Tags
#BAD2014, #BlogAction14, #OCT16, Governance, Inequality, Slavery
The United States, per capita, has a very low rate of slavery: just 0.02 percent, or one in every 5,000 people. But that adds up to a lot: an estimated 60,000 slaves, right there in America.
But, the rich, developed countries tend to have by far the lowest rates of slavery. Many reports say that effective government policies, rule of law, political stability and development levels all make slavery less likely. The vulnerable would be less vulnerable if those who would exploit them face higher penalties and greater risk of getting caught. A war, natural disaster or state collapse is likely to force helpless children or adults into bondage because of lack of governance. Another crucial factor in preventing slavery is discrimination. When society treats women, ethnic groups or religious minorities as less valuable or less worthy of protection, they are more likely to become slaves. It is, in fact, evident in the Middle East, esp. in Iraq or Syria today.
Slavery is also driven by extreme poverty, high levels of corruption and toleration of child marriages of young girls to adult men who either may be paying their parents a “dowry” or not depending on cultures and the situation in a given country. Haiti, in Pakistan and in India, more than 1 percent of the population is estimated to live in slavery because of either lack of good governance or cultures. Now, it is estimated that 30 million people are living as forced labourers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, and child brides in forced marriages and, in all ways that matter, as pieces of property. They are under servitude of absolute ownership literally, in these countries.
Two other bright red regions are Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. Both are blighted particularly by sex trafficking, a practice that bears little resemblance to popular Western conceptions of prostitution. Women and men are coerced into participating, often starting at a very young age, and are completely reliant on their traffickers for not just their daily survival but basic life choices; they have no say in where they go or what they do and are physically prevented from leaving. International sex traffickers have long targeted these two regions, whose women and men are prized for their skin tones and appearance by Western patrons. And this is happening because of the variation in the quality of governance in these counties in comparison to the countries that have better governance which corroborates that inequality is multidimensional.