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Slavery used to look like this,
then it evolved into this,
and today it looks like this.
In fact, there are an estimated 45.8 million people
living in modern slavery
across 167 different countries.
They fall into three general categories:
children held in the commercial sex trade;
adults held in the commercial sex trade;
and any other laborer made to work through force, fraud, or coercion.
The trafficking victim often looks like anybody else at work
in a mine, on a farm, in a factory.
Many are lured by promises of a steady job in another country,
only to have their passports confiscated when they arrive.
However, many slaves work in their native countries
or even the cities where they were born.
According to the The Global Slavery Index,
these ten countries are home to the most modern slaves.
They each suffer from income inequality, discrimination, and classism,
and entrenched corruption.
Number ten, Indonesia, produces about 35% of the world’s palm oil.
The many small palm plantations present an immense challenge to inspectors
trying to crack down on child labor.
The country’s many islands are also home
to tens of thousands of enslaved fishermen
trafficked from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia.
Number nine is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
20,000 of the DRC’s more than 870,000 slaves
live in one of the most hellish landscapes on the planet,
a vast ore mine in the east of the country.
The terrorist group Boko Haram gets overshadowed by ISIS,
although it kills more people.
When it comes to enslavement, one of its tactics
is to give Nigerian entrepreneurs loans
and then force them to join their group if they fail to repay fast enough.
Seventh is Russia.
55% of the slaves there work in construction.
Foreigners are lured mainly from nearby Azerbaijan,
the “stans,” Ukraine, and North Korea--
thanks to this border on the far eastern edge of Russia.
The North Korean government is the world’s largest single slaveholder.
Not only does it force more than 1 million of its people
to toil in labor camps and other similarly hopeless situations,
but it actually loans out some people to work in neighboring China and Russia,
then pockets most of their wages.
This exploitation generates about $2.3B each year
for the Kim Jong-Un regime.
The fifth most enslaved country, Uzbekistan,
is the world’s sixth largest producer of cotton.
It has benefited from forced labor,
as the government puts more than 1 million people to work
using threats of debt bondage, heavy fines, asset confiscation,
and police intimidation.
Slave recruiters in Bangladesh promise poor families
that their boys will be given a job,
only to be enslaved on a faraway island and beaten
to clean fish for up to 24 hours straight.
Often, these fish are exported as cat food for our pets here in the West.
Sometimes, the boys meet a gruesome death when they are eaten by tigers
while searching for firewood.
Third is Pakistan,
which has suffered through decades of conflict, terrorism, and displacement--
especially along its northwestern border with Afghanistan.
Its provinces have not raised the minimum age of marriage,
which has allowed the widespread problem of forced and child weddings to continue.
Over 250 million Chinese have migrated within the country
to find better opportunities,
creating the ideal conditions for human trafficking.
Each year, 58 million children are "left behind"
as their parents search of work in the China’s many booming cities.
Every year, up to 70,000 children fall into forced begging,
illegal adoption, and sex slavery.
And number one is India, which has by far the most victims of modern slavery.
While economic growth has greatly reduced
the percentage of its citizens living in poverty,
the country’s sheer size still results in more than 270 million Indians
living on less than $2/day.
It’s unsurprising then that intergenerational bonded labor,
forced child labor,
commercial sexual exploitation, forced begging,
forced recruitment into nonstate armed groups,
and forced marriage
all exist in India.
The good news is that the government has already created
many of the laws necessary to fight the epidemic,
but the challenge is effectively enforcing those laws
and tracking improvements and areas of continued need.
On the flip side, these are the countries
rated as the ten best at fighting modern slavery.
As you can see, no country has complete eradicated the problem,
and leaders on this issue-- like the United States--
can even contribute to it by consuming products
that were, at some point in their supply chain,
touched by slave labor.
While it can be hopeless to be a slave,
the rest of us can help by raising awareness,
helping an anti-slavery group,
or pressuring government officials around the world to take action.
Kevin Bales, a professor of contemporary slavery
and the lead author of the study on which this video is based,
described to NPR’s Fresh Air
one of the many instances where he’s seen slaves being freed.
(Dave Davies) “Can you share an example of where that’s worked,
where locals with the support of the organization
have liberated slaves?”
(Dr. Kevin Bales) “Oh, sure. I’ve got lots of those, in fact.
But I think the one that I most find rather thrilling, myself,
is how in Northern India, more than ten years ago,
we began to work with a local organization.
Those young men who had come to freedom
began to operate with our support to go into other villages
where the entire village was enslaved in hereditary slavery, working in quarries.
Because they were the same ethnicity, they would slip in in the evenings
and they would meet with people while they were having their supper
and they would say, ‘oh, so who do you work for around here?
Oh, you all work for the same person?
Oh, you’re all working in the mines?
But where’s the school?
Oh, there is no school.’
And they’d start this Socratic dialogue that would lead in time
to an awakening of an understanding of an alternative.
It’s important to remember that when you’re in hereditary slavery,
you have no notion of freedom.
But when the image and truth of freedom is awakened in your mind,
people really do become unstoppable.
There would come a time when those young men would say,
‘you know, I used to be in the same situation.
I used to live in a village just like this one,
but now we have a school and we even have a clinic.
We have jobs and so forth.’
And then people would say, ‘how do you get there?’
And then, what we found there is that in those villages,
the women would step forward even though it’s a very male dominated society.
The women would step forward and say
we will lead this even if it leads to our deaths.
Because, they would say - not to me, but to my women colleagues -
‘we don’t want our daughters to be raped the way we were raped
by the slaveholders, by the slavemasters.
And they would push that along.”
You can learn more about this study through the link below
and you can help spread this video
by hitting the like button and sharing it with your friends.
Thanks for watching.
Until next time, for TDC, I’m Bryce Plank.