How to Understand the Challenge of Modern Slavery

When was slavery abolished?

It Wasn’t…

How selfish of me to get so tied up in my life and all its 1st world issues. It is so easy to forget as we glide through our lives that our stress and challenges are of a different magnitude to our brothers and sisters elsewhere on this planet.

How much more stressed would I be if I wasn’t concerned with how to get my courgettes to propagate but rather that my basic human rights; freedom, enjoyment, movement, expression, dignity, education and family life had been torn from me?

So back to the question, when was slavery abolished? Everyone is going to say the late 1800s, or early 1900s, wrong. What is slavery? It can be defined in many different ways but essentially it’s the same, a slave is a person whose fundamental human rights, with respect to aspects of freedom, have been taken from them legally or illegally.

It is universally accepted that various widespread enslavement practices are illegal; sex trade, child trafficking, child soldiery, etc. Almost every country in the world has condemned such evil trade, but how many of these signatories vigorously enforce their condemnation? Not all, most, but not all…

Yazidi women and girls as young as eight have been forced into sexual slavery Islamic State extremists according to the Kurdistan Regional Government

I am not alone in feeling that when an institution declares an act to be illegal but then fails to properly legislate and enforce the law it is equally guilty of a humanitarian crime. This includes turning a blind eye to practices that are often quite overt.

Unfortunately, many countries hide their lack of constitutional robustness behind tradition or religious smokescreens. For example, Russia quite openly supports forced labour even though it is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first ratified in 1957.

Forced labour inmates in southeastern Turkey…

The victims are, as always, the vulnerable; women and girls forced into prostitution, migrants trapped in debt bondage, and sweatshop or farm workers bound illegally by such means as passport seizure or incarceration.

‘Workers’ rescued from a brick kiln in Linfen, Shanxi, China. Kidnapped and brutalised by a gang of modern-day slavers.

In Russia, the Global Slavery Index (GSI) is an incredible 490,000–540,000 people. A big chunk of the forced labour in Russia are migrant workers from Kyrgyzstan and illegal immigrants from surrounding regions such as North Korea. The forced workers (slaves) work in construction, manufacturing, narcotics, or sex trade industries. Russia’s long and vaporous border combines with institutional corruption to ensure the slavery problems not going away any time soon.

Children still constitute a shameful percentage of those held by debt bondage

I am not picking on Russia, I am using Russia’s experience to highlighted a shocking set of statistics. Russia is one of the better nations! Russia is ranked 49th of the global GSI scores. That means that there are 48 countries that are worse, with larger numbers involved.

The fact is that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history, estimated at about 28–35 million people are slaves…today and it’s increasing. Even more shocking is that this is not restricted to emergent economies. For example, there are an estimated 55–65,000 slaves in the USA.

There are an estimated 2 million slaves in Europe, right under our noses. To end this appalling and shameful situation it needs action; 5+ billion voices raised as one, every nation united...