| 01 October 2009

Benjamin Skinner, a Carr Center for Human Rights Fellow at Harvard, spent four years in the field researching slavery. His stories are horrendous. “In an underground brothel in Bucharest, I was offered a young woman with the visible effect of Down syndrome. One of her arms was covered in slashes, where I can only assume she was trying to escape daily rape the only way she knew how. That young woman was offered to me in trade for a used car.”
Today, sixty years after the U N’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned slavery worldwide, there are 27 million slaves, more than at any time in history, according to Kevin Bales President of Free the Slaves.
We find slavery in almost every part of the world; In the Far East, India, Pakistan, Latin America, Eastern Europe and, yes, even in America—the land of the free.
How could this monstrous human rights issue continue? Because slavery is all about economics; it is a high profit, low risk enterprise. Today slaves are not the personal property of the slaveholders. Rather they are, according to Skinner, “disposable tools for making money.”
A modern definition of slavery (again from Kevin Bales) -- “slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence [or] for no pay beyond subsistence. If you’re talking about forced commercial sexual slavery… there’s an added element of humiliation or shame, because we’re talking rape.”
Wage slavery occurs when workers are deceived into traveling to a distant location for high paying jobs. When they arrive, they find they must work for subsistence wages to pay off inflated transportation costs, that, of course, will take years (or never) to pay off. In India, the country with the largest number of slaves in the world, there’s generational slavery. In one case, generations of workers were forced to labor in a quarry braking up boulders to pay off the debt of their grandfather-- a loan of sixty-two cents.
Slavery is big business in Brazil where recruiters tout good paying jobs to impoverished villagers who end up working for nothing under threats of beatings and rape.
In America, it is estimated that about 14,000 to 17,000 people are trafficked into the country every year and forced to work under threat of violence for subsistence wages, many of them women who work as domestics and in the sex trade.
“I wish, I knew, how it would feel to be free ...” a Nina Simone tune from the 60s, written by Billy Taylor.
I thought about those lyrics – how could we ever – ever - understand slavery from a personal level? To have no civil rights, to toil in perpetuity for subsistence wages, to be physically restricted, to routinely face brutal beatings or rape, to have no contract with family or loved ones...
To learn more about this modern scourge and/or become involved, log on to http://www.castla.org/