the commercial sex industry, which may include: pornography, prostitution, strip clubs, online escort services, residential brothels, hostess clubs, fake massage parlors or any exchange of a sex act for something of value. Money may or may not be exchanged; other things that may be traded for sex acts are drugs, shelter, food or clothes.

According to UNICEF, as many as two million children are subjected to prostitution in the global commercial sex trade. In poor countries many girls are sold to pay for debts at a very young age and can never get out of the sex industry.
If a girl has been forcefully brought to a brothel and refuses to “have sex” with a customer, she would be severely beaten, not given food, often gang raped and tortured until she breaks.

Many girls are being drugged or forced to consume alcohol, some to the extent that they became addicted. Most can’t negotiate with customers over the use of condoms and so many suffer from sexually transmitted diseases.

Sex slavery is a global issue that exists in every country in the world.
According to some estimations, more than 200,000 children are trafficked into the sex industry in the U.S each year. Child trafficking and child pornography, generate several billion dollars to the international sex tourism industry world-wide. According to a report by the NISMART (National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Throwaway Children) one out of every three teenagers who runs away from home is recruited into the sex industry within 48 hours.

In the United States, the average age a teen enters the sex trade is 12 to 14-year-old. According to Shared Hope International, children exploited through prostitution report they are typically forced to serve between 10 to 15 buyers per night, though some girls report having been sold to as many as 45 buyers in a night at peak demand times, such as during sports events or conventions.
To demonstrate a conservative estimation, a sex trafficking victim who is rented for sex acts with five different men per night, for five nights per week, for an average of five years, would be raped by 6,000 buyers during the course of her victimization through prostitution.

Children who have been trafficked across borders and 'rescued' are often treated as criminals.
They are considered to be in breach of the law in those countries, which criminalize prostitution, and they are considered to be in breach of immigration laws for having entered a country illegally. They may be subjected to imprisonment or 'rehabilitation' before being sent back to their country of origin. Once in their country of origin, some will be punished again, this time according to the laws and policies of their own countries for emigrating illegally.

Debt Bondage

Also called bonded labor, is a situation in which an impoverished individual borrows money and places himself as collateral against the loan.
Sometimes the debt is created when the individual is getting an advance on a job offer only to find out the job offer was a fake, used to put him in debt. In other cases individuals accrue enormous debt to the employers for food, shelter, documentation and travel fees. The employers inflate these costs and tack on enormous interest rates that condemn their new laborers to a life of slavery.

If the individual cannot pay back the debt, he and all of his labor, and often the labor of his family members as well, become the property of the moneylender until the debt is repaid. However, the slaves have no way of earning money now that their labor belongs to another, thus they have no way of paying back the debt. Bonded laborers are paid only enough to stay alive so they can work another day. The small income and usurious interest rates ensure they can never earn enough to repay the debt. Therefore, the amount of money loaned, becomes the price paid to acquire a slave.

Being under the moneylender control and with barely enough money to buy food, the enslaved must keep taking numerous loans from the same moneylender for basic subsistence, further increasing their debt.
Sometimes these debts last a few years, and sometimes they are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt.

More than 20 million people are currently held in Debt bondage. 90% of them are in South Asia with the most, 14.5 million people, held as debt slaves in India. That is despite that the practice is illegal there for years. Illegal but deeply rooted in the Indian social system as the Dalits the lowest caste (called ‘Untouchables’), who are the most socially and economically vulnerable people, are by far the most affected by bonded labor.
Debt bondage also snares women and girls into sex slavery at roadside red-light districts, now widely dispersed across the Indian countryside.

Involuntary Domestic Servitude

Involuntary domestic servitude is a form of coerced labor, performing domestic work taking place in a private residence.
It involves such abuses as confiscation of travel documents, withholding of wages, confinement, working from very early in the morning to late at night, no time off, deliberate isolation from the community and all family and friends and in many cases physical and sexual abuse.

Living under the threat of violence, sanctions and punishments, and in the case of migrants and especially undocumented migrants the threat of arrest and deportation, the domestic workers are in such a vulnerable place that they are not in a position to charge a compliment.

The social isolation and lack of personal autonomy inherent in live-in domestic service, combined with lack of legal protections, since the authorities cannot inspect homes as easily as formal workplaces, provides a convenient ground for slavery.
When the victims are migrants, oftentimes, they do not speak the language of the country they are in, making it even more difficult for them to contact outside of the home they serve. Domestic servitude can be a form of bonded labor when the workers incur a debt for their travel and/or recruitment fee and sometimes the employer or recruiter even adds on additional costs like housing or food that can never be repaid.

Many of the domestic workers are children. In Haiti they even have a name - Restavek. Basically it is a traditional system in which Haitian children from impoverished families (usually rural) are sent by their parents who are unable to provide for them, to live with relatives or even strangers (usually urban), and work for them as domestic servant.

Ideally the child is enrolled in school by the host household and treated like one of the family. But often this does not happen.
For many children, the day is filled with chores. Even the youngest are expected to fetch heavy buckets of water, hand-wash clothes, carry loads to and from the marketplace, and work in the fields—often laboring for 14 hours a day for no pay.
Children in Haiti’s Restavek system often suffer a kind of apartheid, reduced to a subjugated status in their household and in society—sleeping on the floor, dressed in rags, eating leftovers, and often beaten. Two-thirds are girls, and many are viewed by men in the family as convenient objects for sexual exploitation. Girls are often abruptly expelled from the household if they become pregnant. It is estimated that there are 300,000 restavek children in Haiti.

Forced Marriage

The practice in which an individual, mostly a girl or a young woman is forced, coerced, threatened, or tricked to marry without her consent.
The process usually involves mental pressure, emotional blackmail and coercion from the family or society. Many cases also involve physical violence, abduction, detention, threat of murder or murder. Most of the forced marriages are of girls under the age of 18, with about 14.2 million girls forced to marry every year. 5 million of them are under 15.
The young girls are trapped in a life of servitude, controlled by their husbands and are virtually there to provide them with domestic and sexual services.

Child marriage is rooted deeply in gender inequality, patriarchal tradition and poverty. Some cultures believe marrying girls before they reach puberty will bring blessings on families. In addition families see it as a way to insure that their daughter will not become pregnant out of wedlock and bring dishonor to the family. Poor families marry off young daughters to reduce the number of children they need to support. In some cultures, a major incentive is the price that the prospective husbands offer for young brides. In many cases Child marriage operates as a shield behind which slavery and slavery-like practices occur with impunity.

In cases where there is a high gap between the number of women and men, mostly in rural India, China and Korea, forced marriages often begin by abduction or with girls being sold by their families to be traded as brides. In these situations the girls are treated as a commodity, they are domestic servants which cost their enslaver only the price of their purchase, in many cases they are abused physically and sexually and are then resold to other men.

In Ghana, Togo and Benin, young virgin girls, usually under the age of 10, are pledged to the villages’ priests. This traditional practice is known as Trokosi (slave of the gods) and its formal function is to atone for offenses allegedly committed by a member of the girl's family. The girls become the property of the fetish priest and must provide sexual services as well as other labor for him. In simple words, parents prostitute their own little children in order to atone their own crimes.

Chattel Slavery

A form of slavery found mostly in Mauritania and Sudan, in which certain people are the property of other certain people and can be used as a medium of exchange. The slaves are used for house or farm labor, for sex, and for breeding. They may also be exchanged for money, guns, trucks and etc. Chattel slavery is inherited. Many are born into and die in slavery.

Although the Africans in Mauritania converted to Islam more than 100 years ago, and the Qur’an forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims, race seems to trump religious doctrine. Reports to the UN Commission on Human Rights have underscored the racial aspect of the practice. Government-armed Arab militias in Sudan are known to kill the men and enslave the women and children as personal property or to march them north to be auctioned off and sold. Anti-Slavery International reports that there is probably no village in the north without kidnapped black slaves.
In Mauritania slavery is an entrenched social, cultural and historic phenomenon. Although the national government has repeatedly banned the practice (most recently in 2007) many human rights groups see this as mere window-dressing with little enforcement effort. The descendants of black Africans abducted into slavery now live in Mauritania as “black Moors” or haratin and partially still serve the “white Moors”, or bidhan, as slaves. The number of slaves in the country is not known exactly, the estimates are of at least 90,000 darker-skinned Africans who still live as the property of the Muslim Berber communities. Other estimates, perhaps using a broader definition, claim up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are slaves to North African Arabs.

Child Slavery

Describes all child labor obtained from individuals under the age of 18 through the means of force, deception or coercion. Children can be enslaved in debt bondage, forced labor (for example in agriculture, factories, construction, brick kilns, mines, bars, restaurants or tourists environment), domestic work, prostitution or pornography, armies as child soldiers, illicit activities, such as forced begging, petty theft, and drug trade and other forms of hazardous work. Today, forced child labor exists in nearly every industry around the globe.

Besides what is referred to as forced child labor, according to the International Labor Organization there are about 168 million labor children in the world, with the youngest being 5 years old. More than half of them, 85 million, are in hazardous work.
These children may not be forced to work by a particular someone but they do out of a particular situation. They are not considered as slaves however they do work out of a necessity and not their own will.

The vast majority of children are working in agriculture. Child agricultural work is grueling and harsh. Children frequently work long hours in scorching heat, haul heavy loads, exposed to toxic pesticides, and suffer high rates of injury from sharp knives and other dangerous tools.
Child agricultural workers often begin to work at early ages, and may work 12 or more hours a day. During peak harvest season, they sometimes work 14 hours or more. Children may begin working as early as 4 a.m., and may spend two hours or more, each morning and evening, traveling to the fields where they work.

Sweatshops

Sweatshops are working environments that are mainly characterized by very long hours, very low pay, and unsafe and unhealthy working conditions.
Sweatshops may also have policies that severely restrict workers' freedoms, including limiting breaks, including to the bathroom, conversations with fellow workers and often even of any movement from the working station. At its worst, violence is used against sweatshop workers.

Sweatshops have been a factor in the production of merchandise around the world for centuries, but the globalization of business has led increasing numbers of major corporations to take advantage of low-cost sweatshop labor in developing countries.

Multinational corporations and big retails are in a global race to increase profits by driving down costs. As they source merchandise from all over the world, they search for places where workers are paid the lowest wages, and human rights are trampled.
In fact, the current trade laws encourage companies to make their products in places with the worst conditions and the lowest wages. Places where workers are not free to stand up for their rights and protect themselves.

Sweatshop workers report horrible working conditions including sub-minimum wages, no benefits, non-payment of wages, forced overtime, sexual harassment, verbal abuse and corporal punishment.

Sweatshop operators can best control workers that are ignorant of their rights as workers. Therefore, bosses often refuse to hire unionized workers and intimidate or fire any worker suspected of speaking with union representatives or trying to organize her fellow workers.

Large corporations almost always use contract manufacturing firms to produce their goods. In this way, corporations separate themselves from the production of their own goods and try to claim that the working conditions under which their goods are produced are not their responsibility.

The corporations are driving poorer countries into a race to the bottom. Factories with relatively good conditions are getting shut down and sweatshops are opening up.

Since sweatshop workers are paid less than their daily expenses, they are never able to save any money to improve their lives. They are trapped in an awful cycle of exploitation.

Slavery exists for thousands of years, was never ended nor reduced but actually broadened in terms of the number of slaves, the enslavement methods, the salves’ ages, the ethnical diversity, and the geographical spread.
Despite that nowadays slavery is illegal in every nation on earth, it can be found in every corner of the globe.

There have been several attempts in the history of the modern world to abolish slavery. They’re all failed. Slavery has always re-emerged in one form or another.

In a way the fact that slavery is not legal anywhere but happens everywhere makes it worse, because it means that slavery exists not as a result of political disputes between different parts of society, but it exists and is so prevalent because humans are too apathetic to really stop it.