Human Bondage

There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves. - E Benjamin Skinner -

In some cases, one could arrive in Haiti, ask to buy a child, negotiate a price and agree to pay $50 for a child slave. Is it for sex? work? Doesn't matter, they don't ask many questions. And the author makes the point, this is not indentured servitude or so called "slave wages" this is entirely something else - slavery. And it exists in the United States everyday. Though, rhetoric is thrown at the problem almost nothing is being done about it.

Between 2000 and 2006, the U.S. Justice Department increased human trafficking prosecutions from 3 to 32, and convictions from 10 to 98. By 2006, 27 states had passed anti trafficking laws. Yet, during the same period, the United States liberated less than 2 percent of its own modern-day slaves. As many as 17,500 new slaves continue to enter bondage in the United States every year.

The author makes the point that yes, sex slavery is bad and is revolting on its face, but it only focusing on this issue, as the United States has done does nothing to curb the ever growing problem.

Read this account of a slave town in India: Gonoo lives in Lohagara Dhal, a forgotten corner of Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state that contains 8 percent of the world’s poor. I met him one evening in December 2005 as he walked with two dozen other laborers in tattered and filthy clothes. Behind them was the quarry. In that pit, Gonoo, a member of the historically outcast Kol tribe, worked with his family 14 hours a day. His tools were simple, a rough-hewn hammer and an iron pike. His hands were covered in calluses, his fingertips worn away.

Gonoo’s master is a tall, stout, surly contractor named Ramesh Garg. Garg is one of the wealthiest men in Shankargarh, the nearest sizable town, founded under the British Raj but now run by nearly 600 quarry contractors. He makes his money by enslaving entire families forced to work for no pay beyond alcohol, grain, and bare subsistence expenses. Their only use for Garg is to turn rock into silica sand, for colored glass, or gravel, for roads or ballast. Slavery scholar Kevin Bales estimates that a slave in the 19th-century American South had to work 20 years to recoup his or her purchase price. Gonoo and the other slaves earn a profit for Garg in two years.

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 slavemasters later, Gonoo’s family remains in bondage.

There are groups fighting this bondage, but until governments, mainly the US and the United Nations do something the resistance will be a colossal failure. The United Nations whose founding principles were to fight bondage in all its forms has been absent. They have done little to hold any of its member states accountable for widespread slavery.

The United States has been equally absent. They have been willing to criticize nations, but it has resisted doing so with India. Debt bondage has been illegal in India since 1976, but without local laws to combat and enforce "millions remain in bondage." The Secretary of State's own office to monitor human trafficking has urged Condoleeza Rice to "repudiate India's intransigence" in both 2006 and 2007, but in each case she has not.

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