Can Anything Stop It?

According to Quentin Hardy in his blog post “Global Slavery, by the Numbers” there are 27 million slaves world wide today. This statistic is worrying not only because of its sheer size, but because of the common belief that slavery today doesn’t exist at all. It is this belief about slavery that keeps it alive: less people are aware of it and those that are aware of it don’t know how to fight it because it is so well hidden, thus it continues to be stupidly easy for human traffickers to profit from their work.  Whilst reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave thought about writing a blog entry comparing slavery today with slavery back in pre Civil War America. Now that I am writing though, I find it more important to note and compare efforts against slavery back then and efforts against it now.

Back in Douglass’s time, slavery was countered with the idea of abolition. The north was fighting to abolish slavery, in other words they were trying to make it illegal. Now however, there are laws against slavery, its become a type of contraband, which makes the ways to fight it much harder to think out. Basically its like trying to fight the music downloads, you can catch as many people as you want but it will keep happening. Why? Because it’s easy.  So many people need help today, they need money, they need to be saved from something, and it’s disgustingly easy to trick them into debt or binds they can’t run away from.

In his memoir, Douglass mentions how slaves were divided up and given to their master’s children once the master’s died. They were tied up amongst the animals, “horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being” (pg. 56).  As deplorable as these conditions may be, I feel like they are much worse now. Sex slaves aren’t even divided amongst their master’s children; they are sold to anyone who will pay the price. There are no limits or protection. There are no records or any way to track these people after they get sold into sex trade. As the movie Taken so clearly dramatizes for us: after three days, any hope of finding these people is gone.

So how do we stop slavery today? There is no longer the choice of abolition, there are no laws to abolish. There is no option for civil war, slavery now is globalized and hidden. The only way to fight it is protesting. What types of protests are right though? Traffickers couldn’t care less if we march down the streets with banners and signs screaming “stop human trafficking!” We need to upgrade. We need something that will make people feel ashamed. We need something like this: