The Scourge of Slavery: The Contemporary Reality of an International Human Rights Challenge

David K. Androff is assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University.

Slavery is not history. Yet for many in the West, slavery is inexorably embedded in the past. Conventional wisdom holds that the abhorrent practice of slavery is no more. In the United States, school children are taught that it expired when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. The British Empire abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1833. Indeed, popular histories celebrate such emancipations and abolitions, and the triumph of Enlightenment values of human rights over the oppression, exploitation, and domination of slavery.¹ However, accounts of slavery typically end at this point, implying that slavery did not persist into the present day. Additionally, most academic attention and scholarship on slavery focuses on the transatlantic slave trade and the African experience in America. Even scholars of inequality and oppression often fail to address the contemporary reality of slavery today.

Slavery has been present around the world throughout history. Aristotle famously justified slavery as a natural, necessary and beneficial social status. Across the globe and through antiquity, empires were built upon the enslavement of people. Until the relatively recent abolition movements, slavery was an accepted form of human relations. Now, it is universally accepted that slavery is wrong, immoral, illegal, and a violation of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) forbids slavery, forced labour, servitude, and the slave trade. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) provides for the right to work in a safe environment for fair and just pay. Yet despite this reversal in attitudes about slavery and the myriad laws and international agreements confirming its illegality, slavery persists. It is a troubling aspect of the problem that slavery is illegal everywhere, but also practised everywhere.

The historical legacy of the abolition movement and its successes of pervasive laws against slavery contributed to the widespread perception that the problem had been solved. However, over the past decade, a growing awareness of the reality of contemporary slavery has slowly dawned. Sensational media accounts and investigative journalism spurred interest, and concern from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and faith-based communities led to eventual action by states and resulted in gradual public awareness of the issue. Popular television shows and Hollywood movies have featured plotlines involving international sex trafficking. Nevertheless, confusion still exists about why modern slavery—usually framed as human trafficking—continues to plague so many people, the precise numbers affected, what situations constitute modern slavery, and what possible solutions there are to the problem.

Slavery is not just poor working conditions. Enthusiastic advocates for various social-justice campaigns sometimes exaggerate their causes and have applied the term “slavery” loosely. Although the international community has developed definitions and agreements on modern slavery, the panoply of government agencies, NGOs, the media, and the public is still building consensus towards a common understanding of slavery. Questions remain about what constitutes modern slavery, and often interrelated and overlapping phenomena such as human trafficking, human smuggling, prostitution, sex work, and sex tourism contribute to the confusion. Much of the media coverage is focused upon international sex trafficking, and many assume that this is the full extent or main form of modern slavery; however, there is evidence that other forms of forced labour may rival sex trafficking in scope. Meaningful estimates of the scale of modern slavery are elusive.

Many aspects of modern slavery are tied to the economic, technological, and social forces of globalisation. The accelerated flow of capital, information, and people across political and geographic borders as well as the global diffusion of production, supply, and distribution networks have facilitated the growth of modern slavery and enabled the problem to elude public consciousness and detection. Rapid social forces such as overpopulation and urbanisation, coupled with corruption, particularly in the global South, fuel modern slavery. The result is a globalised system of oppression, interlaced inequalities, violence, and exploitation.

What Is Modern Slavery?

Defining slavery precisely and accurately is an important task, not only to promote understanding of the phenomenon but also to ensure that intervention efforts are well co-ordinated and have the potential for maximum benefit. Definitions of modern slavery vary; this is problematic in and of itself. As mentioned above, popular misconceptions abound about the nature and extent of modern slavery. If modern slavery is defined too narrowly, some who suffer may be excluded from interventions designed to assist and protect them. Conversely, if modern slavery is defined too broadly then intervention policies and programmes may be watered down and weakened by the inclusion of other forms of exploitation and injustice.

Orlando Patterson, a pre-eminent scholar of slavery, applies a tripartite definition.² He writes that throughout history slavery has been a relationship of human domination. This extreme form of human domination is characterised first by its violent nature: most scholars and policymakers agree that violent coercion—controlling another person through force or the threat of violence—lies at the centre of the slave experience. Second, slavery constitutes a form of social death: slaves are cut off from their social relationships, especially their relationships to their own families, in both ascending and descending generations. Slaves do not belong to any social group: they are no longer children to their parents, brother or sister to their siblings, or even parents to their own children. They are exclusively, and usually permanently, slaves to their master, and this tie becomes their main and overarching social relationship. Third, they are stigmatised or dishonoured—powerless people whose social shame contributes to the outward appearance of their acceptance of their position and damages their internal sense of self-identity.

Kevin Bales, a scholar and activist whose writings have done much to raise public awareness of modern slavery, applies a definition that echoes Patterson’s: slaves are forced, through violence, to work without pay. Bales also discerns several differences between historical slavery and modern slavery, notably in the areas of legality, supply, and cost. Besides the fact that slavery is now illegal after being legally permissible for most of history, today there is a greater availability of slaves than ever before. Overpopulation has increased the supply of potential slaves, and economically vulnerable people and communities are at the greatest risk. This increased supply has led to what Bales calls “disposable people”. The cost of obtaining a slave has been reduced, as has the incentive of slaveholders to protect and care for the slave. Today, slaveholders can cheaply obtain new victims if their slaves fall ill or die; their slaves become disposable—to be used, discarded, and replaced.³

During the twentieth century, the international community, first in the League of Nations Slavery Convention (1926) and later in the United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956), defined slavery as involuntary work conducted under threat of penalty. The Supplementary Convention defined slavery as including serfdom, debt bondage, and adoption or marriage for the purpose of slavery.

The term “human trafficking” was originally a policy term that linked cases of involuntary human smuggling to other international law-enforcement problems such as drug and arms trafficking. “Trafficking” implicitly referred to the transportation of people across borders. In contrast, some campaigners began using the term “slavery” to encompass human trafficking and cases of forced labour in which no one was transported across political boundaries but was exploited in his or her country or community of origin. Besides being more accurate, the term “slavery” better communicated the brutality of victims’ experiences than the rather sanitised term “trafficking”. Advances in international policy agreements have rendered these two terms synonymous. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (2000), also known as the Palermo Protocol, and the United States Trafficking Victims Protection Act of the same year, define “trafficking” broadly to include the recruitment, harbouring, provision, obtaining, and receipt of people in addition to transporting them. The Palermo Protocol and US policy also define the use and threat of violence for exploitation broadly, incorporating deception to achieve consent as a form of coercion. “Coercion” was given this expanded meaning to cover sex-trafficking cases in which women appeared to consent to their servitude but in reality believed their families were in danger back home. Several prosecutions of sex traffickers have been derailed by the question of the victim’s apparent consent.

Slavery Today

The myriad forms modern slavery takes also complicate attempts to understand and ameliorate the problem. Modern slavery exists across many “industries” with differing arrangements; however, its forms all share in common the central aspect of the definition mentioned earlier—control of another person through force or the threat of violence. These types of modern slavery include sexual slavery, chattel slavery, debt bondage, contract slavery, domestic servitude, state slavery, religious slavery, and child slavery.

Sexual slavery occurs when someone—most often a female—is sexually exploited or forced to have sex against her will. Usually this entails being trafficked into prostitution and coerced into sex work. This form of slavery has been widely represented in the media; therefore, lesser-known types of modern slavery will be discussed here.

Chattel slavery occurs when one person becomes the property of another; it resembles the historical slavery of the transatlantic slave trade. The slave is the master’s “chattel” and may be captured, sold, or born into permanent servitude. Today, chattel slavery mostly exists around the Saharan desert, in West and North Africa, as vestiges of the trans-Saharan slave trade. In particular, chattel slavery has been identified in Mauritania, where it is a normalised part of the social order and ingrained in the social, economic, and political fabric of the country. Sharp social divisions based on race, ethnicity, language, religion, and class preserve social stability; therefore, slavery in Mauritania is marked by a lack of overt violence. Chattel slavery being more like historical slavery than modern slavery, upper-class families have long‑term relationships with their slaves, who are cared for, maintained, and rarely sold but passed on from generation to generation. Strong emotional bonds develop on the part of the slaveholders’ families, who are said to refer to their slaves as their dependent children, requiring their care and supervision.

Debt bondage occurs when someone is forced into work because of debt. This is found primarily in agricultural work in South Asia. Ordinary life-expenses, such as the cost of a wedding, education, or the medical bills from a family member’s illness, can lead borrowers to pledge their labour to moneylenders to repay the loan plus interest. Unscrupulous moneylenders exploit illiterate borrowers by manipulating the account to prevent continually completion of the repayment. Borrowers toil, but low earnings preclude repaying more than the interest, and the original debt can be passed on to their children. The costs of the borrower’s meals and housing can be added to the debt, and it is not unusual for borrowers to be subjected to interest rates as high as 60 per cent. Some bonded labourers have incurred interest rates as high as 100 per cent on debts that they will never be able to repay and that will keep their families enslaved for generations to come.

Contract slavery occurs when someone is offered a false contract guaranteeing employment, but is later coerced through violence to work without pay. The promise of work is used to attract desperate job-seekers, who are vulnerable to such recruitment in the context of material deprivation and grinding poverty. The inducement of good pay for hard work encourages them to agree to leave their homes and be transported to faraway locations, such as another country, a distant urban centre, a remote mine, factory, or plantation. They are housed and fed during their journeys, and are sometimes held at collection points before beginning work, when they are incur additional lodging and meal expenses. The reality of what they find upon arrival clashes tragically with their expectations of economic opportunity; some find themselves in brothels, others in cages, and most are completely isolated, kept under guard, with no hope of escape, of calling for help, or of sending word back home. They are brutally treated until they comply by working for no pay, and are told they have to repay the money their “employer” advanced to cover the cost of their transportation. Their subjection is reinforced by expenses incurred at the “company store”, often their only available source for food and essentials, offered at inflated rates to a captive market. To evade detection, the slaveholders may produce the bogus contract as evidence of a legitimate employee agreement, thus hiding the slavery that is sometimes in plain view. In addition to the contracts, slaveholders take control of the workers’ government-issued identity and labour cards. Labourers are loath to leave without their papers, especially proof of citizenship, which they depend upon for legal protection and would be required if they were to search for real work.

Domestic servitude occurs when someone is forced to work within a household. Typically, women and children are made to perform domestic work in private residences, but are trapped inside the home and isolated from the outside world. Completely dependent on the slaveholder and under strict control, the domestic slave is vulnerable to extreme physical and sexual abuse.

State slavery occurs when a government captures and forces its own citizens to perform work. This might be in labour camps or on state-sponsored construction projects. In some cases, a political authority will force people to join the military and conscript them into border wars or campaigns against ethnic minorities. Currently, Myanmar and North Korea are the countries most associated with state slavery.

Religious slavery occurs when people are under the control of religious institutions or authorities, and forced to work for the religious community. In certain communities, cultural beliefs and religious practices sanction the “sacrifice” of a female family member into religious servitude. Thus, in West Africa, families may atone for their sins by giving virgin girls to local shamans or fetish priests. The women, known as trokosi, are kept at the shrine and forced into ritual servitude, including sexual slavery as well as labour and upkeep of the property. In Hindu parts of South Asia, daughters of poor families sometimes become devadasi when they are given to a temple. Forced to work for the men at the temple, they are also coerced into sexual slavery and sometimes made to work as prostitutes as well. Women trapped in religious slavery are considered to be “wives of the gods”, which is used to justify their exploitation.

Child slavery can take any of the above forms of slavery, with children as the victims instead of adults. Significant attention has been paid to child sexual slavery, when children are trafficked into sex work or prostituted. Another form of child slavery is child domestic work, when children are kept inside a home and forced to do domestic labour. This occurs around the globe; in Haiti, a child domestic worker is known euphemistically as a restavec (stay with), where the practice is tied to informal adoption. Child soldiers, similar to state slaves in the military, but also exploited by rebel militias and armed gangs, have been used in conflicts in Central America and Colombia, and across Asia and Africa. Child slavery also exists in many different industries and settings besides those mentioned above.

How Much Slavery?

It is impossible to say how many people are ensnared around the world in these multiple forms of modern slavery. As observed above, many forms of slavery succeed in part because of the extreme isolation of the victims. Besides strengthening the slaveholder’s control over the slave, this isolation in brothels, households, factories, farms and mines also conceals the slave from detection by the police. The illegality and isolation of modern slavery make it nearly invisible, so that only approximate estimates of its scope are possible. Estimating the number of slaves in the world is also hampered by a lack of methodological rigour; most research that presents estimates is descriptive and reflects a specific setting.

Nonetheless, attempts have been made to aggregate such estimates. Most that are reported in the media and academic literature rely on two main sources. The first is the work of Kevin Bales, who based his global total of twenty-seven million slaves on government data and semi‑structured interviews with slaves and slaveholders around the world.⁴ Contrary to his expectations, many groups, especially NGOs and advocacy bodies, have simply accepted his estimate without debate. Bales’s figure of twenty-seven million slaves is widely used by groups campaigning for a global movement to abolish modern slavery. His estimate is similar to that of the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, which in 1999 estimated that twenty million labourers were held in debt-bondage, primarily in South Asia. Bales himself estimated that of his twenty-seven million figure, fifteen million to twenty million slaves lived in South Asia. A 1996 Human Rights Watch report, The Small Hands of Slavery, estimated that fifteen million children worldwide were enslaved in debt-bondage. In 2005, the International Labour Organisation estimated that there were 8.4 million child slaves. The UN Working Group on Slavery, in 1984, estimated that more than a quarter of a million people were held in chattel slavery across the Saharan region.

The second chief source for estimates of the extent of modern slavery and human trafficking is the US State Department. The US government estimates that 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Of these, 14,500 to 18,500 are trafficked into the United States. The 800,000 figure is also employed by other governments, international agencies, and the United Nations. Most of these victims are women—some 70 per cent according to US estimates—trafficked mainly for prostitution. The US government additionally estimates that two million to four million people are trafficked within countries—without crossing political borders. This estimate is corroborated by the International Organisation for Migration, which estimates that four million people are trafficked between and within international borders.

The distinction between the many millions of slaves estimated by advocacy groups and the hundreds of thousands estimated by government agencies may be the result of political motivations. Those committed to promoting social action on the issue may be motivated to opt for the highest numbers available in order to draw more attention to their cause. Governments may be motivated to use lesser counts that minimise the problem so as to reduce their responsibility to find a solution. Both those using the higher figures and those who gravitate to the lower are unclear about the methodologies behind the estimates or even their sources. The disparate estimates, the difficulty of defining slavery, and ignorance about its many forms all hamper attempts to intervene against modern slavery.

What Can Be Done?

Modern slavery is a complex problem, exacerbated by multiple economic, political, social, cultural and psychological factors; therefore, solutions to slavery need similarly to be complex. Anti-slavery programmes and policies can range in scope from the local to the international, and in focus from social services for current and rescued former slaves to comprehensive social-change strategies that seek to fix the systemic problems of corruption and poverty forming the context that enables slavery to flourish. While these responses are segmented for the discussion that follows, a combination of solutions is required to combat slavery. Similarly, these interventions are not prescribed for any one type of slavery; rather, a multifaceted approach is warranted.

Social-service interventions are programmes that seek to protect current slaves and rehabilitate former slaves who have escaped, been discarded by, or rescued from their slaveholders. Such programmes tend to be local, and are often operated by NGOs, sometimes with international or governmental funding and support. A common format is the drop-in centre, usually a room at an NGO’s office, which provides medical, social, educational, and vocational services to slaves in their local communities. Drop-in centres may offer legal aid, basic-skills training for cooking or typing, literacy and numeracy tuition, socialisation and peer support, and therapeutic counselling. Other educational programmes are sometimes provided in school settings or public venues such as marketplaces. One example of an NGO that runs a drop-in centre in Bangladesh is Ain O Salish Kendra. In Peru, Casa de Panchitas does the same.

Community-based interventions focus on prevention, outreach, public education and raising awareness about modern slavery. These can also be run by NGOs. Prevention programmes attempt to raise awareness about the risks and dangers of being trafficked, recruited for dubious work opportunities, and enslaved. There is a growing emphasis on developing interventions that focus on prevention in the communities where many trafficking victims originate. In Togo, WAO Afrique educates parents about slavery and trafficking so that their children may become less vulnerable. Community-based interventions can also take the form of sensitisation and public-awareness campaigns to draw attention to the plight of enslaved people through various media such as radio and billboard advertisements, documentary films, and television shows. Outreach programmes, such as India’s National Child Domestic Workers movement, seek to identify victims of slavery through peer networks and even through the children of slaveholders, who often are in contact with child slaves. A peer outreach organisation in the Philippines, Sumapi, provides referrals to social-service programmes.

Harm-reduction interventions attempt to work with slaveholders to improve the working and living conditions of slaves. This approach has generated some controversy as detracting from a purely abolitionist stance that aims first and foremost to free every slave. Like harm-reduction efforts in other fields, such as substance abuse and sex work, these programmes do not focus on eradicating the injustice (here enslavement), as the abolitionist would, but rather try to reduce its worst aspects in order to minimise the harm suffered by its victims. This approach is based on the pessimistic view that ending slavery may be impossible, and so aims instead at the gradual amelioration of the conditions of servitude that cause the slave harm.

A primary harm-reduction strategy is to engage with slaveholders, recognising them as a key aspect of the problem that should be targeted by interventions. Harm-reduction programmes eschew sensational media accounts and popular narratives about slavery, as these fail to engage the slaveholders, who just dismiss such information. Working with slaveholders also brings the benefit of access to hard-to-reach populations of slaves. Harm-reduction activists negotiate directly with slaveholders to persuade them to allow their slaves to attend school or drop-in centres where they can gain access to a wide range of needed services. Such interventions may be most effective in places where slavery has a high degree of social and cultural acceptance; NGOs that promote engagement with slaveholders are active in South Asia and Mauritania, such as Shoishab in Bangladesh. Harm-reduction advocates argue that anti-slavery programmes should work to win acceptance by slaveholders of a reinterpretation of the slave’s role—as that of an employee, for example. Such a reconceptualisation might lead to the introduction of modest payments, improved working conditions, and perhaps even better working hours. Activists may win these small improvements, however, at the cost of seeming to endorse certain forms of servitude.

Rule-of-law interventions range from rescue and law-enforcement efforts to anti-corruption measures that promote an impartial and independent judiciary. Law-enforcement agencies focus on identifying and rescuing slaves, discovering and disrupting trafficking networks, and apprehending and punishing perpetrators. The enforcement approach might appear to be a straightforward means of dealing with such a crime as slavery, yet it is precisely the failure to enforce the laws forbidding it that has perpetuated the problem. Slaveholders are rarely prosecuted and punished, even in the global North. Difficulties in establishing the victims’ lack of consent have derailed many prosecution attempts. However, prosecuting the slaveholders is a crucial and necessary component of the fight against slavery: without holding the perpetrators accountable, slavery will continue with impunity. Prosecutions also fail when judges do not understand slavery and trafficking, or where the rule of law is weak, or even worse, where corruption thrives. Therefore, rule-of-law interventions must also include judicial education programmes to inform lawyers and judges about the dynamics of slavery. As many countries across the global South lack functioning legal systems, interventions to combat corruption and promote the rule of law help indirectly to end slavery by creating a legal and moral environment where justice can be served and the rights of individuals promoted. To this end, interventions that strengthen the institutions of the state and civil society will encourage good governance and also contribute to the struggle against slavery.

Economic interventions seek to promote economic growth and development. Anti-poverty programmes and policies indirectly address slavery by reducing the context of material deprivation that makes many vulnerable to it. Indeed, economic development that contributes to people’s economic and social security and the emergence and strengthening of a middle class can strike a weighty blow against slavery. Rising incomes and increases in material welfare liberate people from the traditional social structure and arrangements that enable forms of slavery such as debt bondage. In addition, technological advances in many industries transform the nature of work and can make slave labour redundant and unnecessary. Policies that foster economic development, balanced with investments in human capital such as education, can contribute to sustainable social development. Income-generating strategies for former slaves that guarantee a minimum level of material welfare and quality of life will promote their recovery and rehabilitation, reducing their vulnerability to re-enslavement. Although the contemporary globalised world economy distances consumers from the production of a range of commodities that may be tainted by slave labour, consumer-led movements against goods so produced or against companies profiting from such labour are another economic strategy that may be able to have an impact on slavery. Consumers should demand that their products are certified slave-free, as with fair-trade products. An example of a successful consumer movement is the Rugmark campaign that sought to end child labour in the carpet factories of South Asia.

An Eradicable Scourge

Slavery should be history. The world has the ability, through careful co-ordination and the considered application of resources, to end this barbaric practice that has plagued humanity throughout the ages. Ending the scourge of slavery requires a multifaceted approach and comprehensive interventions. The international agreements, treaties, and laws that protect universal human rights must be implemented and enforced. The political will to enforce laws must be marshalled and deployed. Governments, campaigners, social scientists, social-service providers, legal professionals, and people everywhere should collaborate to end slavery. The continuation of slavery diminishes the humanity and justice of everyone. Slavery is a major human rights challenge of our era. Freeing victims from slavery and preventing the enslavement of another human being will contribute to a more socially just and humane world.

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

2. See his seminal Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

3. See Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

4. Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).