Modern Day Slavery: Then & Now

"It's estimated that 27 million people are in slavery around the world"

Sourced by the UN, New York Times, Amnesty International, The Christian Science Monitor, and Free The Slaves, among others.

"While traditional chattel slavery is still widespread in such Saharan nations as Niger, Mauritania, Chad, and Sudan, it is immensely overshadowed by what modern antislavery groups describe as "new forms" of slavery -the men, women and children who are physically forced to work, often under the guise of meaningless contracts, in sweatshops or in building roads and pipelines for multinational corporations. Along with the exploitive use of indebtedness as an excuse for forced labor, there is also am enormous international traffic, especially in eastern Europe and south Asia in . . . girls or young women who have volunteered for decent-sounding jobs, only to find themselves coerced into prostitution...

"I remember attending as a child the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, which celebrated ‘A Century of Progress.' The title was, of course, chosen before the stock market crash of 1929, and it hardly required a cynic to note that 1933 was a year of deep economic depression and also the year when Hitler came to power. But... looking backward  from 1933, only a century had elapsed since Britain's pioneering and peaceful emancipation of some eight hundred thousand slaves, which helped lead the way to the outlawing of chattel slavery in much of the world.

"...By 1888, a century after the founding of the first feeble antislavery organizations in Philadelphia, London, Manchester, and New York, slavery had been outlawed throughout the entire New World -a hemisphere whose economies had long depended on the labor of millions of Africans or people of African descent. While some of this amazing emancipation can be attributed to slave resistance, especially the fleeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves behind Union lines in the American Civil War, and the mass exodus of thousands of slaves from farms and plantations in Brazil in the late 1880s, slave resistance was far more striking at earlier stages in the history of the New World -for example, in the creation of large maroon societies or in the Haitian Revolution.  It is surely certain -as certain as one can be about any historical events-that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred if there had been no abolitionist movements."

--Source: Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale. For more information on the Center, please see: http://www.yale.edu/glc/

"A wide range of estimates exists on the scope and magnitude of modern-day slavery, both internal and transnational. The International Labor Organization (ILO) -the United Nations (UN) agency charged with addressing labor standards, employment and social protection issues-estimates that are 12.3 million people in forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, and sexual servitude at any given time; other estimates range from 4 million to 27 million." 

--Source: Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2006, Department of State, United States of America. See: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2006/ to download a full copy of the report.

William Wilberforce's work is far from finished. It is difficult to imagine that people in the world today are still bought and sold, bartered for and mistreated, but the plight of modern day slaves is all too real.

Please visit the Amazing Grace group to learn more about the history of slavery.

Republished with permission from www.amazinggracemovie.com