Breaking Bounds Of Modern Slavery
Breaking Bounds Of Modern Slavery
Inter-continental slavery which was abolished in the 19th century certainly was marked the end of the slave trade but the beginning of modern slavery. It is dreadful to know that women are forced into prostitution; children and adults are forced to work in the agricultural sector, domestic work or factories, and sweatshops producing goods for global supply chains.
In some cases, the entire families are forced to work for nothing to pay off generational debts, and very young girls are forced to marry older men. These illegal practices still blight the contemporary world. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) around 21 million men, women, and children around the world are in a form of slavery.
Nowadays, slavery cannot be recognized from a distance because the perpetrators do it in hiding. But none-the-less there are many different characteristics that distinguish slavery from other human rights violations, only one needs to be present for slavery to exist.
Someone is in slavery if they are forced to work through mental or physical threat. Also, if anyone is owned or controlled by an ’employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or dehumanized and treated like a commodity or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement, that person is certainly a slave.
In Africa, marrying off young girls to older men is still widely practiced and is a form of slavery, violation, and abuse. Lazy parents hide under the pretense of cementing family ties to force their children to work for them given that these very old men are rich and would support the families financially.
Other victims are pulled out of school and sent to urban areas to serve domestic and commercial purposes. They work extra hard in the rain, sun, and even at night but at the end of the month, their wages are forwarded to their parents while their basic requirements are not being met. These children are deprived of the right to education and they lack basic needs like good clothes and even rest and leisure.
Another very rampant phenomenon is the ‘bush falling’ syndrome in search of greener pasture. It is shocking to know that young girls have been granted visas to some countries like Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia to work but upon arrival, they are being locked up in the homes of their employers. These girls work under inhuman conditions and even lack of time to rest.
Some of these girls and forced into prostitution meanwhile their masters collect their earnings while others are assaulted and sexually abused by their so-called masters. Relatives of such victims have received several and a countless number of phone calls and text messages from the victims crying and begging for help.
Ironically, the news of such oppression does not frighten other young people who still fight to go to such places and witness for themselves. In a report published by the nonpartisan Urban Institute and Northeastern University, it states that foreign workers who are lured by false promises of good jobs in America, soon find themselves enslaved in plain sight as victims of labor trafficking.