Slavery

[bunn]

Last night on the local news, some person who had 'written a musical about slavery' said 'there are more people in slavery now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade' and that 'there are slaves in every town and city in the UK'.

Can this possible be true? I know human trafficking exists, and is a terrible thing, but surely this has to be on a much smaller scale, given that it is illegal?

Comments

[wryelle.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia, that is true (especially as the global population is higher now than at the time of the Atlantic slave trade), with most of the number accounted for by slavery in countries where it is still practiced on a large scale. I think in many places its either legal or has only recently become illegal, although I don't know more details.

I have read there are about 4000 slaves in the UK, but I don't know how reliable that figure is.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

See, this is what I'm dubious about. Given that this is an activity which is both illegal and which the entire population is firmly against, it must be phenomenally hard to come up with any kind of figure, let alone an accurate one.

Presumably they would either need to be completely isolated from the world, including telephones, or in such a state of fear that they cannot ask for help - quite different to a state-sanctioned trade.

I really hope it was a wild exaggeration or misdefinition.

[purplecat]

Well you have to account for the fact that definitions of slavery are quite variable - e.g. illegal immigrants who "technically" get paid wages but well below minimum wage and work hours well above legal maximums but who dare not complain because they will get reported.

Add to that the various forms of debt slavery in which, again, isolation is not required.

It might not be obvious, in either case, to a casual observer that they were looking at a slave as opposed to a perfectly legal low paid manual labourer.

I can certainly believe there are people in such situations in every city in the UK and a lot of towns, anywhere there might be a demand for casual manual labour, or seasonal demands for a large number of hands, and employers prepared not too look too closely at the "agencies" who supply the labour.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I am not convinced by those definitions. They are certainly bad things, but if you count people who are not paid much, work long hours in bad conditions, are in debt and don't get much choice about it, then surely that definition would encompass an awful lot of the population, if you go back a hundred years or so? Coal miners, factory workers, agricultural laborers?

It seems to me to devalue the suffering of people in the past (and some in the present) to make the definition so broad?

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

It seems to me to be comparing apples and oranges, or perhaps fruit and oranges: "there are more people in bad working conditions now than there were in a specific legal definition of slavery then"

[bunn.livejournal.com]

yes, I feel that somehow a state sanctioned system of enslavement should have a different word.

Like, selling illegal drugs is 'the drugs trade' and selling legal ones is a tobacconist or an off licence. Well not quite, but something like that.