Two years ago, when the British Government celebrated the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, slavery was still being discussed as an historical phenomenon. The image of captured Africans herded into the holds of ships for the murderous Atlantic crossing, after which the survivors would be paraded at slave markets, has huge resonance — but most people treated it as a closed chapter of colonial history.
They probably were not aware of an astonishing admission by the Brazilian Government at the UN three years earlier which suggested that slavery was very much a contemporary phenomenon. More than a century after the practice was outlawed in Brazil, the Government admitted that 25,000 people were toiling in conditions “analagous to slavery”. Anti-slavery campaigners put the figure much higher.
Who are these modern slaves? Who exploits them? Where do they work? Why are most of us barely aware of their existence? In Brazil, companies producing hardwood, pig iron and processed meats have been implicated in using forced labour, while soya beans are exported to countries where consumers are unaware that they are buying products that might be tainted by slavery. But here is an even more astounding statistic: a new book estimates that today there are 27 million slaves worldwide, as many as were seized from Africa during four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.
The authors of Modern Slavery are Kevin Bales, president of the organisation Free The Slaves and an adviser to governments and the UN, and Zoe Trodd and Alex Kent Williamson from Harvard University. Their research demonstrates that contemporary enslavement is more diverse and less visible than in the past; it is also illegal, which is the point that so many people missed when commemorating the 200-year-old Act of Parliament that abolished the British slave trade. The great abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries, from William Wilberforce to Frederick Douglass, campaigned not just to free slaves but also to have the practice outlawed; they were successful and slavery no longer exists as a legal entity. But it has not gone away and it is tolerated, even condoned, by corrupt regimes and police forces across the world.
Invisibility makes 21st-century slaves harder to count and the authors often have to rely on ranges of numbers, which is less satisfactory than exact figures. But they are scrupulous about their sources, citing government reports and organisations such as the UN’s employment rights agency, the ILO, where they can.
They believe that modern slavery is concentrated in countries such as India, where about ten million people are trapped in debt bondage, working to pay off theoretical “debts” that get larger as the years go by. These modern slaves work in brick kilns, rice mills, quarries, agriculture and fireworks and garment factories, toiling for long hours at back-breaking jobs and unable to leave. “When I say I was a slave, or that my parents were slaves, I want you to understand what I’m talking about,” says Ramphal, a former quarry slave in India. “At no time were we free to do what we wanted to do or to make our own choices. That’s when we realised we were slaves.”
A Mauritanian woman, Selek’ha Mint Ahmed Lebeid, was born into slavery and passed between masters. “I was taken from my mother when I was 2 years old by my first master . . . When I was very small I looked after the goats, and from the age of about 7 I looked after the master’s children, and did the household chores — cooking, collecting water and washing clothes.” At 10, she was given to a new master, who passed her on to his daughter as a marriage gift. “I was never paid, but I had to do everything, and if I did not do things right I was beaten and insulted.”
Most Western observers would instantly recognise that Lebeid was a slave but they might not realise that slavery exists in their own countries, albeit on a smaller scale. Domestic servants leave their home countries in search of work and discover that they are entirely dependent on employers who confiscate their passports, imprison them in smart flats and houses, and even sexually abuse them. Roseline Odine, from Cameroon, was held as a domestic slave in Washington for two and a half years after being tricked by an offer of education in the US. Her captors, who also came from Cameroon, were eventually convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. They were also ordered to pay her $100,000 for the unpaid work that she had been forced to do.
Most domestic slaves are children and the ILO estimates that ten million, some as young as 8, are trapped in domestic labour around the world. There are 700,000 child servants in Indonesia, 300,000 in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and 265,000 in Pakistan. Cut off from their families and unable to go to school, they are frequently illiterate and end up in prostitution when they grow up.
Forced prostitution is the form of slavery that has become most visible in recent years. In the UK, campaigns by Amnesty International, Anti-Slavery International and the Poppy Project, which cares for trafficked women, have drawn attention to the number of criminal gangs bringing women into the country specifically to work in brothels. As long ago as 1861, the abolitionist Harriet Jacobs remarked that slavery is terrible for men “but it is far more terrible for women”. She was referring to the sexual abuse and rape suffered by women slaves on American plantations, never imagining that the practice would one day be replicated in Europe, Asia and Africa on an industrial scale.
Not all this traffic is transcontinental — thousands of victims from other African countries are brought to Nigeria, Ivory Coast and South Africa, for instance — but trafficked women are working in suburban brothels and massage parlours up and down the UK. Economic disintegration in the former Soviet republics has provided an ample supply of young women desperate to get to the West, and two thirds of women trafficked from former Soviet countries — 100,000 a year, according to some estimates — end up in Western Europe.
During a debate on sex trafficking at Europe’s human-rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, a Moldovan woman shocked delegates when she said that few young women were left in some villages in her home country because they had all been lured into the European sex industry. Their suspicions are lulled by the use of female recruiters; according to the authors of this book, more than half of the people involved in the trafficking process in Moldova are women. Some trafficking victims suspect that they will have to sell sex when they arrive in London, Hamburg or Madrid, but many are enticed by false promises of jobs as waitresses or nannies.
These insights into the hidden lives of grotesquely exploited people could be depressing, but Modern Slavery is an optimistic book. The predictors of the existence of slavery in a country are well known, it argues, citing indebtedness, war, instability and corruption as factors that lead to enslavement and trafficking. Slaves have never been so cheap, but they are worth surprisingly little to the world economy — only $44 billion a year in worldwide profits, according to the ILO — and most of that benefits criminal organisations. Its effect on local economies is dire, driving down wages for non-enslaved workers and removing potential consumers from the market (slaves, for obvious reasons, cannot pay rent, buy consumer goods or support teachers and doctors). They are, the writers say, “a drag on a country’s economy”.
They also argue that slavery is “ripe for extinction” and offer a programme for speeding up the process. Consumers can do their bit by buying fair-trade products, while in 2001 the global chocolate industry established a protocol that aims to eliminate slave labour from the cocoa supply chain. It is believed that less than 5 per cent of the 800,000 farms that grow cocoa in Ivory Coast (the world’s biggest supplier) use slave labour; and instead of countrywide boycotts, which damage companies that do not use slaves, the protocol encourages farmers to acknowledge and eliminate forced labour. This approach isn’t perfect — a certification system that should have come into effect in 2005 has been held up by wrangles about who will pay — but it offers a model for other industries under pressure to stop using forced labour.
The writers would like the UN to appoint slavery inspectors, who would look for breaches of the many treaties and national laws that outlaw slavery, and they also recommend that individual countries come up with anti-slavery plans. When Brazil admitted that it had a problem, the Government set up mobile inspection units that rescued almost 7,000 people from forced labour by 2005, while $3 million was given to freed slaves to rebuild their lives.
Two centuries after the moral argument against slavery was won, it is shocking that men, women and children need to be rescued from servitude. Even if slaves make up only a small proportion of the exploited people of the world, they still outnumber the population of Australia. What is needed is nothing less than a new abolition movement, led by campaigners as determined as Douglass or Wilberforce. This timely and important book is its rallying call.
Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People by Kevin Bales,
Zoe Trodd and Alex Kent Williamson
Oneworld, £12.99; 256pp