21st century slavery:
23 March 2009
Throughout the world's darkest history we find entire civilizations built on the backs of slaves, and the modern ages reveal forced labor feats that rival the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Bloody human hands have hacked out thousands of kilometers of sea and river canals, railway lines, and highways as global industrial empires were built at the price of human bondage.
Today, the face of 21st century slavery has changed a little. The numbers and profits have increased, as well as the clandestine methods of human trafficking. According to the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation, human trafficking alone generates a staggering $9.5 billion in yearly revenues worldwide. The International Labor Office estimates that there are more slaves today than any other time in human history. Worldwide estimates are that 27 million men, women, and children, are in slavery today, at any given time, and exponentially growing.
The international slave trade reaches into every country around the world, it includes the old fashioned buying, selling and owning of humans as well as many forms of sexual exploitation and "bonded" labor. In the so called advanced countries, the largest category is sex slavery, which is linked to legalized or tolerated prostitution. In the Near East, the largest category is domestic servitude slavery, fed by a massive migration of young women from South Asia. On the Indian subcontinent, the largest category is bonded labor slavery of the lowest castes in rice mills, carpet factories and brick kilns. In Africa and Sri Lanka, the largest category is child soldier slavery.
Over the past decade, trafficking in human beings has reached epidemic proportions. The search for work abroad has been fueled by economic disparity, high unemployment and the disruption of traditional livelihoods. Traffickers face few risks and can earn huge profits by taking advantage of large numbers of potential immigrants. Trafficking in human beings is a crime in which victims are moved from poor environments to more affluent ones, with the profits flowing in the opposite direction, a pattern often repeated at the domestic, regional and global levels. It is believed to be growing fastest in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
In the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has become the target of a new global crime threat from criminal organizations and criminal activities that have poured forth over the borders of Russia and other former Soviet republics. The nature and variety of the crimes being committed seem unlimited, trafficking in women and children, drugs, arms trafficking, stolen automobiles, and money laundering are among the most prevalent. Russian organized crime is unique in the degree to which it is embedded in the post Soviet political system.
At the same time, it has certain features in common with such other well known varieties of organized crime as the Italian Mafia. The latter has a complicated history that includes both cooperation and conflict with the Italian state. Much more than was ever the case with the Italian Mafia, however, Russian organized crime is uniquely a descendant of the Soviet state.
Trafficking is almost always a form of organized crime and Russia is one of those unfortunate countries that has the receptive environment in which organized crime thrives. Organized crime is deeply rooted in the 400 year history of Russia's peculiar administrative bureaucracy, but it was especially shaped into its current form during the seven decades of Soviet hegemony that ended in 1991. This ancestry helps to explain the pervasiveness of organized crime in today's Russia and its close merger with the political system. Organized crime in Russia is an institutionalized part of the political and economic environment.
How people are attracted, recruited and exploited is not a mystery. The global economy has lifted many of the world's workers into the middle class. But it has also widened the gulf between the rich and the poor, particularly in Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Southeast Asia and India. Regions that suffer flooding or desertification, the destruction of forests and natural disasters create desperate migrants willing go anywhere to survive. With the collapse of communism, the transition to market economies has turned millions into casualties of rapid economic change.
In the past slavery meant one person legally owning another person. Today there is no place in the world that allows legal ownership of human beings. In many cases, however, non ownership turns out to be in the interest of the slaveholder, who now enjoys all of the benefits of slavery without any responsibilities. Thus, modern slavery is not typically chattel slavery, where a person is born, captured, or sold into permanent servitude. It is debt slavery that is most common today. A person pledges to work against a loan of money, but the length and nature of the work are not defined and the loan may never get paid off, the debt sometimes passed down for generations.
Government corruption, and often collusion, plus the threefold increase in the world's population since World War II, have led to literally a glut in potential slaves. Slaves have simply become so cheap that they are not seen as a capital investment.
In this way the new slavery mimics the world economy in a shift away from ownership and fixed asset management. The new slavery simply appropriates the economic value of individuals while keeping them under control, but without asserting ownership or accepting responsibility for their survival.Although the new slavery evokes universal condemnation, the tangle of current international and domestic laws and overlapping jurisdictions makes it difficult to prosecute slave runners, even when they are identified. Most traffickers receive light sentences. A USA federal law that forbids any "sale into involuntary servitude" carries a maximum penalty of only 10 years in prison.
Ultimately, the problems created by the global phenomena, such as migration and trafficking, require a global solution. And in an age that has been marked by a huge upsurge of rhetoric about human rights, a global solution must match this with implementation and with accountability. Because as this economic crisis deepens, so shall the pool of potential victims swell.
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