Human Trafficking: Slavery Still Exists And It’s Getting Worse

Slavery And Human Trafficking Still Exists, And In Many Ways It’s Far Worse Than We’ve Ever Seen

Slavery has existed since the dawn of mankind, and for all of the historical victories won against those who have done the enslaving, it is still on the rise today. Often when we think of slavery, we flashback to the 16, 17, and 1800’s when millions of Africans were sold into slavery in the United States and in many other countries around the world. It has been more than 150 years since slavery has been abolished worldwide, so the thought that millions of men, women, and children would be subjected to such barbaric practices as being sold like an item on a Walmart shelf, being held in cells without reason, and being viciously mutilated for the personal gain of others seems far-fetched, right?

Astonishingly, the kind of enslavement that millions of Africans suffered through historically still exists today, and for many it is no less brutal. According to the Polaris Project, an organization fighting to end human trafficking, 3 out of every 1000 people worldwide are victims of enslavement. It is estimated that there are as many as 27 million people enslaved today. That is double the number of people taken from Africa during the three and a half centuries the trade thrived there, with about 800 thousand new victims sold across international borders each year. There are at least 17,000 victims of slavery brought into the United States annually who are forced into sexual acts and labor for nothing more than their subsistence.

How does this happen in today’s age?

There are many ways people become victims to slavery. Often it’s because they are promised work and a better life, only to find that they receive absolutely nothing from their captors when they reach their destination. Sometimes the victims own family sells them into slavery because they owe a debt. Others are lured by those who appear friendly but then exploit that individual’s trust for nefarious purposes. The reasons it happens go on and on.

“The parallels to the kinds of slavery we think of from the past and the kind of slavery today are striking,” Bradley Myles, CEO of the Polaris Project, wrote in a piece for CNN. “The control mechanisms used by the captors of so many Africans are the same tactics and stories we hear about daily from the people who reach out to us for help on the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline, which Polaris Project operates.”

The concept of putting a price tag on another human’s life is, what I believe to be, the ultimate for of evil. In a world where we consider ourselves so “advanced” and forward thinking, how do we let this kind of behavior continue, and why is it not front page news daily?

Where are the slaves coming from?

The simple answer is “virtually everywhere”. Unlike early America when plantations were filled with dark-skinned men, women and children stooped over cotton plants, gingerly pulling fluffy fiber from between hostile thorns, slaves today are not as easily recognizable. Those who currently buy and sell them have been forced underground.

In her book Slavery, photographer Lisa Kristine documented those enslaved across the globe, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Escorted by local representatives from Free the Slaves, she found children in the Himalayas lugging slabs of slate heavier than themselves down the mountains, via crude harnesses attached to their foreheads made from sticks, rope and torn cloth.

“At a brick kiln in Nepal, she photographed workers in 130-degree heat and choking dust, stacking 18 bricks on their head at a time and walking the loads to waiting trucks…She saw trafficked children in tattered shirts reeling in 1,000-pound fishing nets on the shore of Lake Volta in Ghana, freezing in the early dawn after all-night fishing expeditions.”

The very people the world should most protect — children and the disadvantaged — are often subjected to the worst forms of bondage. Nowhere is this more evident than in the satellite nations that splintered after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Citizens who had relied on government aid for over 50 years were forced to fend for themselves as corruption and greed replaced law and order.

According to Victor Malarek in his book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, the once-impenetrable Iron Curtain became overrun with organized crime syndicates, which realized that they could make a large fortune — with little consequences — selling girls from the region as slaves.

“With the social structure in disarray, families broke down. Children were abandoned in the street. Husbands sought solace in the bottle and alcoholism became an epidemic. Violence against women and children soared. And through it all, the women were left to pick up the pieces…Even young girls with no families yet of their own went searching for jobs to feed younger siblings and parents…With the stench of desperation in the air, they made perfect targets.”

More than 30 percent of all sex trafficking victims are Eastern European women. Throughout the past 20 years, 400,000 Moldovans, 400,000 Ukrainians, and 15,000 Bulgarians have been taken from their homelands. The numbers are difficult to determine, however, as less than 5 percent of victims ever find their way back home.

Pause for a moment. These women were daughters, mothers and sisters trying to provide for their families. Many were lured by promising jobs as waitresses, nannies, housekeepers and models, only to be seized by traffickers who brought them to countries where, in some cases, prostitution is legal. Throughout the infamous Red Light District in Amsterdam, the dialects of women sex workers reveal that they are not from the Netherlands, but from Moldova, Bulgaria, Russia and Ukraine, among others — with many brought under false pretenses.

In an effort to highlight this fact, the nonprofit Stop the Traffik organized a choreographed display at one of the Red Light District hot spots in which scantily clad women danced in the windows of a supposed brothel. At the end of the spectacle, a sign appeared that read: “Every year, thousands of women are promised a dance career in Western Europe. Sadly, they end up here.”

While men who had stopped to watch at first started dancing and videotaping the event on their cellphones, they walked away miffed after realizing they had been had — perhaps knowing their attitudes have played a part in such statistics.

“Germany and the Netherlands purport that [legalizing prostitution] is an ideal way to deal with trafficking. They maintain that legalization will better protect the rights of the women entering the trade — an argument that is nothing short of specious. The only tangible effect of such legalization is that the state effectively becomes another pimp, living off the avails of the women in prostitution through taxation, and reaping huge benefits from increased foreign sex tourism,” Mr. Malarek wrote.

He later stated: “Virtually every city, town and village in Eastern and Central Europe has seen some of its girls and women disappear. Incredibly, they weren’t lost to illness or war or to the tragedy of famine or natural disaster. On the contrary, they have become expendable pawns in the burgeoning business of money, lust and sex. What is most disturbing is that trafficking is a man-made disaster that can be prevented. Yet the world continues to ignore the plight of these women and girls.”

Well-off Western countries, such as Britain, are not immune to modern-day slavery. Consider the case of Mende Nazer: after being taken from her home in war-torn Sudan by marauders and shipped to Khartoum to work as a servant for a wealthy Arab family for eight years, she was sent to a suburban London brickstone home where she was physically and sexually abused as a domestic slave. And she was just one of 5,000 others being held against her will in Britain, according to the nonprofit organization Unseen (uk).

Even in the U.S., the treatment of modern-day slaves is often no less brutal than it was in the 1800s.

“I was involved in [sex] trafficking for more than six months,” a survivor recounted on the NY Anti-trafficking State Coalition website. “I compare that time to being held hostage in a timeless existence where my mind engaged itself in disassociation with my soul. This mental state was the only way in which I could keep any sanity. Repeatedly, I witnessed the beatings, rapes and murders of innocent women.”

In another instance, a 14-year-old foster child in a precarious family situation was forced into prostitution after a 24-year-old she met promised he would take care of her. Since she was so young, she did not realize she would become one of his pawns. He brought her to Cleveland, Ohio, where she thought she would meet his family, but instead he forced her into prostitution. When she did not make enough money, he beat her and broke her arm with a baseball bat. She escaped after a few years and now runs a house for victims of sex slavery.

Such stories are hard to believe. Slavery still occurring in the United States and Britain? Yet even in nations typically considered well-off, the threat of enslavement is just a few steps away.