7 ms·

There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History

87 points by rms 17y ago

alnayyir 17y ago
Per capita or total?
- scythe 17y ago
  >there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million. Total, clearly.
- abefortas 17y ago
  If it was per capita it would also be total.
cema 17y ago
Define slave.
- rms 17y ago
  It's repeated a few times in the interview: >slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence >TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape. >BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.
  - cema 17y ago
    In other words, different definitions from what was used in the past. Need a common definition for a meaningful comparison.
    - rms 17y ago
      The comparison isn't important, it's a title meant to draw attention. Bikeshed, etc.
      - cema 17y ago
        Yes, the title is unfortunate, in part because it is incorrect. To see that it is incorrect, one needs to define the slave consistently. Modern slavery is an important issue (for humans in general, leaving aside its relevance to HN). When the word is misused, the issue may be trivialized, and I think it would work against solving the slavery problem.
    - roundsquare 17y ago
      Presumably when he is doing his comparison he is using a common definition.
      - cema 17y ago
        Then he is incorrect. Modern slavery is an important problem, it should not be trivialized. Trivialized is not the right word; I am looking for an English word... when one misapplies a word and thus presents the situation direr than it is, diluting the meaning of the word. Like what happens with the word "Nazi" in modern American English usage (soup nazi etc). However nazis are almost gone and slavery is not. And rigging the numbers does not help.
        roundsquare 17y ago
        Then he is incorrect. Citation needed? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that, under his definition, there are more "slaves" than ever before (just given the increasing size of population). On the other hand, I agree with you that we need to be careful with the vocabulary. While I'm not trying to downplay how serious the problem is is, I'm not sure if this definition of slavery will inspire the same sense of outrage the "traditional" one will in most people.
    - hughprime 17y ago
      I'm confused -- what was the old definition of "slave" which was so different from "person forced to work and prevented by force from leaving"? I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people fitting that definition at the moment, but I can't see how someone fitting that description is anything other than a slave. (Hmm, though I suppose legitimate prisoners can be forced to do work without being "slaves" so perhaps the definition does require tinkering around the edges.)
      - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
        "I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people.." There are billions of people in the world. Billions. Think about that for a minute and let it sink in.
      - roundsquare 17y ago
        The "held through fraud" part maybe what distinguishes legitimate prisoners from slaves. Although, that part of the definition does seem strange, I'm not sure if we'd always want to require that someone be held through fraud to be considered a slave (someone chained to a post and forced to do hard labor is still a slave in my book, but I don't see any fraud involved).
- pyre 17y ago
  I really hope that Hacker News doesn't become a place were 'Didn't you read the article?' gets a response of 'You must be new here.'
  - cema 17y ago
    Do not jump to conclusions.
evansolomon 17y ago
I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. My first thought was, "Wow." My second thought was, "I wonder how many people end up in similar (very loose sense of the word) situations based on lending that's occurred in the last 5 years.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  What "lending over the past 5 years" are you referring to? Microfinance? Or are you talking about credit card debt in the first world? In the US, the only consequence for failing to pay your debts [1] is an inability to get further credit. [1] Child support debt excluded. You go to jail if you can't pay that.
  - diN0bot 17y ago
    maybe the op was just wondering what amount of slavery he could personally have prevented. that was the thought that crossed my mind. not that "throwing money" at a problem is a reasonable solution, but how different is my perspective on money than "a slave." or rather, i wanted to add that perspective to my thought process. ps - donations to credible organizations do help. pps - somewhat relevant fiction making the rounds these days by Stieg Larsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson I really respect Larsson's response to things he felt were immoral. he set out to change them. 1+ investigative journalism.
- jerf 17y ago
  In the presence of the choice to go bankrupt, if one freely choose to go nuts working to pay off your debt which you freely entered into, that's a choice that should be respected. That's two more "freely"s than the people we're talking about get, and I think it rather takes it out of the same domain altogether. In some sense I am a "wage slave" working for the man, but I freely chose it, and even suggesting that this is anything like actual slavery is unproductive at best (and probably offensive). I know hatin' on the capitalist system is fun and all, but it's been a while in the places where the bad lending occurred where it is actual slavery.
rms 17y ago
For anyone wondering about the credibility of this interview, Skinner's book got blurbs from Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel. http://acrimesomonstrous.com/ http://acrimesomonstrous.com/
- mahmud 17y ago
  Since when does a politician's blurb, and Bill Clinton's at that, add any credibility to anything? http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/ClintonWarCriminal_Herman.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/C... The blurbs often benefit their utters more than the books they're affixed to: looking at the list of people and institutions who gave feedback on the book, I can say a good chunk of them are karma-whoring themselves on the author's good standing.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Since when does anything add anything to anything? This is a useful argument...
    - mahmud 17y ago
      Don't be so harsh. I provided a link to an article that supports my argument for Bill Clinton not being the most credible person out there wrt to support for human rights.
      - rms 17y ago
        I wasn't commenting on Bill Clinton's human rights record. I simply mentioned him to show that this book is endorsed by the establishment as being reliable, which I thought was important because alternet is a leftist site with a specific political bias.
  - antipaganda 17y ago
    Elie Wiesel is a whore? I think you should maybe google the name before you imply such a thing...
pyre 17y ago
> My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery, believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned through bloodshed. Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers, after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history. This just seems like a bunch of self-promoting nonsense. His great-great-great-grandfather didn't shed blood with the idea that after the US Civil War was over slavery would be eliminated from the face of the Earth forever and ever. The point was to eliminate US Government legal acceptance of slavery. Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do. > While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight down to Port au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport I find this a bit disingenuous. 'Just five hours away' implies something that is a lot closer than New York and Haiti. At least he was nice enough to qualify himself, but stating like that comes across as trying to make this emotionally-charged rather than a rational discussion. > They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50. Now to put that in context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of about $40,000. I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go? There's also the difference that when slaves were being sold for $40K is was to put them to work in a money-making enterprise (i.e. plantations) and the slaver traders were selling them in a US market. Plantations owners weren't shipping themselves across the seas to buy slaves directly in Africa. For that matter, today the costs (and risks) of travel are hugely less than they were in the past. In this example, he's going to another country and buying a child that will make him no money (housework and personal sexual favors are not a stream of money). Not only that, that $50 or $100 does not account for how he would them import that child back into the US. I would venture a guess that -- especially nowadays -- it's pretty expensive to get papers to bring a slave-girl child into the US (at least through 'public' ports of entry like airports). > If you were to plot slaves on the map, you'd stick the biggest number of pins in India, followed by Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more slaves In India than the rest of the world combined. And yet, if you look at international efforts or American pressure, India is largely let off the hook because Indian federal officials claim, "We have no slaves. These are just poor people. And these exploitive labor practices," -- if you're lucky enough to get that term out of them -- "are a byproduct of poverty." Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt. Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously). India especially seems to have problems with this due to population density and the caste-system that their society still holds on to. I'm interested if this is an increase in the percent of the population that are slaves, or just an increase in the number of slaves because the population has exploded across the board. I'll admit that it's also possible that there is an increased demand for slaves as the Indian middle-class has taken off. I remember reading that a lot of Indians work on visas in the US for a while, but end up moving back to India because when their wives move over here they are disappointed that the middle-class doesn't have servants (as one in India would expect to have at that income level). > Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt. If this is the case, I hope that he's including 'indentured servants' in the numbers of slaves when he's looking all the way back into history. Indentured servants were often in the same situations he's describing now (even though most elementary school textbooks like to gloss over that fact by claiming that the servants were 'only' there to work off a debt and they were free to leave when they were done; conveniently leaving out the number of servants (or an estimate) that actually worked off their debt). > They can also get involved with Free the Slaves. And they can talk about the issue more. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy. Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?
known 17y ago
Slaves != Wage Slaves
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- nwatson 17y ago
  There's a movie about modern slavery (haven't seen it, don't know the quality) titled "Call and Response." If you're in the Silicon Valley a group showed the movie at the Red Rock Coffeehouse in Mountain View on September 19, 2009. I'm not sure when the next showing is ... if you're interested contact the Red Rock or more likely the Highway Community (http://www.highway.org http://www.highway.org).
chasingsparks 17y ago
Debt slaves are not held by debt. Debt is merely the nominal excuse. The use and threat of violence coupled with an insulation from or complete lack of law drives slavery. And that is why I think it is such a pervasive problem. Solutions that work may require carrying a bigger stick -- and using it. That terrifies me. I abhor state military intervention, but I also abhor slavery through violence. Most people are similar which is why they stress alternative measures like economic disincentives and UN resolutions which don't seem to work well.
radu_floricica 17y ago
I'm living in Bucharest, Romania, and I can confirm this part. A few years ago I used to live in a somewhat less respectable part of the city (not a ghetto by any means, the communists made sure we don't have those, just closer to the periphery and poorer). For some reason it use to be a stop point in girl trafficking - lots of young girls worked at the corner of the street for a few weeks at a time. Many of them from Moldavia, and I presume going further west. At one time I was actually offered a woman for around $200. A few points: - Most girls were not slaves per se, kidnapped and hold by force. All, as far as I can tell, were driven to this by poverty, lack of any prospects in the village of birth or both. - I am not against prostitution as a job, especially since I've seen it done successfully and with quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. But in some conditions it can be worst then anything you can imagine. I am especially suspicious of anything that looks organized. I'd guess this is a direct consequence of it being illegal - Amsterdam seems to have managed to make it both organized and civilized. - I'd have liked to make some comments about corruption, politicians and the way things seem to be "settling in" in the last years, but it's all speculation so I'll abstain.
johnnybgoode 17y ago
Some of the situations described sound absolutely terrible. While we're on the subject, though, I want to point out that slavery is a spectrum, not a binary condition. I don't doubt his number, 27 million, for a certain cutoff point of who is considered a slave and who isn't. If you move the cutoff around, though, you can truthfully say there are billions of slaves, or maybe even zero.
shalmanese 17y ago
"I was able to negotiate for a 10-year-old girl for cleaning and cooking, permanent possession and sexual favors. What do you think the asking price was? TM: I don't know ... $7,500? BS: They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50." This fails the smell test for me. at $1 per day for food & shelter, he can buy her for less than it would cost them to keep her for 2 months. Most likely, he was being scammed in some way. They were probably planning to rob him and had no intention of selling the girl.
zandorg 17y ago
Reminds me of a recent article in BoingBoing, about some Arabic city (Dubai?) where people have to build skyscrapers to pay their way out of poverty, and they have to drink almost-salty water instead of fresh water, in bunks, etc. Ah Google found it on the first query 'dubai slavery salty water': http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...
RobertL 17y ago
Sad, Sad stories for sure.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
SlyShy 17y ago
I recommend the book "A Crime so Monstrous" for people interested in learning more on this subject.

87 points by rms 17y ago

alnayyir 17y ago

Per capita or total?

scythe 17y ago
>there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million. Total, clearly.
abefortas 17y ago
If it was per capita it would also be total.

cema 17y ago

Define slave.

rms 17y ago
It's repeated a few times in the interview: >slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence >TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape. >BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.
- cema 17y ago
  In other words, different definitions from what was used in the past. Need a common definition for a meaningful comparison.
  - rms 17y ago
    The comparison isn't important, it's a title meant to draw attention. Bikeshed, etc.
    - cema 17y ago
      Yes, the title is unfortunate, in part because it is incorrect. To see that it is incorrect, one needs to define the slave consistently. Modern slavery is an important issue (for humans in general, leaving aside its relevance to HN). When the word is misused, the issue may be trivialized, and I think it would work against solving the slavery problem.
  - roundsquare 17y ago
    Presumably when he is doing his comparison he is using a common definition.
    - cema 17y ago
      Then he is incorrect. Modern slavery is an important problem, it should not be trivialized. Trivialized is not the right word; I am looking for an English word... when one misapplies a word and thus presents the situation direr than it is, diluting the meaning of the word. Like what happens with the word "Nazi" in modern American English usage (soup nazi etc). However nazis are almost gone and slavery is not. And rigging the numbers does not help.
      - roundsquare 17y ago
        Then he is incorrect. Citation needed? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that, under his definition, there are more "slaves" than ever before (just given the increasing size of population). On the other hand, I agree with you that we need to be careful with the vocabulary. While I'm not trying to downplay how serious the problem is is, I'm not sure if this definition of slavery will inspire the same sense of outrage the "traditional" one will in most people.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    I'm confused -- what was the old definition of "slave" which was so different from "person forced to work and prevented by force from leaving"? I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people fitting that definition at the moment, but I can't see how someone fitting that description is anything other than a slave. (Hmm, though I suppose legitimate prisoners can be forced to do work without being "slaves" so perhaps the definition does require tinkering around the edges.)
    - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
      "I'm not convinced that there are indeed 27 million people.." There are billions of people in the world. Billions. Think about that for a minute and let it sink in.
    - roundsquare 17y ago
      The "held through fraud" part maybe what distinguishes legitimate prisoners from slaves. Although, that part of the definition does seem strange, I'm not sure if we'd always want to require that someone be held through fraud to be considered a slave (someone chained to a post and forced to do hard labor is still a slave in my book, but I don't see any fraud involved).
pyre 17y ago
I really hope that Hacker News doesn't become a place were 'Didn't you read the article?' gets a response of 'You must be new here.'
- cema 17y ago
  Do not jump to conclusions.

evansolomon 17y ago

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. My first thought was, "Wow." My second thought was, "I wonder how many people end up in similar (very loose sense of the word) situations based on lending that's occurred in the last 5 years.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
What "lending over the past 5 years" are you referring to? Microfinance? Or are you talking about credit card debt in the first world? In the US, the only consequence for failing to pay your debts [1] is an inability to get further credit. [1] Child support debt excluded. You go to jail if you can't pay that.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  maybe the op was just wondering what amount of slavery he could personally have prevented. that was the thought that crossed my mind. not that "throwing money" at a problem is a reasonable solution, but how different is my perspective on money than "a slave." or rather, i wanted to add that perspective to my thought process. ps - donations to credible organizations do help. pps - somewhat relevant fiction making the rounds these days by Stieg Larsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson I really respect Larsson's response to things he felt were immoral. he set out to change them. 1+ investigative journalism.
jerf 17y ago
In the presence of the choice to go bankrupt, if one freely choose to go nuts working to pay off your debt which you freely entered into, that's a choice that should be respected. That's two more "freely"s than the people we're talking about get, and I think it rather takes it out of the same domain altogether. In some sense I am a "wage slave" working for the man, but I freely chose it, and even suggesting that this is anything like actual slavery is unproductive at best (and probably offensive). I know hatin' on the capitalist system is fun and all, but it's been a while in the places where the bad lending occurred where it is actual slavery.

rms 17y ago

For anyone wondering about the credibility of this interview, Skinner's book got blurbs from Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel. http://acrimesomonstrous.com/ http://acrimesomonstrous.com/

mahmud 17y ago
Since when does a politician's blurb, and Bill Clinton's at that, add any credibility to anything? http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/ClintonWarCriminal_Herman.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/C... The blurbs often benefit their utters more than the books they're affixed to: looking at the list of people and institutions who gave feedback on the book, I can say a good chunk of them are karma-whoring themselves on the author's good standing.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Since when does anything add anything to anything? This is a useful argument...
  - mahmud 17y ago
    Don't be so harsh. I provided a link to an article that supports my argument for Bill Clinton not being the most credible person out there wrt to support for human rights.
    - rms 17y ago
      I wasn't commenting on Bill Clinton's human rights record. I simply mentioned him to show that this book is endorsed by the establishment as being reliable, which I thought was important because alternet is a leftist site with a specific political bias.
- antipaganda 17y ago
  Elie Wiesel is a whore? I think you should maybe google the name before you imply such a thing...

pyre 17y ago

> My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery, believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned through bloodshed. Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers, after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history. This just seems like a bunch of self-promoting nonsense. His great-great-great-grandfather didn't shed blood with the idea that after the US Civil War was over slavery would be eliminated from the face of the Earth forever and ever. The point was to eliminate US Government legal acceptance of slavery. Thus slavery in the United States is now illegal, severely increasing the costs and the risks of operating a human trafficking enterprise. That's all that we really can do. > While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight down to Port au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport I find this a bit disingenuous. 'Just five hours away' implies something that is a lot closer than New York and Haiti. At least he was nice enough to qualify himself, but stating like that comes across as trying to make this emotionally-charged rather than a rational discussion. > They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50. Now to put that in context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of about $40,000. I see plenty of things wrong here. Is that $40K USD? Is that $40K USD in today's money or in the value of the dollar in 1850? What does it cost to make a living in Haiti? How far will $100 or $50 US go? There's also the difference that when slaves were being sold for $40K is was to put them to work in a money-making enterprise (i.e. plantations) and the slaver traders were selling them in a US market. Plantations owners weren't shipping themselves across the seas to buy slaves directly in Africa. For that matter, today the costs (and risks) of travel are hugely less than they were in the past. In this example, he's going to another country and buying a child that will make him no money (housework and personal sexual favors are not a stream of money). Not only that, that $50 or $100 does not account for how he would them import that child back into the US. I would venture a guess that -- especially nowadays -- it's pretty expensive to get papers to bring a slave-girl child into the US (at least through 'public' ports of entry like airports). > If you were to plot slaves on the map, you'd stick the biggest number of pins in India, followed by Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more slaves In India than the rest of the world combined. And yet, if you look at international efforts or American pressure, India is largely let off the hook because Indian federal officials claim, "We have no slaves. These are just poor people. And these exploitive labor practices," -- if you're lucky enough to get that term out of them -- "are a byproduct of poverty." Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt. Places like India have grown in population since the time of slavery in the United States. I would really like to see numbers based on % of population for these countries rather than raw numbers (and historical percentages for comparison, obviously). India especially seems to have problems with this due to population density and the caste-system that their society still holds on to. I'm interested if this is an increase in the percent of the population that are slaves, or just an increase in the number of slaves because the population has exploded across the board. I'll admit that it's also possible that there is an increased demand for slaves as the Indian middle-class has taken off. I remember reading that a lot of Indians work on visas in the US for a while, but end up moving back to India because when their wives move over here they are disappointed that the middle-class doesn't have servants (as one in India would expect to have at that income level). > Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt. If this is the case, I hope that he's including 'indentured servants' in the numbers of slaves when he's looking all the way back into history. Indentured servants were often in the same situations he's describing now (even though most elementary school textbooks like to gloss over that fact by claiming that the servants were 'only' there to work off a debt and they were free to leave when they were done; conveniently leaving out the number of servants (or an estimate) that actually worked off their debt). > They can also get involved with Free the Slaves. And they can talk about the issue more. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy. Do you really think that any US President is going to wipe out all slavery world-wide within a single term through only foreign policy decisions? Do you even believe that it's possible in the short-term without some sort of war/bloodshed?

known 17y ago

Slaves != Wage Slaves

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
nwatson 17y ago
There's a movie about modern slavery (haven't seen it, don't know the quality) titled "Call and Response." If you're in the Silicon Valley a group showed the movie at the Red Rock Coffeehouse in Mountain View on September 19, 2009. I'm not sure when the next showing is ... if you're interested contact the Red Rock or more likely the Highway Community (http://www.highway.org http://www.highway.org).

chasingsparks 17y ago

Debt slaves are not held by debt. Debt is merely the nominal excuse. The use and threat of violence coupled with an insulation from or complete lack of law drives slavery. And that is why I think it is such a pervasive problem. Solutions that work may require carrying a bigger stick -- and using it. That terrifies me. I abhor state military intervention, but I also abhor slavery through violence. Most people are similar which is why they stress alternative measures like economic disincentives and UN resolutions which don't seem to work well.

radu_floricica 17y ago

I'm living in Bucharest, Romania, and I can confirm this part. A few years ago I used to live in a somewhat less respectable part of the city (not a ghetto by any means, the communists made sure we don't have those, just closer to the periphery and poorer). For some reason it use to be a stop point in girl trafficking - lots of young girls worked at the corner of the street for a few weeks at a time. Many of them from Moldavia, and I presume going further west. At one time I was actually offered a woman for around $200. A few points: - Most girls were not slaves per se, kidnapped and hold by force. All, as far as I can tell, were driven to this by poverty, lack of any prospects in the village of birth or both. - I am not against prostitution as a job, especially since I've seen it done successfully and with quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. But in some conditions it can be worst then anything you can imagine. I am especially suspicious of anything that looks organized. I'd guess this is a direct consequence of it being illegal - Amsterdam seems to have managed to make it both organized and civilized. - I'd have liked to make some comments about corruption, politicians and the way things seem to be "settling in" in the last years, but it's all speculation so I'll abstain.

johnnybgoode 17y ago

Some of the situations described sound absolutely terrible. While we're on the subject, though, I want to point out that slavery is a spectrum, not a binary condition. I don't doubt his number, 27 million, for a certain cutoff point of who is considered a slave and who isn't. If you move the cutoff around, though, you can truthfully say there are billions of slaves, or maybe even zero.

shalmanese 17y ago

"I was able to negotiate for a 10-year-old girl for cleaning and cooking, permanent possession and sexual favors. What do you think the asking price was? TM: I don't know ... $7,500? BS: They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50." This fails the smell test for me. at $1 per day for food & shelter, he can buy her for less than it would cost them to keep her for 2 months. Most likely, he was being scammed in some way. They were probably planning to rob him and had no intention of selling the girl.

zandorg 17y ago

Reminds me of a recent article in BoingBoing, about some Arabic city (Dubai?) where people have to build skyscrapers to pay their way out of poverty, and they have to drink almost-salty water instead of fresh water, in bunks, etc. Ah Google found it on the first query 'dubai slavery salty water': http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...

RobertL 17y ago

Sad, Sad stories for sure.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

SlyShy 17y ago

I recommend the book "A Crime so Monstrous" for people interested in learning more on this subject.