There are more slaves today than at any point in history, remaining as high as 12 million to 27 million,even though slavery is now outlawed in all countries. Several estimates of the number of slaves in the world have been provided. According to a broad definition of slavery used by Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves (FTS), an advocacy group linked with Anti-Slavery International, there were 27 million people in slavery in 1999, spread all over the world. In 2005, the International Labour Organization provided an estimate of 12.3 million forced labourers in the world. Siddharth Kara has also provided an estimate of 28.4 million slaves at the end of 2006 divided into the following three categories: bonded labour/debt bondage (18.1 million), forced labour (7.6 million), and trafficked slaves (2.7 million). Kara provides a dynamic model to calculate the number of slaves in the world each year, with an estimated 29.2 million at the end of 2009.
The Middle East Quarterly reports that slavery is still endemic in Sudan. In June and July 2007, 550 people who had been enslaved by brick manufacturers in Shanxi and Henan were freed by the Chinese government. Among those rescued were 69 children.In response, the Chinese government assembled a force of 35,000 police to check northern Chinese brick kilns for slaves, sent dozens of kiln supervisors to prison, punished 95 officials in Shanxi province for dereliction of duty, and sentenced one kiln foreman to death for killing an enslaved worker. In 2008, the Nepalese government abolished the Haliya system of forced labour, freeing about 20,000 people.An estimated 40 million people in India, most of them Dalits or "untouchables", are bonded workers, working in slave-like conditions in order to pay off debts.Though slavery was officially abolished in China in 1910, the practice continues unofficially in some regions of the country. In Brazil more than 5,000 slaves were rescued by authorities in 2008 as part of a government initiative to eradicate slavery. In Mauritania, the last country to abolish slavery (in 1981), it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved with many used as bonded labour. Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007. In Niger, slavery is also a current phenomenon. A Nigerien study has found that more than 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the population. Many pygmies in the Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo belong from birth to Bantus in a system of slavery. Some tribal sheiks in Iraq still keep blacks, called Abd, which means servant or slave in Arabic, as slaves.Child slavery has commonly been used in the production of cash crops and mining. According to the U.S. Department of State, more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in "the worst forms of child labor" in 2002. Poverty has forced at least 225,000 Haitian children to work as restavecs (unpaid household servants); the United Nations considers this to be a modern-day form of slavery.
Trafficking in human beings (also called human trafficking) is one method of obtaining slaves. Victims are typically recruited through deceit or trickery (such as a false job offer, false migration offer, or false marriage offer), sale by family members, recruitment by former slaves, or outright abduction. Victims are forced into a "debt slavery" situation by coercion, deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat, physical force, debt bondage or even force-feeding with drugs of abuse to control their victims. "Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors," reports the U.S. Department of State in a 2008 study.
While the majority of trafficking victims are women, and sometimes children, who are forced into prostitution (in which case the practice is called sex trafficking), victims also include men, women and children who are forced into manual labour. Due to the illegal nature of human trafficking, its exact extent is unknown. A U.S. Government report published in 2005, estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year. This figure does not include those who are trafficked internally. Another research effort revealed that between 1.5 million and 1.8 million individuals are trafficked either internally or internationally each year, 500,000 to 600,000 of whom are sex trafficking victims.
Socialists view total and immediate wage dependence as a form of slavery - wage-slavery. Cicero wrote "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves."
According to Friedrich Engels:"The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence."
Heather A. O’Connell finds that the higher the percentage of a county’s population who were slaves in 1860s, the worse the poverty of black residents in 2000, 140 years later. The extent of slavery in a county in 1860 — although it is not as important in 2000 as, say, the industrial make-up or the size of the black population — partially accounts for that county’s black-white gap in poverty today (mainly because counties with strong slavery pasts tend to have elevated rates of black poverty now).
ReplyDeleteOne study found that (controlling for virtually every entangling factor imaginable), law enforcement officials in counties that had a history of many lynchings back between 1880 and 1930 were in 2000 less likely to prosecute anti-black hate crimes than were officials in counties with lesser histories of lynchings. High lynching rates a century earlier also predicted rates of black-on-black and white-on-black homicides at the end the twentieth century.
O’Connell and other scholars say that communities and regions have local cultures that get passed on from decade to decade even as circumstances change and even as people move in and out. In this case, a tradition of racial repression, a strong caste system, was passed on in some places from slavery days through the Jim Crow era and even into our times.
A classic study conducted in the 1930s – about halfway in time between slavery and the 2000 economy — illustrated how that tradition of racial control was passed on. In Caste and Class in a Southern Town, psychologist John Dollard described the depth and rigidity of race relations in Indianola, Mississippi, where everyone knew their place. For “Negroes,” that place was off the sidewalk to let whites pass.
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/05/31/slaverys-heavy-hand/
I would love to learn more about this but I do not know where to find any more research. If you would give me more infromation please email me at jessiepossum@yahoo.com
ReplyDeletethank you.