Most secret shocked report about the new global slave trade part 2 THE SLAVE TRAFFIC

Most secret shocked report about the new global slave trade part 2 THE SLAVE TRAFFIC

The modern global slave trade generally involves the use of deception and coercion to induce victims to cross national borders in search of new jobs; once the target has arrived in a foreign country, he or she (and it is usually a she) is then forced into some form of labor bondage. Although hard figures are di⁄cult to come by, in June 2006, the U.S. government estimated that some 600,000–800,000 people were subjected to such treatment each year. This number does not include the many millions of people who are held as forced laborers within their home countries, such as in India and Myanmar.When those individuals are taken into account, the total number of people estimated to be living in some form of forced servitude around the world (according to the International Labor Organization) grows to 12 million. Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was.

Approximately 80 percent of today’s slaves on the global market are female, and up to 50 percent are under the age of 18.According to the United Nations (un), these victims span the globe, being tra⁄cked “from 127 countries to be exploited in 137 countries.” Most of the slaves come from countries such as Albania, Belarus, China, Romania,Russia, and Thailand, while the most frequent destinations for tra⁄ckers are in Asia, followed by the advanced industrial states of western Europe and North America and a number of states in the Middle East (including Israel). The slave trade is also a major problem in Africa—where children are often forced to serve as soldiers—but relatively little is known about the tra⁄c in this region.

Once slaves arrive at their destinations, they typically are forced to serve one of several functions. Approximately 43 percent of those in the global market are used for sex, while another 32 percent are forced into other forms of unpaid labor, working as domestic servants, construction workers, or, occasionally (in the case of very young boys), as camel jockeys in the Persian Gulf states. The rest are pressed into both sexual and economic services. Governments and international agencies diªer about these precise figures, since it is somewhat easier to calculate the numbers of persons forced into sexual servitude than it is to figure out how many are forced into bonded labor. Indeed, the number of men who are trapped as indentured laborers is likely underreported.

What all slaves have in common is that they are forced to work.

Slavers typically recruit poor people in poor countries by promising them good jobs in distant places. A recruiter will then oªer a victim a generous loan—at an exorbitant interest rate—to help with travel arrangements, papers, and locating a job in the new community. On arrival, the promised job never materializes, and thus the large debt— up to several thousand dollars—can never be repaid. The victim is then stripped of all travel documents, given a false identity, and forced into a job. He or she—and his or her family—are threatened with disfigurement or death should the slave try to alert the authorities or escape. If they are paid at all, slaves get the bare minimum required for survival.

As the persistence of the slave trade suggests, it is a profitable activity. The un estimates that human tra⁄ckers earn around $10 billion per year and that the average sale price for a slave is around $12,500. Since operating costs (for transportation and false documents) are estimated to be approximately $3,000 for each slave, slavers can earn nearly $10,000 per victim. It is worth noting that the cost of a slave today is far less than what African slaves once fetched in the antebellum United States—a diªerence owing in part to cheap modern transportation.

As a result of the low entry costs of the modern slave trade, the business is dominated by numerous criminal gangs instead of one large mafia. These gangs are mainly from Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America; the authorities do not know whether they are part of larger syndicates or are specialists in human tra⁄cking. Besides easy profits, the slave trade oªers another advantage to criminals: the risks of arrest are low and the penalties are relatively light. In the United States, for example,drug tra⁄ckers generally face much stiªer sentences than do those who tra⁄c in humans.

In order to thrive, the slave trade requires the direct or indirect involvement of national governments, at both the source and the destination. Since profits are high, slavers have plenty of money to pay oª government o⁄cials and local police. In certain countries, these criminal links go to the very top. For example, in a September 2005 memorandum to Secretary of State Rice, titled “Presidential

Determination With Respect to Foreign Governments’ Eªorts Regarding Tra⁄cking in Persons,” President Bush stated that the Cambodian government had “failed to address the tra⁄cking complicity of senior law enforcement o⁄cials” in that country and that the

Myanmar military was “directly involved in forced labor.” Bush also singled out a number of other governments—including those of Ecuador, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela—for failing to “show a serious commitment” or to devote “su⁄cient attention” to stopping human tra⁄cking in their countries. If ordinary criminals are rarely punished for dealing in slaves, high-level o⁄cials in such places enjoy even more impunity.