The Ills of Modern-Day Slavery

“My name is Loui Itoh and I’m calling from the American Anti-Slavery Group, based in Boston. We’re looking to launch TV public service announcements to alert Americans to the fact that slavery is a modern-day problem, worldwide and even in the United States....”

The responses of the potential donors that my boss has asked me to call and ask to help fund our public awareness campaign have varied from a confused stutter to hanging up, except for the occasional individual who expresses interest in the issue. I can understand the rude and hostile reactions of these people to someone asking for money. But I wonder if I actually got the chance to talk to these people about the need for a public-awareness campaign to alert Americans to modern-day slavery, they still would not support the need for such an initiative.

Unlike other issues such as gay marriage, abortion, or gun control, modern-day slavery does not have two sides to the debate—most people who care to listen would agree that slavery is wrong and should be discontinued. Yet frustratingly few people support our cause. Almost nobody in America realizes that 27 million human beings are still enslaved today, more than at the height of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade—and tens of thousands of them reside on American soil.

Slaves are used as housemaids, prostitutes, construction workers, sweatshop workers, and agricultural laborers. There are several methods by which people are enslaved, including chattel slavery, in which a person is captured, born, or sold into permanent servitude; debt bondage, in which a person pledges him or herself against a loan of money but the length and type of labor is not defined; and contract slavery, in which a potential employee is promised a job, often in another country, and once they arrive, find that their passport and documents are confiscated, and that the terms of employment are drastically different. They are trapped in a situation in which they are not even paid, cannot leave, and suffer physical and sexual abuse.

And slavery is not just a worry in the third world—it is is increasingly an American problem. In the past five years alone, the press has reported 131 cases of forced labor in the United States involving 19,254 men, women, and children from a wide range of ethnic and racial groups. The victims are both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, and about half of the cases involve prostitution. Estimates from government documents suggest that 50,000 people are trafficked into the U.S. every year for forced labor. The organization ECPAT-USA (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) has calculated that 300,000 American children are “at risk” of being forced into the sex trade. Incidents of child sexual exploitation, including child pornography, child prostitution, online enticement of children, and child sex tourism have increased 750 percent in five years.

Modern-day slavery flourishes because it is hidden, so an effective solution to combat this problem would be one that raises the profile of this problem: public awareness. A police officer told me that most of the cases the police hear come from phone calls from members of the public, rather than from the victims themselves. If more members of the public were attuned to the existence of slavery, then it seems as though there would be even more cases reported.

Slavery is a problem that I am confident most decent human beings will oppose, but they cannot take action if they do not know that it still exists. My frustration at the inabilty to garner the support that I was hoping to generate for the public awareness campaign demonstrates how the lack of awareness is a problem that feeds itself: people will not support a public awareness campaign about slavery, because they do not know that slavery still exists.

Loui Itoh ’07, a government and religion concentrator in Quincy House, is an editorial editor of The Crimson. She is spending the summer as an associate at the American Anti-Slavery Group on Park Street, in Boston, and now knows how frustrating it is to flag down pedestrians in the Square to give them pamphlets.