Recent stories of foreclosures and widespread personal bankruptcy are heartbreaking, but the deep recession has dealt an even harsher blow to a hidden population in America: across the country, shelters report staggering growth in the number of victims of human trafficking. Here in Los Angeles for example, the Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), has seen a 200% increase in the number of trafficking victims. To be clear, trafficking victims are those forced to work for no pay beyond subsistence. They are held under threat of violence, coerced through fraud, and the women and children are often subjugated further through sexual abuse. They are slaves.
Today, there are more slaves worldwide than at any point in human history, and that number is growing at an alarming rate. In February, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that, despite hundreds of new antislavery laws across the globe, widespread impunity for traffickers remains, and increasing numbers are entering slavery. Their frequently illegal status—and always illegal bondage—make slaves impossible to count with precision. But the U.S. government estimates that up to 17,000 are enslaved in America every year. The State Department holds that as many as 800,000 are trafficked across international borders annually, largely into commercial sexual slavery. But the vast majority of slaves worldwide are held in some form of collateralized, hereditary debt bondage, a euphemism for a monstrous crime that renders as many as 20 million South Asians de facto chattel of masters whose only claim to their labor is a debt, often miniscule, often initiated in a previous generation.
The numbers can be numbing, which is why, in five years of travel on five continents, I sought out slaves, traffickers and abolitionists, to collect some of the human stories behind the statistics. I found slavery chillingly close. Five hours from my Brooklyn apartment, in broad daylight on the street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, I was offered ten-year-old girl for domestic and sexual slavery. The asking price was $100; a quick negotiation dropped the cost of the girl to $50. I never paid for human life in Haiti or anywhere else; to purchase slaves’ freedom, shelter operators told me, would only bolster a trade in human misery.
But as Thoreau wrote about slavery and the rumbling disunion in 1861, two days before the first shots of the Civil War: “As long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis.” Knowledge of the reality and extent of modern-day slavery is its own imperative, and abolition is a collective pledge. Encouragingly, President Obama promised during the campaign to make fighting human trafficking “a top priority.” Thus far, his appointments have included a number of individuals who have owned the antislavery issue. Last week, the president nominated Melanne Verveer, most recently the co-founder and chairman of the board of Vital Voices, an organization doing effective antislavery work worldwide, to be his ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. Verveer’s former and current boss, Hillary Clinton, was deeply affected by meeting an HIV-positive sex slave during a trip to Thailand in 1994. Together, if they can turn passion in to policy, they will build on the Bush administration’s well-meaning but underfunded and inconsistent efforts to cajole foreign governments to abolish slavery.
Now, more than ever, abolitionists need our help. On my Web site, I link to two of the best organizations doing worldwide antislavery work. Both offer direct ways of becoming an abolitionist; others include Verveer’s former organization Vital Voices; CAST; and the Somaly Mom Foundation, a fundraiser for which I’ll be speaking at tomorrow night at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan.
—E. Benjamin Skinner
Tags: Benjamin Skinner, Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking, Contemporary Slavery, Fighting Human Trafficking