MODERN SLAVERY

As a Briton, I take no exception to your mentioning this country's modern slavery problem. Also, as you say, Al Jazeera is a reputable news source.

The problem is by no means confined the the UK and USA: one can find reports from all over the world - Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million to 29 million.

Modern slavery is a multibillion-dollar industry with estimates of up to $35 billion generated annually. The Global Slavery Index 2013 states that 10 nations account for 76 percent of the world's enslaved:

India 14 million (over 1% of the population)
China 2.9 million
Pakistan 2.1 million
Nigeria 701,000
Ethiopia 651,000
Russia 516,000
Thailand 473,000
Congo 462,000
Myanmar 384,000
Bangladesh 343,000

Slavery also exists on a smaller scale in advanced democratic nations, for example the UK where Home Office estimates suggest 10,000 to 13,000 victims. This includes, forced work of various kinds, such as forced prostitution. The UK has recently made an attempt to combat modern slavery via the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Large commercial organisations are now required to publish a slavery and human trafficking statement in regard to their supply chains for each financial year. There have been prosecutions and recoveries of large sums of money from slaveowners. My worry about this is that the initiative does not go far enough, that not enough attention is paid to victim protection. President Barack Obama proclaimed January 2016 as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.

Thanks for the additional information, Boss. This:



. . . at least, is encouraging. It may not go far enough, but first steps are important. I read a very disturbing piece in The New York Times several years ago about the importation of slaves from China into the United States. They were brought in on container ships, and those who survived (many didn't) were put into barrack-like tenement housing, and worked 12 to 14 hours a day to pay off the fees they had been charged to come here--and this was in major urban centers such as New York or Los Angeles. It is not much different than the scams with which slavery was first introduced into the new world. People, often functionally illiterate, would sign a contract, and upon arrival, be put to work to pay off their indenture--which, of course, they would never accomplish. Eventually, slavery was simply institutionalized. When Wilberforce and the evangelicals succeeded in ostensibly ending the slave trade, West Indian planters just replaced African slaves with coolies from India. The transcontinental railroad in the United Stares was, effectively, build with the slave labor of Chinese coolies, imported in the same manner by Chinese agents in Macao or Hong Kong--and this as the country was ratifying the amendment to the constitution which outlawed slavery.

When i've discussed this with people, the most common reaction is a phony veneer of sophisticated cynicism--the appeal to common practice fallacy. "Everybody does it--it's always been that way."

It's true. Left unchecked, greed will always seek to exploit.

To quote my grandmother: "If everybody jumped off a building, i suppose you'd have to, too." I'm glad to think that we live in a time when these evils are tackled, but it will need to be dealt with in every generation--because that greed of which you wrote doesn't go away.

I believe that greed exists without slavery. And, slavery can exist without great wealth being accumulated. Actually, not everyone that participates in a slave trade is getting rich. There must be many low level jobs for the hangars on. So my point is that those that participate in this type of activity must just have a moral orientation that goes back to an earlier era, when it was ubiquitous in many societies. So, a culture that trivializes women, or certain demographics can have people participating in a slave trade. The emphasis on greed just sounds too pat an answer, more for a class in economics? By the way, in societies where greedy profit was verboten, some real slave situations have existed. Anyone hear of a gulag?

The following is from theguardian:

The global slavery index is based on flawed data – why does no one say so?
The anti-trafficking community has remained uncritical of Walk Free’s methodology, yet poor information often leads to damaging decisions

In the 20 years I have been working in the field of anti-trafficking, it has moved from the margins to the mainstream. New laws have been adopted; new institutions established; hundreds of millions of dollars spent to support prosecutions, victim protection and prevention. Today, trafficking is the focus of a major social movement that, according to the publicity of its self-proclaimed leaders, is uniting millions of individuals against the scourge of “modern slavery”.

A major game-changer has been the emergence of the philanthropist-founded NGO. Walk Free, established by the Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest in 2012 to “eliminate slavery in [Forrest’s] lifetime”, is the most prominent example.

As the Economist reports, Forrest consulted with Bill Gates, the original founder-funder, who advised that he needed to find a way to quantify the problem because “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist”. This led directly to the global slavery index (pdf), which ranks countries based on the prevalence of slavery. The first index was released in 2013 and the second – which measures vulnerability to slavery and government responses as well as prevalence – in November 2014.

One of the great frustrations of the anti-trafficking field has been the absence of hard data. We know that millions of people in all parts of the world are trapped in situations of exploitation. But human exploitation takes many different forms, occurs largely among hidden populations, and is notoriously difficult to find, let alone quantify in any meaningful way. That is a problem for those working to address such exploitation because pushing for change becomes difficult, if not impossible.

This creates an almost irresistible temptation to make a silk purse out of a very tattered sow’s ear: to harness the power of statistics and numbers to create an illusion of concreteness that masks the slipperiness of what we are counting.

It is understandable that Walk Free, a new player seeking to make its mark in a highly competitive environment, has succumbed to that temptation. Less forgivable are the weaknesses that mar the substance of the index and compromise its findings: a mysterious, inconsistently applied methodology, a raft of unverified assumptions and multiple, critical errors of fact and logic. Even the basic unit of measurement of “modern slavery” is flawed: the definition is self-created and, bizarrely, changes from one year to the next.

The methodology used (pdf) to establish the prevalence of slavery is extremely crude: random sample surveys in seven countries and derived data involving three others, supplemented by existing survey data of highly variable quality from a further nine.

Even the well-informed reader will struggle to understand how the fragile sample data from 19 countries (10 from Walk Free data, nine from secondary sources) was so confidently extrapolated across to the remaining 148. The division of surveyed countries into six “clusters” for extrapolation purposes has some very peculiar results: Egypt classified as “high income” for example, and Hong Kong falling behind China on the same measure.

At some points, application of the extrapolation “protocol” verges on the ludicrous. For example, Thailand and Brunei are claimed to have the same proportion of their populations enslaved – a risible assertion to anyone with even cursory knowledge of the situation in those two countries. Incredibly, the number of slaves in South Africa is calculated on the basis that this country is 70% like western Europe (because “historically, South Africa has been culturally similar to western, democratic nations”) and 30% like Africa. After noting that little reliable information exists on slavery in China, the index’s authors declare that they are comfortable with China being considered pretty much the same as other east Asian nations like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Despite these and many other egregious flaws, critical examination of the index has been oddly muted. One wonders whether the avalanche of statistical and quantitative research jargon is deliberately intended to have a confusing and silencing effect.

Other possible explanations for the lack of critical engagement are even more worrying, because they concern the rather grubby realities of power and funding. The leadership of Walk Free appears to enjoy unfettered access to the global elite; securing glowing endorsements of the index from Clinton to Blair, Bono to Branson. For the mainstream media and pretty much everyone else, this was more than good enough. With marginal exceptions, coverage of the index has been uniformly fawning and superficial.

The resounding silence from the anti-trafficking community and its failure to engage critically with the index is also disquieting and deserves scrutiny. Walk Free, along with its various subsidiaries, has come to the big table with seductive promises of abundant funding at a time when previously generous government donors are flagging. A number of international organisations, such as the International Labour Organisation – now a partner (pdf) in Walk Free’s Global Slavery Fund – and individual experts in a strong position to critically evaluate the index have been effectively co-opted through partnerships and advisory roles.

Why does all of this matter? The most immediate problem is that poor information, presented as fact, contributes to poor decision making and sometimes highly damaging, unintended outcomes.

Another grave concern is the distorting effect that organisations such as Walk Free and tools like the index are having on how we understand and respond to human exploitation. Put simply, by failing to challenge or even gently interrogate the underlying structures that perpetuate and reward exploitation, the index embodies and perpetuates a comforting belief that slavery is all about bad individuals doing bad things to good people. At the root of this belief is an unshakable faith in us being able to eliminate slavery without fundamentally changing how our societies and economies are organised; without a radical shift in the distribution and exercise of political and economic power, including a global economy that depends on the exploitation of poor people’s labour to maintain growth and a global migration system that entrenches vulnerability. In the words of Peter Buffett, this is not much more than “philanthropic colonialism”, the advocacy and giving that “just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place”.

Only the shortsighted would oppose an injection of energy, commitment and resources into the battle against slavery. If Walk Free proves capable of producing reliable and replicable data through the consistent application of quality methodology, then this will be a valuable contribution to improving understanding of how exploitation happens and why. But that is not happening yet. And, even while we collectively obsesses over numbers and data points, we would do well to consider how far we are all willing to go in attacking the structures that preserve and nourish a world built solidly on the foundations of human exploitation.