Baltimore Anti-Slavery Society
What constitutes slavery in the modern world?
The United Nations has assigned WORKING GROUP ON CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF SLAVERY to look at this issue. The modern definition of slavery has been expanded by conventions signed by almost all countries in the world to include trafficking in women and bonded labor. The High Commissioner for Human Rights in his Opening Statement to the WGCFS, 23rd SESSION, 18-28 MAY 1998 (Geneva, 18 May 1998) stated that "Slavery and its prohibition is enshrined in international treaties and in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the international community is actually commemorating its 50th Anniversary. Article 4 of the Universal Declaration guarantees that 'No one shall be held in slavery or servitude, slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.' But still, slavery is not dead. It continues to be reported in a wide range of forms: traditional chattel slavery, bonded labour, serfdom, child labour, migrant labour, domestic labour, forced labour and slavery for ritual or religious purposes." (Related documents can be located at the United Nations Human Rights Documentation Research Guide).
As slavery seems to take new forms -- it is still, nevertheless, identified by an element of ownership or control over another's life, coercion and the restriction of movement -- by the fact that someone is not free to leave, to change an employer. In a California garment sweatshop in 1995, Thai workers were found confined to a compound behind razor wire.
Contemporary slavery is not always easy to identify or root out because much of it is accepted within a culture. Debt bondage is practiced in many parts of the world, particularly in South Asia. In India and Nepal it is supported by a caste system that makes subjugation socially acceptable.
The director of Equality Now, an international women's rights organization, said real slavery exists in the Sudan, a contention supported by the United Nations and independent human rights investigators. Islamic tribes in southern Sudan regularly raid villages of non-Muslim animists and take away captives who must work for them as unpaid labor unless they are bought back by their clans. Race is not the issue. In Ghana, the trokosi tradition, makes young girls "slaves of the Gods."
Anti-Slavery International has also found traditional, 18th-century-style slavery in West Africa, where children in poor countries like Togo and Benin are seized from villages and sold into domestic servitude in Nigeria, Gabon and elsewhere in the region.
In Asia, a well-organized begging industry mutilates Indian children and transports them to Saudi Arabia to plead for money outside mosques.
In the United States, immigrant rings trafficking in undocumented aliens operate within their cultural systems, as is the case with the Mexican networks placing trinket-sellers in New York and California. The plight of deaf Mexicans discovered in Queens, New York in 1997, (The New York Times, July 26, 1997) crowded into apartments and monitored at work in the subways by enforcers of the smuggling ring that brought them here are another recent example of forced labor. More deaf immigrants in bondage were discovered in North Carolina (The New York Times).
The more oppressive forms of slavery affect migrant laborers rendered vulnerable because of language and other cultural barriers which make them easy targets for exploitation. Worldwide, the victims of contemporary forms of slavery are characterized by their poverty and by their vulnerability.
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Content copyright © 1998 Baltimore Anti-Slavery Society
Revised: December 31, 1998
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