A 2007 documentary “Very Young Girls” demonstrated, many in the U.S. are coerced into participating at a young age and gradually shifted into a life that very much resembles slavery.
A less visible but still prevalent form of slavery in America involves illegal migrant labourers who are lured with the promise of work and then manipulated into forced servitude, living without wages or freedom of movement, under constant threat of being turned over to the police should they let up in their work. Walk Free cites “a highly developed criminal economy that preys on economic migrants, trafficking and enslaving them.” That economy stretches from the migrants’ home countries right to the United States.
The country that is most marked by slavery, though, is clearly India.
As per Walk Free Foundation’s report, there are an estimated 14 million slaves in India – it would be as if the entire population of a European country was forced into slavery. The country suffers deeply from all major forms of slavery, according to the report. Forced labour is common, due in part to a system of hereditary debt bondage; many Indian children are born “owing” sums they could never possibly pay to masters who control them as chattel their entire lives. Others fall into forced labour when they move to a different region looking for work, and turn to an unlicensed “broker” who promises work but delivers them into servitude. The country’s caste system and widespread discrimination abet social norms that make it easier to turn a blind eye to the problem. Women and girls from underprivileged classes are particularly vulnerable to sexual slavery, whether under the guise of “child marriages” or not, although men and boys often fall victim as well.
One of the world’s most vulnerable populations for enslavement is Haitian children. Haiti has the world’s second-highest rate of slavery — 2.1 percent, or about one in every 48 people, many of them underage. There’s even a word for it: “restaveks”, from the colonial French for “reste avec” or “stay with”. Traditionally, the word refers to a poor family sending their child to live with and work for a wealthier family. Often it is innocuous. But it can also encompass parents who feel they have no choice, typically because they have no income other than what they derive from selling their children into forced labour conditions that strongly resemble slavery. About one in 10 Haitian children are believed to participate. Those who run away, according to the report, are often “trafficked into forced begging and commercial sexual exploitation.
In The Haitian Times last year, columnist Max Joseph wrote, “For Haitians or any member of the African Diaspora for that matter, the word “slavery” is distinctively associated with the transatlantic slave trade in which millions of Africans were forcibly uprooted from their villages and sold like domesticated animals in faraway lands. “The notion of associating the restavèk phenomenon with slavery is a naked attempt at trivializing one of the most grotesque episodes in human history,” Joseph wrote.
What’s perhaps most amazing about the prevalence of slavery around the world, throughout the East to the West, is how similar it can look across very different societies. The risk factors might change from one place to another, the causes varying widely, but the lives of the enslaved rarely do.
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