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Slavery
by Justin D. Long
To most Westerners, slavery is an issue of the past: one solved by legislation more than a century old. But in 1990, more than 200 million people were enslaved throughout the world according to London-based Anti-Slavery International (ASI). Slaves are "people made to work against their will, for little or no pay, and without the freedom of choice to seek alternative employment." Three categories of slaves include: enforced child labor, debt bondage, and traditional chattel slavery. Landowners and factory operators lower labor costs by making school age children work seven days a week, sometimes 20 hours a day, at hazardous occupations without enough food and little or no pay. This includes Moroccan girls in carpet factories, Indian children in glass and bangle factories, Haitian boys kidnapped for Dominican government sugar-cane plantations, and Thai children in Bangkok sweatshops. As many as 25 million adults and 15 million children in India alone, lacking assets of any kind, mortgage muscle for small loans to survive. Finally, as an example of chattel slavery, members of the Dinka tribe in Sudan are owned by other ethnic groups. Ironically, good anti-slavery laws are on the books of almost every country, but grinding poverty, deterioriation in the status of women and children, and social inequality work against legislation. Development strategies will have to dig deeper to prevent the atrocities of slavery.
"Up to 8,000 children have been abducted, subjected to horrific human rights abuses and forced to become child soldiers and virtual slaves in northern Uganda. The children, some as young as 11-years-old, have been seized over the past three years by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and forced to fight the Ugandan army in a largely ignored conflict." [ http://www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/index/AFR590031997 ]
"Big money is involved in the trafficking of humans. In 1988, posing as a potential client, this correspondent found that the going price for a Bengali or Burmese woman was between 1,500 to 2,500 U.S. dollars -- depending on age, looks, docility and virginity. ... In 1991, a reporter from the ''Jang'' newspaper, posing as a buyer, was assured that the police would not interfere and would even escort him back home with his purchase. ''Where do you want to go? Rawalpindi, Gujrat, Lahore. . . . Wherever you go, it is my responsibility. The police will not say anything,'' the reporter was told." [ http://www.ips.fi/koulut/199802/7.htm ]
"Conscience and slavery: the evangelistic Calvinist domestic missions, 1837-1861" by Victor B. Howard (Kent State University Press, 280 pp., $27.50) describes how missionaries of the evangelical Calvinistic American Home Mission Society worked to prevent the extension of slavery to frontier communities of the West. It also links their anti-slavery stance to the post millenialist belief that the kingdom of God would be established on American free soil before the Second Coming of Christ.
The great human structure of sin of slavery is also chronicled in detail in the updated edition of "Slavery: a world history" by Milton Meltzer (Da Capo, 1993, 344p., $19.95).
A copy of the UN Convention on Slavery can be found at [ http://www.hri.ca/uninfo/treaties/28.shtml ]