Slavery Today

Jesus fucking Christ, this graphic is stunning. The number, an estimated 27,000,000 enslaved people worldwide, is just staggering. Take the top 15 of the most highly populated cities in the United States, add them together, and you'd have a rough estimate of how many people are in bondage across the globe.

• A slave is imported into the U.S. every 30 minutes.
  
• 14,500-17,500 are brought in annually.
• The average cost of a slave is $90. Ninety dollars.
• 300,000 children living in bondage in Haiti alone.
• 24,000,000 people are currently enslaved in Asia
  

This article, where the graphic originated, boggles my fucking mind. These numbers are what corporate wet dreams are made of.

From E. Benjamin Skinner on the Bush administration's focus on the sex-slave trade and prostitution, and the pressure they have put on the rest of the world to make it the main focus:

Many feel that sex slavery is particularly revolting—and it is. I saw it firsthand. In a Bucharest brothel, I was offered a mentally handicapped suicidal girl in exchange for a used car. But for every woman or child enslaved in commercial sex, there are some 15 men, women, and children enslaved in other fields, such as domestic work or agricultural labor.

Recent studies show that locking up pimps and traffickers has had a negligible effect on the aggregate rates of bondage. And though eradicating prostitution may be a just cause, Western policies based on the idea that all prostitutes are slaves and all slaves are prostitutes belittles the suffering of all victims. It’s an approach that threatens to put most governments on the wrong side of history.

...

Every single man, woman, and child in Lohagara Dhal is a slave. But, in theory at least, Garg neither bought nor owns them. They are working off debts, which, for many, started at less than $10. But interest accrues at over 100 percent annually here. Most of the debts span at least two generations, though they have no legal standing under modern Indian law. They are a fiction that Garg constructs through fraud and maintains through violence. The seed of Gonoo’s slavery, for instance, was a loan of 62 cents. In 1958 his grandfather borrowed that amount from the owner of a farm where he worked. Three generations and three slave masters later, Gonoo’s family remains in bondage.

...

Any lasting solutions to human trafficking must involve prevention programs in at-risk source countries. Absent an effective international body like the United Nations, such an effort will require pressure from the United States. So far, the United States has been willing to criticize some nations’ records, but it has resisted doing so where it matters most, particularly in India. India abolished debt bondage in 1976, but with poor enforcement of the law, millions remain in bondage. In 2006 and 2007, the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons pressed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to repudiate India’s intransigence personally. In each instance, she did not.

...

Until governments define slavery in appropriately concise terms, prosecute the crime aggressively in all its forms, and encourage groups that empower slaves to free themselves, however, millions more will remain in bondage. And our collective promise of abolition will continue to mean nothing at all.

For a little more hope and information on the fight against global bondage I suggest reading the whole article.
(via Sullivan)

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