If you are celebrating this year as the bicentennial of an end to slave trading in this country, you are celebrating a false cessation. In our consciousness, the dust which covers the exchange of human life as property also buries the fascinations of ancient wars, witch hunts and the bubonic plague. The two-hundredth anniversary of its abolition is far too late a date to scrape away this forgetful apparition and finely scrutinise the wretched reality underneath. Today, slavery is still thriving and alive beneath the surface.
The prohibition of slavery, now effectively the case in all nations, is merely a statement of opinion if a government cannot back it up. As a commitment, it must be enforced with the same authoritative might as is wielded in the search for terrorists or paedophiles. Without fervently striving to defeat it, a legal opposition to people as property is simply hypocrisy. Whilst no modern country recognises the right to own another human being, few do their utmost to prevent it taking place. In fact, there is little enough will to ascertain its prevalence across the world. The task of generating opposition to, or even awareness of, slavery is left to groups such as the Anti-Slavery Society and disparate government departments (as in the U.K.). There is also an occasional thrashing and panting of enthusiasm from a politician in need of a non-partisan or unifying topic of discussion. Tony Blair–no doubt for unrelated reasons–said the following on January 23rd of this year:

“It is vital that we reflect on the past and that we look to the future. The spirit of freedom, justice and equality that characterised the efforts of the abolitionists is the same spirit that drives our determination to fight injustice and inequality today. People and child trafficking is an abhorrent modern form of slavery that we are committed to tackling. Signing the [European Council’s] Convention will enable us to give victims every support and strengthen our efforts to prosecute traffickers.”

Being “committed to tackling” the problem, Mr. Blair has generously felt able to announce “a national service at Westminster Abbey, the launch of a £2 coin to mark the anniversary and the issue of stamps bearing anti-slavery campaigners”. His major pledge in place to prevent contemporary slave trading mentioned in the text above was Britain’s support for the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. He also issued a “public statement of sorrow” on the 27th November 2006. These policies are a contrast to that of the 21st May 2001, when his government, along with those of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, blocked the passage of a European Union apology for slavery. Whilst the recent effort is obviously a step in a propitious direction, no authority, not even the E.U. or U.N., exists with the teeth to tear apart the corrupt tissues of organised crime which orchestrate the captivation and exchange of human beings for profit.
The United Kingdom’s government, like many others, has been ineffective in enforcing its two-hundred year old commitment, certainly in comparison to the vigour of certain other foreign policy areas. The evidence of slavery being a global and national pandemic is considerable, although estimates of the number held in a state of unfreedom naturally vary according to definition and disposition. They are generally between that of the advocacy group Free the Slaves at 27 million people and the 200 million of less cautious organisations. Moreover, the Anti-Slavery Society’s figures show an increase in the cross-border trade of slaves in 2003–a figure which does not list sales within nations. They reveal that the current number is the greatest ever to have existed in history– although this must be corroborated by the continual global demographic explosion. The current number held in slavery is actually the lowest ever as a percentage of the world’s population. But its existence is undeniable. United Nations peacekeepers in Africa have acknowledged the widespread extent of undisguised slavery in Sudan. The advocacy group Free The Slaves reports that in Mali a young male agricultural labourer can be obtained for as little as U.S. $40, whereas in Thailand the price for an H.I.V.-free prostitute can be as high as U.S. $1,000 (plus an upkeep including the narcotics on which they are often kept). This fee is often one which attracts impoverished parents to part with their children–or even to have children for the purpose of selling them into ownership and oppression. The child soldiers in countries like The Democratic Republic of the Congo are a well-known example. However, they are a minute, if barbarically treated, proportion. There are also sex-slaves, trafficked to developed nations, as well as the strong demands for industrial or agricultural hands in Africa, Asia and South America. They are forced to work under the most degrading yokes of bondage–charcoal extraction in Brazil, brick making in Pakistan, or even inhumanly long hours selling water in Mauritania.
For those who organise these atrocities, there are massive economic benefits in owning and putting to work a subjugated labourer. As a slave holder in any nation today, you could expect a profit of 800% per unit. This, along with the ready supply of new slaves, means that the victims can be regarded as “disposable people” (the title of Kevin Bale’s authoritative text on the issue). Very quickly an owner or pimp can break-even on their property, and afford to leave them on the streets of a city once they have contracted HIV, become pregnant, or met whatever grisly end is likely with the task into which they are brutally coerced. This is often the domestic symptom which is evident to our social services or media in the UK. Barnardo’s regularly publishes reports on the severity and consequences of prostitution– especially amongst children–and the influx of people into Britain’s brothels and darker havens of corruption. It invariably describes the stigma associated with helping these victims, who are tarnished as “undeserving poor” and cannot be reached or withdrawn from their servitude. Amongst the few successes has been the conviction of three people in July 2006 for running a “massage parlour” in Birmingham, euphemistically named Cuddles. The raid of its premises in 2005 revealed nineteen women, sustained on narcotics and birth control pills whilst earning huge profits for the three owners who are now behind bars. It is a familiar story for young and poor eastern-European women: they were enticed by the promise of respectable jobs in the UK, only to be sold into the sex trade. What the media were not so effective in reporting, however, was that immediate action was taken to repatriate six of these women, with only a brief pause “for time and support to recover and reflect”. No guarantee can be made that they will not be ground back into the desperation which first led them into slavery. However, even with the fairest assessment of the right to asylum for victims of human trafficking, these social problems are symptoms at the end of the process. On the global scale, a report by the United States’ government in 2003 suggested that those shipped across borders in that year numbered between 800,000 and 900,000. However, due to the illegal and underground nature of this monster, no firm description of its magnitude can be made. It is an unknown phantom, stretched between the known and the submerged, unspeakably beyond the capability of language to express–and most often outside the glimpses of brutality seen in the periphery of the media.
Language is often the basis for criticism against the Anti-Slavery movement. The definition of “slavery” is often bent beyond its literal, and practical, sense. It is true that Great Britain no longer participates in the marketplace of tiny lives which pass between oppressive owner and abusive slave-holder, and will prosecute those whom it finds to be engaged in this practise. In this sense, our legislative obligation of 1807 is handsomely fulfilled. But it is a very narrow attitude which abides by ancient conceptions and does not encompass an expansion in the number of sexslaves, child soldiers and other modern forms of human chattel. Language is again one of the main inhibitors to the issue of contemporary slavery exploding onto political agendas. The most pertinent definition of slavery provided by the Oxford English Dictionary is “the condition or fact of being entirely subject to, or under the domination of, some power or influence”. This offers something far more than is conjured up by thoughts of 1807. It is quite safe to say that within this definition fall the abuses of debt bondage (unfree labour to pay off loan-sharks), sex-trafficking and enforced prostitution. However, by no means are these perverted new phenomena emerging in the world’s economy railed against in the same voracious way as the immorality of formal indenture in the 19th Century. So disparate a crisis, lacking even a coherent verbal definition, requires a William Wilberforce capable of transcending the closely guarded boundaries of sovereign nations, uniting the global economic market and even overcoming the inadequacy of how we describe the enemy. be foolish to suggest that slavery can be tackled independently from the blights of organised crime or drugs trafficking. Unlike these, though, its annual gross economic product across the globe is around U.S. $13 billion–a tiny proportion of the crimes with which it is associated. Its complete abolition would not cripple a single economy–and any adverse consequences could certainly not be criticised where there is such a strong moral imperative for action. Evidence that it can be dealt with is clear in the ‘Cocoa Protocol’ (or, more accurately, the Harkin-Engel Protocol), formally signed in 2001. It committed the chocolate industry to preventing the worst forms of child and adult slavery in the growing and harvesting of cocoa for consumption in countries like the United Kingdom and United States (whose commitment is naturally a key factor). Involved in the agreement were not only the representatives of relevant governments and NGOs, but also the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering and Tobacco Allied Workers Associations (IUF) and the National Consumers League. It has gone a long way towards eradicating the use of unfree labour in cocoa picking in West Africa and elsewhere, proving that international cooperation, where achieved, can be effective.
achieved, can be effective. This begs the question: if there is no incentive to keep it, and if efforts like the Cocoa Protocol have succeeded in prevented it–why has no global movement stood in its way? Aside from the inseparability of slavery from drug economies, crime-lords and international fraud, as well as its slipperiness as a concept, there is no doubt that there is difficulty in coordinating any means of combating it. Most importantly, such an undertaking requires the teeth to cross borders and bring to justice the individuals responsible. Facilitated by a lack of an invigorated opposition, slave trading continues to be the sibling of narcotic smuggling and internationally organised crime–Globalisation’s bastard, but not insuperable, children
market is similar to that of climate change in the limited sense that national commitments and pledges, or even those imposed from a supranational level like the E.U., are tiny fillets fighting something far larger and more insidious than individual projects can hope to make an impact upon. If a solution is to be found, apologies like the “public statement of sorrow” issued by Tony Blair should be accompanied by a commitment to spearheading an international fight against such a degrading form of oppression. To be effective, the involvement is essential not only of governments, but precisely those who made effective the Cocoa Protocol: NGOs, producers, and industry representatives. But no such progress can be made without the political will, which, ultimately, must be motivated by a public desire to see change. Initially, then, for an effective international solution, there must first be a global whipping up of support similar to those which have begun to whirl around the towering heights of AIDS, Third World poverty and climate change. Advertisement, awareness, and ultimately abject outrage are now desperately needed in fighting the inferno of human slavery and its symbiotic corruption, still raging beneath our myopic social radar.