by Roger, serving in Asia
13 November 2007

Diamonds, rugs, chocolate ... what do they have in common? The products you buy may have been manufactured by slaves, often children. The house down the street in your suburban neighborhood may actually be a brothel, with women and children locked in the basement. If you happen to live overseas, the child working in the home next door, who your local friends say is “a relative,” may in fact have been given or sold into domestic service. The government in a nation near you (Myanmar, China, Sudan) may be capturing civilians and forcing them to work in construction projects or to fight in the army. Right here, right now in our world, “people are enslaved by violence and held against their wills for exploitation."¹

You may ask, “Slavery here? Now?”

We all wish slavery went away after it was declared illegal in the era of William Wilberforce (subject of the recent film Amazing Grace) and in the American Civil War years that followed. Yet, in reality, what happened was that one form of it all but died out², only to have a different form evolve at an alarming rate in our own lifetime.

	Image courtesy of CARF Brazil

In the last 30 years since I was a first grader sitting safely in school in a quiet Kansas town, 30 million women and children in Asia alone were trafficked for sex, according to the Centre for International Crime Prevention.³

This is the reality I call “slavery here-and-now.” How can we understand this modern brand of slavery? How might Jesus want us to respond to it?

Consider the acronym “S.L.A.V.E.R.Y.”:

Statistics
Locations
Abolitionists
Value of Life / Vulnerability
Examination of trade patterns
Resources for Action
Yearnings

Statistics

Numbers can be a stark wake-up call: During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, around 13 million Africans were victims of a trafficking process that took them to the Americas and the Caribbean. That number does not include the many Africans who perished because of inhuman conditions aboard slave ships, revolt or choosing death rather than enslavement. Today, there are an estimated 27 million people enslaved worldwide. With anywhere from USD $9.5 billion to $32 billion annual revenue (depending on who you ask), the sale of people—currently third in the top criminal activities on the planet—may soon eclipse illegal drug and arms sales.⁴

Locations

	A Talibe boy, Dakar Senegal WEC International photo

“From everywhere to everywhere” has become a new buzzword in global movements of Christianity, but it could just as easily apply to modern slavery. “Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today,” explains David Batstone, “and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings. You may even find slavery in your own backyard.”⁵ The U.S. State Department estimates that over 50,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year.⁶

As the HBO film Human Trafficking depicts⁷, modern slave traders are ruthless but expert businesspeople, constantly shifting trafficking patterns both to avoid police or immigration interference and to access new pools of potential victims to garner the greatest profit. Nevertheless, there are some key “hot spots” of slavery in the world, as shown, for example, by Free the Slaves on their “World Slavery Map”. A sampling:

• Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal together are home to 20 million slaves—most of whom are bonded laborers trapped by small debts that can never be repaid due to endless fabricated costs by their “benefactors.”
• Japan is the top consumer of slave labor among wealthy nations, that “labor" often being prostitution of women trafficked into Japan under legal “entertainment visas.”
• Young educated women are lured from Eastern Europe by “friends” offering them “waitressing jobs” in Italy, then trafficked to brothels in Europe and the USA.
• West Africa continues to live with the pain of internal slavery, where “brokers buy and traffic children within and between Mauritania, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria ... for work in cocoa, coffee, cotton, fishery, [and] mines.”
• The recent film Blood Diamond highlighted the interconnected economies of the diamond trade and arms purchases for civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s—a pattern currently being repeated in the Congo, according to the March 2007 issue of Sojourners magazine.

Abolitionists

In his book Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade—and How We Can Fight It, David Batstone shares that as he began his research on current slavery worldwide, “I had steeled myself emotionally to end up in the depths of depression and despair.” He was delighted instead to find hope:

“I met a heroic ensemble of abolitionists who simply refuse to relent. I felt like I had gone back in time and had the great privilege of sharing a meal with a Harriet Tubman or a William Wilberforce or a Frederick Douglass ... [heroes who] simply refuse to accept a world in which one individual can be held as the property of another.” Batstone weaves true stories of people caught in various types of enslavement who then miraculously cross paths with these abolitionists, to find freedom and redemption.

Who are these abolitionists?

• A portly Italian priest who shelters eastern European trafficking victims and fearlessly confronts organized crime
• A Swiss entrepreneur who started a soy milk factory, clothing design company and culinary school/catering services in Cambodia to provide jobs for formerly-prostituted women.
• World Vision counselors in Uganda to whom the government sends any children who escape from the Lord’s Resistance Army, which kidnaps boys to fight and uses girls as sex slaves for officers⁸
• A Peruvian social worker who spontaneously began to shelter street kids in her office
• A pair of graduates from Brown University who created the Polaris Project to mobilize other students to stop slavery
• An African suburbanite in Virginia who recognized the signals that the “housemaid” in his neighbors’ home was actually an unwilling prisoner from his native Cameroon.

Given such variety, the next abolitionists could easily be you or me.

Value of Life/Vulnerability

While commodifying a human soul is evil in any context, modern slavery has brought the “value” of human life literally to a new low: In his book Disposable People, Kevin Bales notes that in contrast to a modern equivalent of the $40,000-50,000 that owners in the Americas paid for African slaves in the 1850’s and 1860’s, today a person can be sold in, say, Ivory Coast for just USD $30, or can become “indebted” in India for as little as USD $10.⁹

Commenting on this reality, Chris Heuertz of Word Made Flesh, whose members live incarnationally among street children and prostitutes, suggests that here we see the epitome of Babylon in Revelation 18:11-13, where cargoes are listed in order from those most valued by the world system—beginning with gold—to the least valued, with “the bodies and souls of men” listed last. Conversely, what the world values most is merely the pavement of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:21), where it is the people of every tribe and language who have the greatest “purchase value,” having been bought by the precious blood (1 Pet. 1:18-29) of the slain Lamb (Rev. 5:9).¹⁰

Predictably, it is the very poor of the world who are vulnerable to being enslaved, whether by deception or by sheer violence. Refugees of war, displaced and desperate, prove easy targets for traffickers. Some impoverished families knowingly sell their sons or daughters into sex slavery and receive a small fortune in return. Others are tricked into selling or giving away their children, thinking the child will receive an education or job or adoption in a rich nation. ¹¹

Examination of Trade Patterns

Kevin Bales outlines the differences between trans-Atlantic slavery of the 1800’s and current slavery:¹²

Old Forms of Slavery	New Forms of Slavery
Legal ownership asserted	Legal ownership avoided
Low profits	Very high profits
High purchase cost	Low purchase cost
Shortage of potential slaves	Surplus of potential slaves
Long-term relationship	Short-term relationship
Slaves maintained	Slaves disposable
Ethnic differences important	Ethnic differences less important

The new form of slavery is one of the dark by-products of globalization. Porous borders and communications technology make it easier and easier for slave traders to traffic human lives. People are bought and sold over the Internet on sites like eBay and Craig’s List. The unlimited pools of vulnerable people around the world are “easy pickings” for traffickers, making it convenient for them to throw slaves away when they become ill or unprofitable.

	Image courtesy of CARF Brazil

Tragically, our own lifestyles, linked to the world economic order, can fuel the demand for slaves, even without our meaning to do so. It is hard to admit that my seemingly innocent desires (“I want chocolate;” “I want the cheapest price”) can be part of a process that involves exploitation: Suppose the favorite candy bar I buy was made with chocolate bought wholesale by a large multinational corporation, who chose the cheapest price from an African supplier who relied on child slave labor in order to offer a competing rate.¹⁴ This challenges us to examine not only the patterns of the global slave trade, but also our own patterns of purchase and consumption

Resources for Action

Slavery is a reality that millions of people are currently experiencing. Here are ideas of what you can do to respond in your own “here” and “now”:

Read

• Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade—and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone.
• Archived copies of the Word Made Flesh publication “The Cry,” with many challenging articles from Christians who live among women and children who prostitute.
• http://www.asha.viva.org/trafficking.htm lists many resources for learning and acting.

Involve children

• Use “Education Pack Downloads” with teaching and group activities for children and youth from www.freetheslaves.net
• Moses: When Harriet Tubman led her people to freedom by Carole Boston Weatherford and Kadir Nelson, an award-winning children's picture book, depicts Tubman's spiritual formation in poetic, prayerful dialogue between Tubman and God. Tubman’s life shows us that, no matter how insignificant or powerless the world may see us, we can make a great difference by God’s power about the pressing evils of our day.

Study together with friends

• "Amazing Grace: Christians and the Global Slave Trade" is a discussion guide from the editors of Sojourners magazine. The USD $5 download fee includes permission to reprint up to 10 copies for use in a group study.

Support abolitionist agencies

• Evangelical groups like International Justice Mission have field operatives in many nations who work through the local political/legal systems to rescue slaves, prosecute traffickers, and secure restitution.
• www.theamazingchange.com has an excellent list of “Champion” agencies working in a variety of nations and includes ideas of what ordinary people can do about slavery

Evaluate what you buy, and from whom

• Avoid buying from companies with documented human rights abuses. Though all may not agree with every category listed, profiles of specific companies tracked according to social justice topics can be found for free at www.coopamerica.org/programs/rs/or by subscription at www.ethiscore.org.
• Fair Trade certifications provide buyers with alternative sources of goods that are guaranteed to be produced in just systems, such as through community development projects that empower, rather than exploit, the poor. A random sampling of options:
  • Multiple products: www.transfairusa.org
  • Diamonds: www.brilliantearth.com
  • Chocolate: www.divinechocolate.com
  • Coffee: www.puravidacoffee.com
  • Rugs: www.rugmark.org
  • Sporting goods: www.fairtradesports.com

Pray

The following agencies have produced insightful prayer guides:

• Salvation Army
• International Justice Mission
• Viva Network

Yearnings

We, the community of Christ, are strategically positioned at many vantage points in the world of the here-and-now. We serve in mission with the God who told Moses, “I have heard [my people] crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering,” (Exodus 3:7) and then sent Moses to be His agent of rescue. Our Savior has been anointed “to preach good news to the poor ... to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18) As Graham Kendrick sings, “... so may (Jesus') longings, the Spirit’s yearnings, be on our lips before the Father’s throne of grace.”

Let us pray for release of slaves, salvation of traffickers, and for churches around the world to follow the ways of the Anointed One to take redemptive action here and now.

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¹David Batstone, Not for Sale, p. 11
²Tragically, that form of “old slavery” motivated primarily by racism continues in Mauritania, where black slaves are held by Arab slaveholders.
³Reported by Student Volunteer Movement 2 at Passion ’06, Jan. 1-4, 2006 in Nashville, Tennessee.
⁴David Batstone, Not For Sale, p. 3-4
⁵Ibid, p. 1
⁶Education Pack Download Part 1, “Slavery in the 21st Century,” p.4 www.freetheslaves.net
⁷Caution: This film is not for the faint of heart—it deserves a definite R rating for violence and depiction of scenes in brothels.
⁸The doumentary Invisible Children depicts the situation in Uganda quite well.
⁹ “Testing a Theory of Modern Day Slavery” by Dr. Kevin Bales, p 6
¹⁰excerpt from a workshop given at Urbana ’06 in St. Louis, MO, 28 December 2006.
¹¹“Rani’s Story” is one example of this, found at www.troniefoundation.org
¹²Kevin Bales, New Slavery, p. 8.
¹³www.stopthetraffik.org
¹⁴from the song “The Way Is Open” by Graham Kendrick, © 2006 Make Way Music, PO Box 320, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 9DE, UK www.grahamkendrick.co.uk