Abstract
Slavery has been and continues to be one of the great evils in human life. Nearly all societies on earth at one time or another have participated in this vicious assault on human dignity. But the face of slavery has changed over the decades. The old form of slavery, the legal ownership of people (chattel slavery), is now (since Mauritania in 1980) universally outlawed. However, slavery in its new forms thrives. This is the disposable slave, who is coerced into slavery but not owned, and who is abandoned when no longer useful. Currently, abolitionist organizations and researchers estimate that there are between 27 and 40 million slaves.
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Notes
- 1.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982). The amount of research that went into this study is staggering.
- 2.
Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004), Understanding Global Slavery: A Reader (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005).
- 3.
Siddharth Kara, Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
- 4.
Ibid., 57.
- 5.
Ibid., 6, 8. He correctly states that “trafficking” is movement toward enslavement and not slavery per se.
- 6.
Patterson, 337.
- 7.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 14, 28. Cited by Patterson, 339.
- 8.
Bales, Understanding Global Slavery, 25.
- 9.
Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997).
- 10.
Understanding Global Slavery, 26.
- 11.
Ibid., 27 and again on 32.
- 12.
Bales states that “Researching slavery and meeting slaveholders in many countries has convinced me that we must explore (though not accept) their own self-definition. Exploring this is an important part of the study of slavery, but has no effect on the evil of their actions.” Bales does not discuss self-deception. Slaveholders may mask or hide the truth from themselves (their injustice) by appeals to economics or their fatherly relation to their slaves. Understanding Global Slavery, 24–25.
- 13.
Ibid., 38–39.
- 14.
Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: “Individuals at sea and inhabitants of coastal towns were ceaselessly ravaged by pirates. Caesar being perhaps the most celebrated victim,” 115.
- 15.
Bales is the founder and director of an organization, Free the Slaves, headquartered in Washington, DC.
- 16.
Leviticus 25–44. Cited by Patterson, 40.
- 17.
Quoted by Patterson, 3–4.
- 18.
Workers Socialist Web Site, T. Kala, “Exploitation of Child Labourers in India,” June 8, 2006. wsws.org.
- 19.
Disposable People, 195.
- 20.
Ibid., 202.
- 21.
Ibid., 203.
- 22.
Ibid., 201.
- 23.
Ibid., 21.
- 24.
Law, Crime and Justice, Lindsay Haskell, “Modern-Day Slavery: Haiti’s Restavec System,” November 22, 2010. suite101.com.
- 25.
U. S. State Department, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Amy O’Neill Richard, “International Trafficking of Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime,” April, 2000. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-ofintelligence/trafficking.pdf.
- 26.
Ibid., 22–23.
- 27.
Disposable People, 2–3. See below for the idea of a universal and rigorously vetted child’s travel card.
- 28.
Bales’ chapter on Thai sex slavery is in Disposable People, Op. cit., 34–79. For attempts to rethink portions of Buddhism and eliminate doctrinal sexism see the writings of Rita M. Gross. Her latest article is “A Vision of Buddhist Women’s Future,” in Women and the Futures of World Religions, edited by Avind Sharma (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, forthcoming).
See also “Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW),” Donna M. Hughes et al., The Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation, “Thailand.” Not dated. catwinternational.org.
- 29.
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), Donna M. Hughes et al., The Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation, “Thailand.” Not dated. catwinternational.org.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Disposable People, 59.
- 32.
Disposable People, 21–22 and 199–200.
- 33.
Brian O’Keefe, “Inside Big Chocolate’s Child Labor Problem,” Fortune 500, March 1, 2016. http://fortune.com/bigchocolate-child-labor/.
- 34.
Cited by O’Keefe, “Inside Big Chocolate’s Child Labor Problem.”
- 35.
“BBC Investigation, “The Bitter Taste of Slavery.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2hi/africa/946952stm; John Robbins, “Is there Slavery in Your Chocolate?” https://johnrobbins.info/is-there-slavery-in-your-chocolate/.
- 36.
“Dominican Republic: Modern Sugarcane Slavery,” The Outpost, January 26, 2014. http://www.wilderutopia.com/international/humanity/dominican-republic-modern-day-sugarcane-slavery/.
- 37.
“Slaves in Paradise,” Dominican Watchdog, April, 2011. http://www.dominicanwatchdog.org/page-Stop_Sugar_Purchases_from_the_Dominican_Republic-96k.
- 38.
Richard Marosi, “Hardship on Mexico’s Farms, a Bounty for U. S. Tables,” The Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2014. http://graphics.latimes.com/product-of-mexico-camps/.
- 39.
Sidharth Kara, Modern Slavery, 252. Adversely affected his mind and overall health.
- 40.
Ibid., 225.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Ibid., 228–229.
- 43.
Ibid., 230.
- 44.
C. Robert Gibson, “How the iPhone Helps Perpetuate Modern-Day Slavery,” Huffington Post, The BLOG, September 11, 2014.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
“Exhaustion Has No Limit at Apple Supplier in China,” Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, December 22, 2014. http://www.globallabourrights.org/reports/exhaustion-has-no-limit-at-apple-supplier-in-china.
- 47.
Stanford Advanced Materials, “What Is Cobalt Used in Everyday Life,” November 1, 2017. http://www.samaterials.com/content/193-what-is-cobalt-used-in-everyday-life.
- 48.
Annie Kelly, “Children as Young as Seven Mining Cobalt Used in Smartphones, Says Amnesty,” January 18, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/children-as-young-as-seven-ining-cobalt-for-use-in-smartphones-says-amnesty.
- 49.
The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, “Toys of Misery Made in Abusive Chinese Sweatshops,” December 11, 2008. http://www.globallabourrights.org/reports/toys-of-misery-made-in-abusive-chinese-sweatshops.
- 50.
Disposable People, 230–231.
- 51.
Slaveholders and traffickers risk “on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for life.” http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/enacted.
- 52.
Summarized by UNICEF’s “FACT SHEET” at: https://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf.
- 53.
The children traveling with their parents have their own passport. The child card will contain more information than a passport, and its acquisition will involve rigorous vetting.
- 54.
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Child Adoption: Trends and Policies” (New York, 2009). http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/policy/child-adoption.pdf.
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DeArmey, M.H. (2020). Slavery I. In: Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42978-2_9
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