Modern Slavery

After thousands of years of suffering through slavery, abolition had appeared to be the answer to this issue, yet it still exists and continues to grow all around the world. More people are enslaved today than at any other time before in the history of humanity despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human right now prohibits it. The research of Bales (2008) and “Free The Slaves” claim that there are at least 27 million slaves in the world today. Modern slavery takes different forms and affects people of all ages and sex. During the last years the term “human trafficking” has often been used to hide slavery from society. Most commonly, men are forced to work, women are bonded into prostitution, and children are trafficked in different countries and/or used as soldiers. Bales (2008) defines slavery,” as a social and economic relationship in which a person is controlled through violence or the threat of violence, is paid nothing, and is economically exploited.” This essay will explain the actual context of slavery; more particularly sex trafficking, and focuses on the solutions to end to this crime.

The existence of modern slavery can be explained by the growth of the population and the globalisation. This important growth of population had occurred after the World War II and mostly in the developing world, where slavery is the most spread (Batstone, 2007). Another important explanation of this slavery has been the rapid change in the global economy that increased the poverty and vulnerability of the population in the developing world. Slavery is based on a simple economic principle: the best way to maximise profits is to minimise the cost. The demand for cheap products means that an invisible workforce of men, women and children are working in very bad conditions for very low wages. (Batstone, 2007)

The situation of slavery is critical as it can be seen with its current status. Bales talk about twenty-seven million people enslaved today; this is more than all the people taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. The number of slaves in the world is also greater than the population of Australia today (Bales, 1999). Moreover, this number is still growing and this even in developed country as the United States where the government estimates that there is about 17,500 new slaves trafficked into their borders every year (US Department of States, 2004). Today tens of thousands of people live in real slavery in America: people who have to work against their will under violence and without being paid. They cannot walk away; attempting to escape from their masters is dangerous for the modern slaves because they risk personal violence or reprisals against their families. They don’t have control of their life anymore and are exploited and brutalised similar to slavery that occurred in the past.

The value of a slave has decreased. Free the Slaves evaluates the average cost of a slave today to ninety