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DailyChristmas Encouragement
(Devotionals by Pastor Wayne Taylor)
Ministry of Sleeping
"ThenJoseph, being aroused from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord commanded himand took to him his wife, and did not know her till she had brought forth herfirstborn Son. And he called His nameJesus."(Matthew1:24, 25)
Wouldn'tit be great to have a ministry of sleeping? I'd like the Lord to call me to that kind of ministry. Unfortunately, God doesn't call us to aministry of sleeping, but He is calling us to a ministry of resting.
It'sso easy in today's world to be burdened with anxieties and insecurities, and tobe stressed out with all our busyness and expectations. Christ the Great Shepherd wants to give youthe rest that David found in the Lord when he said, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; Heleads me beside the still waters" (Psalm 23:1, 2).
Thereis incredible rest, peace, security, and fulfillment in trusting your life toJesus Christ. "For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from hisworks as God did from His" (Hebrews 4:10). Christ gives His rest to you as a gift whenyou trust Him.
WhenJesus died on the cross, "He said,'It is finished!' And bowing His head,He gave up His spirit" (John 19:30b). "Bowing" is the Greek word used for resting your head on apillow. Jesus was resting in thefinished work He accomplished. Thanks toJesus' great work on the cross for our sins, God is fully satisfied. You can rest in Him today.
"Cometo Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)
(Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
31 Aralık 2012 Pazartesi
The Sign of the Manger
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"Andthis will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths,lying in a manger." (Luke2:12)
WhenGod sent Jesus Christ as a gift to the world, He didn't want anyone to missit. So He gave signs to confirm Christ'sbirth. One sign was that the baby wouldbe born in a manger.
Amanger is literally a feeding trough for beasts. This was Jesus' first bed, a place wherepigs, cows, horses, and sheep were fed. Jesus didn't have a nice oak crib with a Simmons Beautyrestmattress. No, He slept in a stonetrough, the kind used in Palestine at that time. His first resting place was a cold, hard,dirty manger. The angel gave a veryspecific sign to help the shepherds identify their Messiah. Not many babies have an animal feeding troughfor their first crib! I don't know ofany, besides Jesus.
Themanger has spiritual significance because it illustrates Jesus' purpose incoming to earth. Our hearts can be justlike that feeding trough―unclean and oftentimes cold and hard likestone. Even so, our spiritual heartshunger to know God.
Humanhearts are not only unclean, but often beastly. We have a fallen and sinful nature, but that's why Jesus came. God the Son became a man to die for our sinsand bring forgiveness and new life with God. When we repent of our sin and receive Jesus Christ, we discover thegreatest Christmas gift of all: God's love. Oh, how restless and disquieted our hearts can be without Christ!
Augustinesaid, "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless tillthey find rest in Thee."
Jesussaid, "Come to Me, all you who laborand are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). Your heart, like that manger, can be a placeof rest with Jesus. (Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
"Andthis will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths,lying in a manger." (Luke2:12)
WhenGod sent Jesus Christ as a gift to the world, He didn't want anyone to missit. So He gave signs to confirm Christ'sbirth. One sign was that the baby wouldbe born in a manger.
Amanger is literally a feeding trough for beasts. This was Jesus' first bed, a place wherepigs, cows, horses, and sheep were fed. Jesus didn't have a nice oak crib with a Simmons Beautyrestmattress. No, He slept in a stonetrough, the kind used in Palestine at that time. His first resting place was a cold, hard,dirty manger. The angel gave a veryspecific sign to help the shepherds identify their Messiah. Not many babies have an animal feeding troughfor their first crib! I don't know ofany, besides Jesus.
Themanger has spiritual significance because it illustrates Jesus' purpose incoming to earth. Our hearts can be justlike that feeding trough―unclean and oftentimes cold and hard likestone. Even so, our spiritual heartshunger to know God.
Humanhearts are not only unclean, but often beastly. We have a fallen and sinful nature, but that's why Jesus came. God the Son became a man to die for our sinsand bring forgiveness and new life with God. When we repent of our sin and receive Jesus Christ, we discover thegreatest Christmas gift of all: God's love. Oh, how restless and disquieted our hearts can be without Christ!
Augustinesaid, "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless tillthey find rest in Thee."
Jesussaid, "Come to Me, all you who laborand are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). Your heart, like that manger, can be a placeof rest with Jesus. (Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
Incredible Peace
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"Andsuddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising Godand saying: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towardmen!'" (Luke 2:13, 14)
Thenight Jesus was born was a night of incredible peace. First of all, there was universal politicalpeace in the Roman Empire. Aftercenturies of ethnic fighting and wars of all kinds, Rome's power and controlhad grown to the degree that for a short time all was quiet throughout theempire. It was a very appropriate timefor the Prince of Peace to be born.
Jesus'birth was announced to lowly shepherds out in the fields in the stillness ofthe night. Maybe this was one reasonthey were the first ones chosen to receive this glorious announcement. The shepherds weren't so busy, noisy, anddistracted that they couldn't hear. Theywere quiet and alert.
Aheavenly host of angels spoke to the shepherds with words of peace. In other words, this peaceful proclamationcame from a military troop! In Greek,the word host literally means "army." They were God's Angelic Air Force Choir, singing of world peace through Christ,our only hope for true peace.
Doyou and I take time to be quiet, yet alert, before the Lord? Or are we continually caught up in thebusyness and noise of this world? Psalm46:10a tells us, "Be still and know that I am God." It's amazing the peace and strength God cangive us when we quiet our hearts before Him and reach out in faith to our LordJesus Christ.
Whereis there real peace on earth? In thehearts and minds of those who are letting the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ,rule within. Jesus wants to bring Hisblessed peace to our hearts. By dyingfor our every sin on the cross, the hostility between us and God has beendefused.
Howdo you receive the peace of Christ? Byletting His presence come to rest in your life by faith. Jesus promised, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the worldgives do I give to you. Let not yourheart be troubled, neith neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27).
From Pastor Wayne Taylor, Calvary Fellowship, Mountlake Terrace, WA
"Andsuddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising Godand saying: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towardmen!'" (Luke 2:13, 14)
Thenight Jesus was born was a night of incredible peace. First of all, there was universal politicalpeace in the Roman Empire. Aftercenturies of ethnic fighting and wars of all kinds, Rome's power and controlhad grown to the degree that for a short time all was quiet throughout theempire. It was a very appropriate timefor the Prince of Peace to be born.
Jesus'birth was announced to lowly shepherds out in the fields in the stillness ofthe night. Maybe this was one reasonthey were the first ones chosen to receive this glorious announcement. The shepherds weren't so busy, noisy, anddistracted that they couldn't hear. Theywere quiet and alert.
Aheavenly host of angels spoke to the shepherds with words of peace. In other words, this peaceful proclamationcame from a military troop! In Greek,the word host literally means "army." They were God's Angelic Air Force Choir, singing of world peace through Christ,our only hope for true peace.
Doyou and I take time to be quiet, yet alert, before the Lord? Or are we continually caught up in thebusyness and noise of this world? Psalm46:10a tells us, "Be still and know that I am God." It's amazing the peace and strength God cangive us when we quiet our hearts before Him and reach out in faith to our LordJesus Christ.
Whereis there real peace on earth? In thehearts and minds of those who are letting the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ,rule within. Jesus wants to bring Hisblessed peace to our hearts. By dyingfor our every sin on the cross, the hostility between us and God has beendefused.
Howdo you receive the peace of Christ? Byletting His presence come to rest in your life by faith. Jesus promised, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the worldgives do I give to you. Let not yourheart be troubled, neith neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27).
From Pastor Wayne Taylor, Calvary Fellowship, Mountlake Terrace, WA
Tidings of Great Joy
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"Thenthe angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidingsof great joy which will be to all people'…And suddenly there was with the angela multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: 'Glory to God in thehighest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!'" (Luke 2:10,13, 14)
Thistime of year it's so wonderful to hear the Christ-filled verses of Joy to theWorld, O Come All Ye Faithful, O Holy Night, and Hark the Herald Angels Singfilling the malls as we go Christmas shopping.
Carolsabout Jesus' birth literally transformed Christmas in seventeenth centuryEngland. The winter holidays had becomeso raucous with drunkenness and rioting that decent citizens were afraid toleave their houses, so in 1644, the English Parliament passed a law forbiddingthe celebration of Christmas.
Gradually,carols about Jesus became popular, and many began rejoicing at Christmas timewith worship and praise. Christmas wasproclaimed legal again—another good reason to keep Christ in Christmas!
Whenthe angel sang the very first Christmas carol to the shepherds, he said, “Ibring you tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” Joy is "chara" in Greek—meaningcheerfulness and delight—and is the root for "charis," or God'samazing grace. In giving us Christ, Godgave unspeakable grace, His unmerited love and blessing. This is the most joyful gift we can receive.
Theangels brought the shepherds “tidings ofgreat joy" (Luke 2:10), literally "mega joy," and when the wise men saw the star, "they rejoiced with exceedingly greatjoy" (Matthew 2:10). In otherwords, the wise men were "vehemently shaking and trembling with joy!"
Todayour world is desperately seeking joy. Wewant to be lighthearted and carefree because there is so much pressure, stress,and heaviness around us. Often we thinkjoy comes from having more money, but if that were true Donald Trump would be amodel of joy. Senecaonce gave this advice, "To be happy, add not to your possessions, butsubtract from your desires." Quitepossibly our pursuit of riches is the very weed that is choking out a joyfulrelationship with God.
Jesustold us to rid our hearts of these time-robbing weeds that keep us fromHim. This Christmas, remember that truejoy doesn't come from things, it comes from a deep, dear friendship with Jesus.
"...Thoughnow you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible andfull of glory, receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of yoursouls." )1 Peter 1:8b, 9)
"And Hesaid to them, 'Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does notconsist in the abundance of the things he possesses.'" (Luke 12:15)
(Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
"Thenthe angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidingsof great joy which will be to all people'…And suddenly there was with the angela multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: 'Glory to God in thehighest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!'" (Luke 2:10,13, 14)
Thistime of year it's so wonderful to hear the Christ-filled verses of Joy to theWorld, O Come All Ye Faithful, O Holy Night, and Hark the Herald Angels Singfilling the malls as we go Christmas shopping.
Carolsabout Jesus' birth literally transformed Christmas in seventeenth centuryEngland. The winter holidays had becomeso raucous with drunkenness and rioting that decent citizens were afraid toleave their houses, so in 1644, the English Parliament passed a law forbiddingthe celebration of Christmas.
Gradually,carols about Jesus became popular, and many began rejoicing at Christmas timewith worship and praise. Christmas wasproclaimed legal again—another good reason to keep Christ in Christmas!
Whenthe angel sang the very first Christmas carol to the shepherds, he said, “Ibring you tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” Joy is "chara" in Greek—meaningcheerfulness and delight—and is the root for "charis," or God'samazing grace. In giving us Christ, Godgave unspeakable grace, His unmerited love and blessing. This is the most joyful gift we can receive.
Theangels brought the shepherds “tidings ofgreat joy" (Luke 2:10), literally "mega joy," and when the wise men saw the star, "they rejoiced with exceedingly greatjoy" (Matthew 2:10). In otherwords, the wise men were "vehemently shaking and trembling with joy!"
Todayour world is desperately seeking joy. Wewant to be lighthearted and carefree because there is so much pressure, stress,and heaviness around us. Often we thinkjoy comes from having more money, but if that were true Donald Trump would be amodel of joy. Senecaonce gave this advice, "To be happy, add not to your possessions, butsubtract from your desires." Quitepossibly our pursuit of riches is the very weed that is choking out a joyfulrelationship with God.
Jesustold us to rid our hearts of these time-robbing weeds that keep us fromHim. This Christmas, remember that truejoy doesn't come from things, it comes from a deep, dear friendship with Jesus.
"...Thoughnow you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible andfull of glory, receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of yoursouls." )1 Peter 1:8b, 9)
"And Hesaid to them, 'Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does notconsist in the abundance of the things he possesses.'" (Luke 12:15)
(Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
Jesus' Black Sheep
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Jesus' Black Sheep
"Butwhen Jesus heard that, He said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of aphysician, but those who are sick…For I did not come to call the righteous, butsinners, to repentance.'" (Matthew 9:12, 13b)
Jesusloves "bad people." This isreally brought out in the Christmas story. To whom did God send His angels to first to invite them to come andworship the newborn Savior and Lord? Theshepherds.
Inthose days, shepherds were considered crooks and liars, and in many cases, theywere. They couldn't even be witnesses incourt because of their notorious reputations. But God chose shepherds to be His first witnesses of the Savior, andthey were so thrilled when they saw Jesus that they glorified God and went outto tell everybody about the Messiah's birth.
Godloves the unrighteous, those who know through and through that they're notgood, because they're the ones who see their need for a Savior. Jesus said, "It's not the healthy whoneed a doctor, but the sick."
You'renot going to go to the doctor if you think you're perfectly healthy, and you'renot going to go to the Great Physician, Dr. Jesus, if you don't see that youare incomplete, and that you need God's forgiveness and presence in your life.
Thefact is, most of us think we're good. According to a George Barna poll, 83 percent of Americans believe theyare basically good—more than four out of five! The Bible says that God created us very good, and there's still apotential for good, but we fell into sin and rebellion from God. Without Christ, we're all black sheep in ourattitude toward God. We're not lilywhite sheep—not one of us—we're not even grey sheep.
We'reblack sheep without Jesus, who is "The Lamb of God who takes away the sinof the world!" (John 1:29b). God'sperfect sacrificial Lamb was crucified for our sins on the cross, and byreceiving the risen, living Lord Jesus Christ, we can be forgiven and restoredin love to God.Infront of a church in Germany there stands a stone lamb. As the story goes, a roofer slipped and felloff the roof of the church to the ground. It was a long way down, so his fellow roofers knew he would be killed,but when they got to the ground, they found him unhurt. A lamb had been grazing below and the man hadfallen squarely on top of it, crushing the lamb to death. The man was so grateful that he made a stonememorial of the lamb.
Iam so thankful that God provided a lamb for me to fall on. Our fall into sin has been a long way down,but praise God He has given us a lamb to break the fall.
Haveyou fallen squarely on the lamb yet? Your sins have. Why not put yourfull weight on Him and trust Him today?
"As itis written: 'Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, andwhoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.'” (Romans 9:33)
(Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
"Butwhen Jesus heard that, He said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of aphysician, but those who are sick…For I did not come to call the righteous, butsinners, to repentance.'" (Matthew 9:12, 13b)
Jesusloves "bad people." This isreally brought out in the Christmas story. To whom did God send His angels to first to invite them to come andworship the newborn Savior and Lord? Theshepherds.
Inthose days, shepherds were considered crooks and liars, and in many cases, theywere. They couldn't even be witnesses incourt because of their notorious reputations. But God chose shepherds to be His first witnesses of the Savior, andthey were so thrilled when they saw Jesus that they glorified God and went outto tell everybody about the Messiah's birth.
Godloves the unrighteous, those who know through and through that they're notgood, because they're the ones who see their need for a Savior. Jesus said, "It's not the healthy whoneed a doctor, but the sick."
You'renot going to go to the doctor if you think you're perfectly healthy, and you'renot going to go to the Great Physician, Dr. Jesus, if you don't see that youare incomplete, and that you need God's forgiveness and presence in your life.
Thefact is, most of us think we're good. According to a George Barna poll, 83 percent of Americans believe theyare basically good—more than four out of five! The Bible says that God created us very good, and there's still apotential for good, but we fell into sin and rebellion from God. Without Christ, we're all black sheep in ourattitude toward God. We're not lilywhite sheep—not one of us—we're not even grey sheep.
We'reblack sheep without Jesus, who is "The Lamb of God who takes away the sinof the world!" (John 1:29b). God'sperfect sacrificial Lamb was crucified for our sins on the cross, and byreceiving the risen, living Lord Jesus Christ, we can be forgiven and restoredin love to God.Infront of a church in Germany there stands a stone lamb. As the story goes, a roofer slipped and felloff the roof of the church to the ground. It was a long way down, so his fellow roofers knew he would be killed,but when they got to the ground, they found him unhurt. A lamb had been grazing below and the man hadfallen squarely on top of it, crushing the lamb to death. The man was so grateful that he made a stonememorial of the lamb.
Iam so thankful that God provided a lamb for me to fall on. Our fall into sin has been a long way down,but praise God He has given us a lamb to break the fall.
Haveyou fallen squarely on the lamb yet? Your sins have. Why not put yourfull weight on Him and trust Him today?
"As itis written: 'Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, andwhoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.'” (Romans 9:33)
(Sentby permission from Pastor Wayne Taylor; info@calvaryfellowship.org)
27 Aralık 2012 Perşembe
Slavery's Global Comeback
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Slavery's Global Comeback
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/slaverys-global-comeback/266354/
6 DEC 19 2012, 7:44 AM ET 5
J.J. GOULD - J.J. Gould is deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com. He has written for The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Moscow Times, and The European Journal of Political Theory
Buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means.
Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Many have children with them as they wade in water poisoned by mercury that's used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma -- Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, along with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, that were being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda, the two friends met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching them an offer to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange a great job for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who forced them to walk through the jungle for more than a week. They ended up in weeks of forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok, after which Ko Lin was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. For months, he then rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks and booms, once having to tend to a head wound himself with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside of Rangoon, poor enough that some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would be getting rough and she should take some pills so she wouldn't get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she woke up, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe would be taken around to different villages where she was offered up for purchase as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. Given the anxious month-and-a-half she'd now spent as a Burmese commodity in China, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Concerned, wanting a child, the man who bought her had her blood tested; the results showed she's HIV-positive; and he ended up leaving her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die there. But a young newspaper seller, after fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a Chinese police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly common -- here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. Most of these people have been unknowingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators. Others are children literally sold by parents or relatives in order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Decent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. But most contemporary slavery is based on trafficking -- based on varying combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile, very dynamic, leveraging communications and logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into domestic slavery or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it hasn't come clearly into focus as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the concept of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves -- the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International -- (and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the world's slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million -- which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" -- is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span.
The Concept
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been mathematical; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive -- e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments -- but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's a reverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York -- started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It took no one long to understand that they were prostitutes, and it took few much longer to get that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement developed against sweatshop labor that ended up focusing not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama has now done with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come -- or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, now answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn taken the lead in articulating the emerging consensus around the language of contemporary slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S. -- where Obama has now not only embraced this language but issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting -- but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization" -- or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for big global businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains once and for all of any involvement with forced labor. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, with his current campaign to recruit major businesses around the world to sign on to Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself. Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand -- brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best deal on concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word -- new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation -- and new opportunities to build important capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns -- which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business on the issue. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma -- especially young people -- get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families from the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of modulating or outright changing kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by a caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
There are historical reasons why social awareness of slavery could be more effective on the global level than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International -- or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This worked completely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery -- 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, showing the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed in like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking -- and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most decisive moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, with virtually total Southern intransigence, and culminated an enormous war that resulted in more than a million deaths, counting civilian casualties, and ended in results for the United States' former slaves that abolitionists could only be very partially proud of, if at all, and that has cast a long shadow since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was the global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters everywhere -- a kind of documentary film before there were documentary films -- detailing the destitution in the Congo, which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign captured the photos it captured and showed them across Western Europe and in North America, Leopold, who had completely denied everything until then -- and he could, because there was no way to prove what he was doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme -- well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism -- is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the social uses mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years -- or to ignore the analogies between these uses and some of the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Kin Maung Si, the chief of police and head of the ministry of home affairs's human-trafficking office, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their own political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
This reporting was sponsored by MTV EXIT
Slavery's Global Comeback
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/slaverys-global-comeback/266354/
6 DEC 19 2012, 7:44 AM ET 5
J.J. GOULD - J.J. Gould is deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com. He has written for The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Moscow Times, and The European Journal of Political Theory
Buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means.
Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Many have children with them as they wade in water poisoned by mercury that's used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma -- Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, along with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, that were being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda, the two friends met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching them an offer to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange a great job for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who forced them to walk through the jungle for more than a week. They ended up in weeks of forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok, after which Ko Lin was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. For months, he then rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks and booms, once having to tend to a head wound himself with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside of Rangoon, poor enough that some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would be getting rough and she should take some pills so she wouldn't get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she woke up, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe would be taken around to different villages where she was offered up for purchase as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. Given the anxious month-and-a-half she'd now spent as a Burmese commodity in China, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Concerned, wanting a child, the man who bought her had her blood tested; the results showed she's HIV-positive; and he ended up leaving her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die there. But a young newspaper seller, after fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a Chinese police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly common -- here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. Most of these people have been unknowingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators. Others are children literally sold by parents or relatives in order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Decent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. But most contemporary slavery is based on trafficking -- based on varying combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile, very dynamic, leveraging communications and logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into domestic slavery or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it hasn't come clearly into focus as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the concept of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves -- the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International -- (and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the world's slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million -- which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" -- is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span.
The Concept
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been mathematical; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive -- e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments -- but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's a reverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York -- started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It took no one long to understand that they were prostitutes, and it took few much longer to get that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement developed against sweatshop labor that ended up focusing not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama has now done with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come -- or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, now answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn taken the lead in articulating the emerging consensus around the language of contemporary slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S. -- where Obama has now not only embraced this language but issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting -- but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization" -- or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for big global businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains once and for all of any involvement with forced labor. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, with his current campaign to recruit major businesses around the world to sign on to Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself. Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand -- brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best deal on concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word -- new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation -- and new opportunities to build important capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns -- which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business on the issue. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma -- especially young people -- get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families from the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of modulating or outright changing kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by a caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
There are historical reasons why social awareness of slavery could be more effective on the global level than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International -- or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This worked completely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery -- 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, showing the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed in like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking -- and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most decisive moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, with virtually total Southern intransigence, and culminated an enormous war that resulted in more than a million deaths, counting civilian casualties, and ended in results for the United States' former slaves that abolitionists could only be very partially proud of, if at all, and that has cast a long shadow since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was the global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters everywhere -- a kind of documentary film before there were documentary films -- detailing the destitution in the Congo, which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign captured the photos it captured and showed them across Western Europe and in North America, Leopold, who had completely denied everything until then -- and he could, because there was no way to prove what he was doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme -- well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism -- is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the social uses mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years -- or to ignore the analogies between these uses and some of the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Kin Maung Si, the chief of police and head of the ministry of home affairs's human-trafficking office, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their own political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
This reporting was sponsored by MTV EXIT
Film on Child Sex Trafficking to be Shown at St. Michael's College
To contact us Click HERE
FILM: “Playground: the Child Sex Trade in America”
Screening and Discussion with the Filmmaker
Monday, March 7, 2011, 7:00 p.m.
McCarthy Arts Center, St. Michael's College
While traveling to the Philippines in 2001, filmmaker Libby Spears gained first-hand knowledge of the horrific practice of trafficking human beings for sexual exploitation. She dug a little deeper and discovered that most of these victims were young children. She was further astonished to find the involvement of the United States and the degree to which the U.S. was influencing the global demand and growth of the sex-trafficking industry. This powerful yet poignant film will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.There is no admission cost.
Contact Laurie Gagne for more information: lgagne@smcvt.edu
Today is National Missing Children's Day
To contact us Click HERE
From an email I received from Take 25:
Today is National Missing Children's DayToday marks the 28th annual National Missing Children's Day. First proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan and observed by each administration since, National Missing Children’s Day serves as a reminder to the nation about the importance of child safety and remembering children who are still missing.
May 25th marks the anniversary of the day when 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from a New York street corner on his way to school. Etan's story captivated the nation. His photo, taken by his father, a professional photographer, appeared in media across the nation and around the world. As a result, Etan became the poster-child for a movement and his photo came to symbolize the anguish and trauma of thousands of searching families.
For three decades, the search for Etan has continued. Just as that day when President Reagan proclaimed the first National Missing Children's Day, Etan is still missing. The widespread attention brought to his case and others eventually led to a nationwide commitment to help locate and recover missing children.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) honors this commitment by reminding parents, guardians, and others to make child safety a national priority and encourages them to participate in the Take 25 campaign.
© 2010 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children • Take 25 Campaign • 699 Prince Street • Alexandria, Virginia 22314 • www.take25.org
Please take 25 minutes to talk to your children (no matter if their are 3 or 18) about safety. With a focus on prevention. The Take 25 website has lots of conversation starters you can download and have that talk today.
Today is National Missing Children's DayToday marks the 28th annual National Missing Children's Day. First proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan and observed by each administration since, National Missing Children’s Day serves as a reminder to the nation about the importance of child safety and remembering children who are still missing.
May 25th marks the anniversary of the day when 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from a New York street corner on his way to school. Etan's story captivated the nation. His photo, taken by his father, a professional photographer, appeared in media across the nation and around the world. As a result, Etan became the poster-child for a movement and his photo came to symbolize the anguish and trauma of thousands of searching families.
For three decades, the search for Etan has continued. Just as that day when President Reagan proclaimed the first National Missing Children's Day, Etan is still missing. The widespread attention brought to his case and others eventually led to a nationwide commitment to help locate and recover missing children.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) honors this commitment by reminding parents, guardians, and others to make child safety a national priority and encourages them to participate in the Take 25 campaign.
© 2010 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children • Take 25 Campaign • 699 Prince Street • Alexandria, Virginia 22314 • www.take25.org
Please take 25 minutes to talk to your children (no matter if their are 3 or 18) about safety. With a focus on prevention. The Take 25 website has lots of conversation starters you can download and have that talk today.
I'm Back :)
To contact us Click HERE
OK - SO I took a long break from my blog so lots has happened. We basically scaled back on everything to realign and re-evaluate our family's spending and budget needs. Part of that was our home internet service. So that is the reason for the long break, it's awfully hard to keep up a blog with short times online at the local library.
So I'm sure your wondering what's happened....so I'll be quick....
My Christian Life
My growth in my spiritual life has been taking off and I'm so excited to get to know our God and His son Jesus again. I was baptized on Mother's Day in May 2010 and understand now so much more the meaning of being "born again." I've been teaching Sunday School at church (Abundant Life Community Church) in our Kids Room (Grs 2-5). I am currently the Costume Mistress for our church's community theatre's, (82nd Street Theatre) for the upcoming production of "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe."
My Work Life
I've closed my travel agency. I've worked some short term jobs from June to December. Now we've decided, for the moment, I'm staying home. Although, I am a Barefoot Books Representative and an Avon Representative. Barefoot Books is a wonderful line of children's books that are beatifully illustrated and well written. Of course, Avon, which I love all their products and believe no matter who you are or what your budget is Avon can meet your needs.
Homeschooling
This year has been interesting. Both girls went to Public School at the beginning of the school year. What brought me home is my oldest's daughter, who went to middle school (6th gr) and HATED it. And sadly it wasn't the kids or the academics, it was the negative threats given by the teachers daily. So I brought her back home in October. My youngest (4th gr) loved school but part of our budget reduction included a new rental home that cost less, so when we moved in December she came home. Both are loving it and so am I. We are still following an eclectic style and I try not to look over too many different curriculum options. When I start looking I start questioning yet things are going fine the way they are so I'm just going to keep going the way we are.
So there it is, and I hope you'll enjoy my upcoming posts.
So I'm sure your wondering what's happened....so I'll be quick....
My Christian Life
My growth in my spiritual life has been taking off and I'm so excited to get to know our God and His son Jesus again. I was baptized on Mother's Day in May 2010 and understand now so much more the meaning of being "born again." I've been teaching Sunday School at church (Abundant Life Community Church) in our Kids Room (Grs 2-5). I am currently the Costume Mistress for our church's community theatre's, (82nd Street Theatre) for the upcoming production of "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe."
My Work Life
I've closed my travel agency. I've worked some short term jobs from June to December. Now we've decided, for the moment, I'm staying home. Although, I am a Barefoot Books Representative and an Avon Representative. Barefoot Books is a wonderful line of children's books that are beatifully illustrated and well written. Of course, Avon, which I love all their products and believe no matter who you are or what your budget is Avon can meet your needs.
Homeschooling
This year has been interesting. Both girls went to Public School at the beginning of the school year. What brought me home is my oldest's daughter, who went to middle school (6th gr) and HATED it. And sadly it wasn't the kids or the academics, it was the negative threats given by the teachers daily. So I brought her back home in October. My youngest (4th gr) loved school but part of our budget reduction included a new rental home that cost less, so when we moved in December she came home. Both are loving it and so am I. We are still following an eclectic style and I try not to look over too many different curriculum options. When I start looking I start questioning yet things are going fine the way they are so I'm just going to keep going the way we are.
So there it is, and I hope you'll enjoy my upcoming posts.
National Missing Children's Day - May 25, 2012
To contact us Click HERE
May 25 is National Missing Children's Day. It has been observed on this date since 1983 when President Reagan First proclaimed this day as National Missing Children's Day. This day is the anniversary of the day 6 year old Etan Patz disappeared on the way to school in 1979.On July 6th our granddaughter will be missing 5 years. Ashley Summers. Www.bringhomeashley.9f.comPlease talk with your child about safety no matter what age they are. Etan was 6, Ashley was 14....The age doesn't matter, just open that discussion with them this year on May 25th. Go to Www.take25.org for Safety tips and discussion guidelines to help yourself start this conversation with your child or children.Did you know?An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing every year.?..more than 2,000 every day.An estimated 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys are sexually victimized Before age 18. Only 1 in 3 will Tell anyone.Missing children include parental abductions, non-parental abductions, run always, and children that fall prey to human traffickers. Missing children can range from infants to teens, boys or girls, any race, color or creed. they come from the inner city, the rich suburbs, middle class and rural communities. Don't eve think it won't happen to you or in your community, because it will.Please take the time to educate yourself and child, www.take25.org
20 Aralık 2012 Perşembe
Australia's Female Prime Minister Promises $50 Million to Fight Against Trafficking
To contact us Click HERE
Gillard wants South China Sea code of conduct
PM By political correspondent Louise Yaxley in Phnom Penh
Updated 1 hour 12 minutes ago
VIDEO: Gillard backs Asian free-trade zone (7pm TV News ACT)
RELATED STORY: Gillard, Obama attend Cambodian trade summitRELATED STORY: Obama praises 'first steps' during Burma visit
MAP: Cambodia
Prime Minister Julia Gillard says Australia wants to see a code of conduct for resolving disputes over the South China Sea.
Territorial disputes over the South China Sea have overshadowed the East Asia Summit in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, where Ms Gillard is meeting regional leaders.
She has already spoken to Japan's prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, and China's leader, Wen Jiabao.
China has been reluctant to commit to starting formal talks on a legally binding code of conduct over the sea.
Ms Gillard says Australia does not take sides in the territorial disputes but argues they have to be resolved peacefully.
"We believe it is in everybody's interest that issues in the South China Sea are managed in a peaceful way in accordance with international law; that's Australia's perspective," she said.
"We do believe that a code of conduct would assist with making sure that any issues in the South China Sea, any conduct there, could be managed in accordance with the code, that is, that the rules and manner of responses would be predictable and knowable.
"That's Australia's position. It's been one of long standing and it's one we'll continue to argue for."
Ms Gillard says it is important to Australia that the issue is resolved.
"We are talking about an area of the world that our shipping needs to go through to take our goods to the world," she said.
During her meeting with Mr Wen, Ms Gillard presented the Chinese leader with a photo of former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam meeting China's chairman Mao Zedong in 1973.
The gift, signed by Mr Whitlam, is to mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two nations.
It is likely to be the last meeting between Ms Gillard and Mr Wen before China's new administration comes in next year.
Free trade
AUDIO: Listen to Louise Yaxley's report (PM)
Ms Gillard also says Australia will take any opportunity to push for free trade in the region.
United States president Barack Obama this morning launched the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involves Canada, Mexico as well as countries on the western side of the Pacific.
Ms Gillard says Mr Obama is being ambitious about its scope and he wants the deal in place by October next year.
Trade Minister Craig Emerson, who is also in Phnom Penh, said Mr Obama seemed set to use his second term in office to push for the deal.
"The president of the United States was very enthusiastic and highly ambitious for the Trans-Pacific Partnership," he said.
"As a second-term president of the United States, it is clear that he wants to get this deal done and, indeed, he wants it to be a high-quality, truly liberalising agreement.
"The importance of that is that it creates more jobs and better jobs in the region and beyond."
Australia is also involved in another push to remove regional trade barriers.
Ms Gillard says Australia is keen to be a part of any group that can reduce tariffs and smash trade barriers.
"It makes sense to be involved in both and to be maximising our efforts in both," she said.
Malaria
During a speech at the summit, Ms Gillard promised $1 million for more work to combat malaria in the region.
She also emphasised that Australia had recently promised $100 million over four years to help cut death rates.
The leaders at the summit will make a declaration committing to a regional response to the growing threat of drug-resistant malaria.
Ms Gillard says Australia is supporting a regional alliance to fight the problem.
"Malaria is a disease which disproportionately affects the poor," she said.
"In fact, in 2010 it was estimated 42,000 people in our region of the world died from malaria. Disturbingly, we are seeing the emergence of drug-resistant strains of malaria."
Ms Gillard has also promised $50 million to crack down on human trafficking.
The money will go towards helping investigators and prosecutors catch people who are exploiting others and force them into work or prostitution.
Cambodia is one of seven South East Asian nations to benefit from the funding.
"Trafficking in persons is a dreadful evil where people are forced into exploitative labour situations, and tragically, young people in particular are forced into prostitution," Ms Gillard said.
"The program I am announcing today will enable us to work with a number of our neighbours to reduce trafficking in people."http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-20/gillard-wants-code-of-conduct-for-south-china-sea/4382768
Gillard wants South China Sea code of conduct
PM By political correspondent Louise Yaxley in Phnom Penh
Updated 1 hour 12 minutes ago
VIDEO: Gillard backs Asian free-trade zone (7pm TV News ACT)
RELATED STORY: Gillard, Obama attend Cambodian trade summitRELATED STORY: Obama praises 'first steps' during Burma visit
MAP: Cambodia
Prime Minister Julia Gillard says Australia wants to see a code of conduct for resolving disputes over the South China Sea.
Territorial disputes over the South China Sea have overshadowed the East Asia Summit in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, where Ms Gillard is meeting regional leaders.
She has already spoken to Japan's prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, and China's leader, Wen Jiabao.
China has been reluctant to commit to starting formal talks on a legally binding code of conduct over the sea.
Ms Gillard says Australia does not take sides in the territorial disputes but argues they have to be resolved peacefully.
"We believe it is in everybody's interest that issues in the South China Sea are managed in a peaceful way in accordance with international law; that's Australia's perspective," she said.
"We do believe that a code of conduct would assist with making sure that any issues in the South China Sea, any conduct there, could be managed in accordance with the code, that is, that the rules and manner of responses would be predictable and knowable.
"That's Australia's position. It's been one of long standing and it's one we'll continue to argue for."
Ms Gillard says it is important to Australia that the issue is resolved.
"We are talking about an area of the world that our shipping needs to go through to take our goods to the world," she said.
During her meeting with Mr Wen, Ms Gillard presented the Chinese leader with a photo of former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam meeting China's chairman Mao Zedong in 1973.
The gift, signed by Mr Whitlam, is to mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two nations.
It is likely to be the last meeting between Ms Gillard and Mr Wen before China's new administration comes in next year.
Free trade
AUDIO: Listen to Louise Yaxley's report (PM)
Ms Gillard also says Australia will take any opportunity to push for free trade in the region.
United States president Barack Obama this morning launched the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involves Canada, Mexico as well as countries on the western side of the Pacific.
Ms Gillard says Mr Obama is being ambitious about its scope and he wants the deal in place by October next year.
Trade Minister Craig Emerson, who is also in Phnom Penh, said Mr Obama seemed set to use his second term in office to push for the deal.
"The president of the United States was very enthusiastic and highly ambitious for the Trans-Pacific Partnership," he said.
"As a second-term president of the United States, it is clear that he wants to get this deal done and, indeed, he wants it to be a high-quality, truly liberalising agreement.
"The importance of that is that it creates more jobs and better jobs in the region and beyond."
Australia is also involved in another push to remove regional trade barriers.
Ms Gillard says Australia is keen to be a part of any group that can reduce tariffs and smash trade barriers.
"It makes sense to be involved in both and to be maximising our efforts in both," she said.
Malaria
During a speech at the summit, Ms Gillard promised $1 million for more work to combat malaria in the region.
She also emphasised that Australia had recently promised $100 million over four years to help cut death rates.
The leaders at the summit will make a declaration committing to a regional response to the growing threat of drug-resistant malaria.
Ms Gillard says Australia is supporting a regional alliance to fight the problem.
"Malaria is a disease which disproportionately affects the poor," she said.
"In fact, in 2010 it was estimated 42,000 people in our region of the world died from malaria. Disturbingly, we are seeing the emergence of drug-resistant strains of malaria."
Ms Gillard has also promised $50 million to crack down on human trafficking.
The money will go towards helping investigators and prosecutors catch people who are exploiting others and force them into work or prostitution.
Cambodia is one of seven South East Asian nations to benefit from the funding.
"Trafficking in persons is a dreadful evil where people are forced into exploitative labour situations, and tragically, young people in particular are forced into prostitution," Ms Gillard said.
"The program I am announcing today will enable us to work with a number of our neighbours to reduce trafficking in people."http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-20/gillard-wants-code-of-conduct-for-south-china-sea/4382768
Open Up Your Mind and See Like Me
To contact us Click HERE
ASON MRAZ TOPS MYANMAR ANTI-TRAFFICKING CONCERT
By YADANA HTUN
— Dec. 17 12:09 AM EST
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/jason-mraz-tops-myanmar-anti-trafficking-concert
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — American singer-songwriter Jason Mraz mixed entertainment with education to become the first world-class entertainer in decades to perform in Myanmar, with a concert to raise awareness of human trafficking.
Mraz's 2008 hit "I'm Yours" was the finale for Sunday night's concert before a crowd of about 50,000 people at the base of the famous hilltop Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the country's biggest city.
Local artists, including a hip-hop singer, also played at the event organized by the anti-trafficking media group MTV EXIT — for "End Exploitation and Trafficking" —in cooperation with U.S. and Australian government aid agencies and the anti-slavery organization Walk Free.
Myanmar is emerging from decades of isolation under a reformist elected government that took office last year after almost five decades of military rule. It has been one of the region's poorest countries, and its bad human rights record made it the target of political and economic sanctions by Western nations.
But democratic reforms initiated by President Thein Sein have led to the lifting of most sanctions, and the country is hopeful of a political and economic revival. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy opposition leader, was released from house arrest in late 2010 and won a seat in parliament last April.
Mraz called his top-billed appearance at the concert a "tremendous honor."
"I think the country is, at this time, downloading lots of new information from all around the world," he said. "I've always wanted my music to be here, (for) hope and celebration, peace, love and happiness. And so I'm delighted that my music can be a part of this big download that Myanmar is experiencing right now."
Organizers said Mraz was the first international artist to perform at an open-air, mass public concert in Myanmar. Jazz artists Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Charlie Byrd visited the country under U.S. government sponsorship in the 1970s, when it was still called Burma, but played at much smaller venues.
Many in the crowd queued for two hours before being admitted to the concert site. Yangon native Sann Oo, 31, wearing a white T-shirt with a sketch of Mraz, said he was pleased that Mraz had come and that there would be a broadcast of the event.
"His visit can promote the image of Myanmar, because people outside have been seeing the country as an insecure place, and poor," he said. "Now they can see how we look like from the concert. It also opens the potential for more concerts by foreign artists."
Mraz has a history of involvement with human rights and other social causes.
But there was some criticism of his visit by campaigners for Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya community, which has been the target of ethnic-based violence this year that has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes into makeshift refugee camps. They feel Myanmar's government has been complicit in the discrimination, and that Mraz's visit provides it cover with the image of being a defender of human rights.
Mraz said he was aware of the issue, but that if he didn't come to do the concert because someone else had asked him to protest another problem, then that would not help tackle the exploitation and human trafficking issue.
"I understand that there is a lot of wrongdoing in this world," he said. "Today I'm here for this."
Walk Free used the occasion of Sunday's concert to launch a campaign calling on the world's major corporations "to work together to end modern slavery by identifying, eradicating and preventing forced labor in their operations and supply chains." They are seeking to have the companies make a "zero tolerance for slavery pledge" by the end of March next year.
"While many think of slavery as a relic of history, experts estimate that there are currently 20.9 million people living under threat of violence, abuse and harsh penalties," the Australia-based group said in a statement. "Within this massive number, the majority of people - more than 14.2 million - are in a forced labor situation, used to source raw materials, and create products in sectors such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and domestic work."
ASON MRAZ TOPS MYANMAR ANTI-TRAFFICKING CONCERT
By YADANA HTUN
— Dec. 17 12:09 AM EST
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/jason-mraz-tops-myanmar-anti-trafficking-concert
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — American singer-songwriter Jason Mraz mixed entertainment with education to become the first world-class entertainer in decades to perform in Myanmar, with a concert to raise awareness of human trafficking.
Mraz's 2008 hit "I'm Yours" was the finale for Sunday night's concert before a crowd of about 50,000 people at the base of the famous hilltop Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the country's biggest city.
Local artists, including a hip-hop singer, also played at the event organized by the anti-trafficking media group MTV EXIT — for "End Exploitation and Trafficking" —in cooperation with U.S. and Australian government aid agencies and the anti-slavery organization Walk Free.
Myanmar is emerging from decades of isolation under a reformist elected government that took office last year after almost five decades of military rule. It has been one of the region's poorest countries, and its bad human rights record made it the target of political and economic sanctions by Western nations.
But democratic reforms initiated by President Thein Sein have led to the lifting of most sanctions, and the country is hopeful of a political and economic revival. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy opposition leader, was released from house arrest in late 2010 and won a seat in parliament last April.
Mraz called his top-billed appearance at the concert a "tremendous honor."
"I think the country is, at this time, downloading lots of new information from all around the world," he said. "I've always wanted my music to be here, (for) hope and celebration, peace, love and happiness. And so I'm delighted that my music can be a part of this big download that Myanmar is experiencing right now."
Organizers said Mraz was the first international artist to perform at an open-air, mass public concert in Myanmar. Jazz artists Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Charlie Byrd visited the country under U.S. government sponsorship in the 1970s, when it was still called Burma, but played at much smaller venues.
Many in the crowd queued for two hours before being admitted to the concert site. Yangon native Sann Oo, 31, wearing a white T-shirt with a sketch of Mraz, said he was pleased that Mraz had come and that there would be a broadcast of the event.
"His visit can promote the image of Myanmar, because people outside have been seeing the country as an insecure place, and poor," he said. "Now they can see how we look like from the concert. It also opens the potential for more concerts by foreign artists."
Mraz has a history of involvement with human rights and other social causes.
But there was some criticism of his visit by campaigners for Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya community, which has been the target of ethnic-based violence this year that has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes into makeshift refugee camps. They feel Myanmar's government has been complicit in the discrimination, and that Mraz's visit provides it cover with the image of being a defender of human rights.
Mraz said he was aware of the issue, but that if he didn't come to do the concert because someone else had asked him to protest another problem, then that would not help tackle the exploitation and human trafficking issue.
"I understand that there is a lot of wrongdoing in this world," he said. "Today I'm here for this."
Walk Free used the occasion of Sunday's concert to launch a campaign calling on the world's major corporations "to work together to end modern slavery by identifying, eradicating and preventing forced labor in their operations and supply chains." They are seeking to have the companies make a "zero tolerance for slavery pledge" by the end of March next year.
"While many think of slavery as a relic of history, experts estimate that there are currently 20.9 million people living under threat of violence, abuse and harsh penalties," the Australia-based group said in a statement. "Within this massive number, the majority of people - more than 14.2 million - are in a forced labor situation, used to source raw materials, and create products in sectors such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and domestic work."
Trafficking in the Phillipines
To contact us Click HERE
Suspect in human trafficking faces deportation from PH
By Tetch Torres
INQURER.net
10:58 am | Tuesday, December 18th, 2012
2 23 16
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/59769/suspect-in-human-trafficking-faces-deportation-from-ph
Geralyn Quezo, 17, (R) looks on as she stands by a fellow victim of human trafficking at the Visayan Forum Foundation’s halfway house in Manila, 09 July 2007. AFP FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The Bureau of Immigration has started deportation proceedings against a foreigner suspected of having ties with a human trafficking syndicate that provides fake Philippine passports to Chinese nationals travelling in the country.
Acting Immigration intelligence chief Ma. Antonette Mangrobang identified the foreigner, a Singaporean national, as Law Suang See. Mangrobang said See was with a Chinese companion Jianhuang Guo, 37. They were both arrested at the NAIA 3 terminal last December 12 when the duo arrived a Cebu Pacific flight from Macau. Both are presently detained at the immigration jail in Bicutan, Taguig pending deportation proceedings. Mangrobang said the passengers were apprehended after Guo presented a Philippine passport in the name of Johnny Dela Cruz Que which turned out to be spurious. She said Guo’s inability to speak in Filipino aroused the suspicion of immigration officers who then doubted the authenticity of his Philippine passport. At this point, See admitted that his companion could not talk in the language and that he was actually a Chinese national. He then produced his companion’s Chinese passport and identication card as a holder of a special resident reiteree’s visa. Guo was also carrying a birth certificate purportedly issued by the National Statistics Office, an NBI clearance and Taxpayer’s Identication Number (TIN) card.
Suspect in human trafficking faces deportation from PH
By Tetch Torres
INQURER.net
10:58 am | Tuesday, December 18th, 2012
2 23 16
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/59769/suspect-in-human-trafficking-faces-deportation-from-ph
Geralyn Quezo, 17, (R) looks on as she stands by a fellow victim of human trafficking at the Visayan Forum Foundation’s halfway house in Manila, 09 July 2007. AFP FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The Bureau of Immigration has started deportation proceedings against a foreigner suspected of having ties with a human trafficking syndicate that provides fake Philippine passports to Chinese nationals travelling in the country.
Acting Immigration intelligence chief Ma. Antonette Mangrobang identified the foreigner, a Singaporean national, as Law Suang See. Mangrobang said See was with a Chinese companion Jianhuang Guo, 37. They were both arrested at the NAIA 3 terminal last December 12 when the duo arrived a Cebu Pacific flight from Macau. Both are presently detained at the immigration jail in Bicutan, Taguig pending deportation proceedings. Mangrobang said the passengers were apprehended after Guo presented a Philippine passport in the name of Johnny Dela Cruz Que which turned out to be spurious. She said Guo’s inability to speak in Filipino aroused the suspicion of immigration officers who then doubted the authenticity of his Philippine passport. At this point, See admitted that his companion could not talk in the language and that he was actually a Chinese national. He then produced his companion’s Chinese passport and identication card as a holder of a special resident reiteree’s visa. Guo was also carrying a birth certificate purportedly issued by the National Statistics Office, an NBI clearance and Taxpayer’s Identication Number (TIN) card.
Slavery's Global Comeback
To contact us Click HERE
Slavery's Global Comeback
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/slaverys-global-comeback/266354/
6 DEC 19 2012, 7:44 AM ET 5
J.J. GOULD - J.J. Gould is deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com. He has written for The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Moscow Times, and The European Journal of Political Theory
Buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means.
Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Many have children with them as they wade in water poisoned by mercury that's used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma -- Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, along with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, that were being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda, the two friends met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching them an offer to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange a great job for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who forced them to walk through the jungle for more than a week. They ended up in weeks of forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok, after which Ko Lin was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. For months, he then rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks and booms, once having to tend to a head wound himself with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside of Rangoon, poor enough that some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would be getting rough and she should take some pills so she wouldn't get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she woke up, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe would be taken around to different villages where she was offered up for purchase as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. Given the anxious month-and-a-half she'd now spent as a Burmese commodity in China, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Concerned, wanting a child, the man who bought her had her blood tested; the results showed she's HIV-positive; and he ended up leaving her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die there. But a young newspaper seller, after fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a Chinese police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly common -- here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. Most of these people have been unknowingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators. Others are children literally sold by parents or relatives in order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Decent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. But most contemporary slavery is based on trafficking -- based on varying combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile, very dynamic, leveraging communications and logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into domestic slavery or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it hasn't come clearly into focus as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the concept of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves -- the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International -- (and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the world's slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million -- which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" -- is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span.
The Concept
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been mathematical; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive -- e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments -- but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's a reverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York -- started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It took no one long to understand that they were prostitutes, and it took few much longer to get that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement developed against sweatshop labor that ended up focusing not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama has now done with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come -- or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, now answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn taken the lead in articulating the emerging consensus around the language of contemporary slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S. -- where Obama has now not only embraced this language but issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting -- but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization" -- or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for big global businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains once and for all of any involvement with forced labor. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, with his current campaign to recruit major businesses around the world to sign on to Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself. Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand -- brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best deal on concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word -- new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation -- and new opportunities to build important capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns -- which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business on the issue. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma -- especially young people -- get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families from the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of modulating or outright changing kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by a caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
There are historical reasons why social awareness of slavery could be more effective on the global level than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International -- or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This worked completely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery -- 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, showing the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed in like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking -- and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most decisive moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, with virtually total Southern intransigence, and culminated an enormous war that resulted in more than a million deaths, counting civilian casualties, and ended in results for the United States' former slaves that abolitionists could only be very partially proud of, if at all, and that has cast a long shadow since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was the global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters everywhere -- a kind of documentary film before there were documentary films -- detailing the destitution in the Congo, which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign captured the photos it captured and showed them across Western Europe and in North America, Leopold, who had completely denied everything until then -- and he could, because there was no way to prove what he was doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme -- well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism -- is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the social uses mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years -- or to ignore the analogies between these uses and some of the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Kin Maung Si, the chief of police and head of the ministry of home affairs's human-trafficking office, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their own political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
This reporting was sponsored by MTV EXIT
Slavery's Global Comeback
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/slaverys-global-comeback/266354/
6 DEC 19 2012, 7:44 AM ET 5
J.J. GOULD - J.J. Gould is deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com. He has written for The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Moscow Times, and The European Journal of Political Theory
Buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means.
Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Many have children with them as they wade in water poisoned by mercury that's used in the extraction process. (Lisa Kristine)
RANGOON, Burma -- Earlier this year, Ko Lin, 21 at the time, left his hometown of Bago, 50 miles northeast of Rangoon, along with a friend to look for work in Myawaddy, near the Thai border. The two found jobs there as day laborers loading and offloading goods, anything from rice to motorcycles, that were being illicitly transported by truck in and out of Thailand. After a month, Ko Lin had saved up the equivalent of about US$150 and decided to rejoin his family in Bago. Stopping first to pray at a local pagoda, the two friends met a super-amiable young woman who ended up pitching them an offer to work in Thailand. Her uncle, she said, could arrange a great job for them there.
Ko Lin was reluctant but bent to his friend's enthusiasm. The uncle turned out to be a trafficker who forced them to walk through the jungle for more than a week. They ended up in weeks of forced labor in Chonburi, a city 60 miles east of Bangkok, after which Ko Lin was knocked unconscious and woke up separated from his friend on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Thailand. For months, he then rarely if ever had more than two hours of sleep a night, always on a shared, cramped bed; he was given three meals only on days when the captain felt he'd pulled in enough fish to earn it; and when he was fed, it was always dregs from a catch that couldn't be sold on the market. His arms regularly became infected from the extended exposure of minor wounds to sea water. If he complained that he was feeling unwell, the crew would beat him. He was injured multiple times by heavy blocks and booms, once having to tend to a head wound himself with a handful of wet rice. Three months out, Ko Lin was rescued in a police raid.
There are now twice as many people enslaved in the world as there were in the 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Ma Moe, 34, and her husband lived in a suburb about an hour outside of Rangoon, poor enough that some days they had nothing to eat. A friend offered her a job as a domestic worker in China where, she was told, she could make between $100 and $200 a month. Despite her husband's objections, she decided to go. Near the border, her friend told her the trip would be getting rough and she should take some pills so she wouldn't get carsick. The pills knocked her out almost immediately. When she woke up, she was in a small village in China; she still doesn't know where. Kept with a few other women in a small house, Ma Moe would be taken around to different villages where she was offered up for purchase as a "wife." After a failed escape attempt, when she was beaten by local police, a man from northern China bought her. Given the anxious month-and-a-half she'd now spent as a Burmese commodity in China, she could hardly eat from the stress and was emaciated. Concerned, wanting a child, the man who bought her had her blood tested; the results showed she's HIV-positive; and he ended up leaving her at the bus station. With no hope of being able to get back to Burma, she prayed to die there. But a young newspaper seller, after fending off an attempt by another apparent trafficker to get Ma Moe to go with him, called a Chinese police hotline for trafficking victims. The police coordinated Ma Moe's transfer to a Burmese anti-trafficking task force, and they ultimately took her home.
There's a plain-language word for the horror stories that Ko Lin and Ma Moe have survived, as anachronistic as it might sound: slavery. Contemporary slavery is real, and it's terribly common -- here in Burma, across Southeast Asia, and around the world.
The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. Most of these people have been unknowingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators. Others are children literally sold by parents or relatives in order to pay off debt or to lessen their economic burden. The highest ratios of slaves worldwide are from South and Southeast Asia, along with China, Russia, Albania, Belarus, and Romania. There is a significant slave presence across North Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon. There is also a major slave trade in Africa. Decent-based slavery persists in Mauritania, where children of slaves are passed on to their slave-holders' children. And the North Korean gulag system, which holds 200,000 people, is essentially a constellation of slave-labor camps. But most contemporary slavery is based on trafficking -- based on varying combinations of deception and coercion, very mobile, very dynamic, leveraging communications and logistics in the same basic way modern businesses do generally. After the earthquake of 2010 devastated Haiti, Hispaniola was quickly overrun with opportunistic traffickers targeting children to sell into domestic slavery or brothels.
As pervasive as contemporary slavery is, it hasn't come clearly into focus as a global issue until relatively recently. There are a couple of big reasons why -- one having to do with the scale of the problem, the other with the concept of slavery itself.
The Scale
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the number of slaves in the world today at around 21 million. Kevin Bales, of Free the Slaves -- the U.S. affiliate of the world's oldest human-rights organization, the U.K.-based Anti-Slavery International -- (and the author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy) puts it at 27 million. Siddharth Kara of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy says more than 29 million.
That range represents a tightening consensus. In the 1990s, some accounts had the world's slave population as high as 100 million; others had it as low as 2 million. "It was nuts," says Bales. "I traced all these numbers back. The 100-million number, I finally found this guy in India who'd said it at at UN conference. I asked him, 'How did you get that?' And he said, 'I don't know, it was just a guess.' So nobody had the number."
Bales's 27 million -- which as a statistician he considers a "conservative estimate" -- is derived from secondary-source analysis. "It's still not great," he says, "in the sense that it's not based on random-sample surveys at the grass-roots level. We're doing that now, though, building much sounder numbers, and they're still coming out in the same range. ... So we're getting closer."
In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span.
The Concept
Some of what's obscured contemporary slavery, then, has been mathematical; but some has been conceptual: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.
One consequence of this is that when people apply the idea of slavery to current events, they tend to think of it as an analogy. That is, they tend to use the word to dramatize conditions that may be exploitive -- e.g., terrible wages or toxic working environments -- but that we'd never on their own call "slavery" if the kind of forced labor we used to call "slavery" still existed. "In 1994, when I was in the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery," Bales recalls, "a group came in and said they wanted the UN to declare incest a form of slavery. And we were like, incest is incest; you don't have to call it slavery."
But there's a reverse consequence to seeing slavery as a thing of the past, too: It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
A slave in Kathmandu, Nepal, stacks 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, carrying them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day. (Lisa Kristine)
Right after the end of the Cold War, people in Western cities -- in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, New York -- started noticing something pronounced about migration patterns out of the just-collapsed Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: The "immigrants" were disproportionately young women and girls. It took no one long to understand that they were prostitutes, and it took few much longer to get that they weren't operating freely; criminals were trafficking them out of Eurasia effectively as black-market goods, like opium or Kalashnikovs.
The dominant rhetoric that the coalition of Christian conservatives and anti-prostitution feminists who took the lead on this issue used at the time wasn't "slavery" but "trafficking for sexual exploitation." Around the same time, a movement developed against sweatshop labor that ended up focusing not broadly on the issue of forced labor but narrowly on the conditions of the sweatshops themselves, sometimes even just on safety issues within them.
Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, sees both of these frameworks as inhibiting and, intentionally or not, ways to feel too comfortable about addressing the issues in question. "If we say the problem with domestic servants is that they're not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so let's just go out and make sure they get covered by labor laws around the world, we get to ignore, for example, the fact that domestic servants are being locked in and raped. It's not a wage issue; it's a crime issue. If we look at prostitution and we devolve back to the old debates about whether prostitution should be legal and regulated, should it be illegal and criminalized, we won't say, '... hey, why doesn't the 13th Amendment apply to a woman in prostitution just as much as to a woman on a farm?' Then we end up missing the reality of modern slavery."
Pattern Recognition
CdeBaca thinks we've been using euphemisms about slavery in our recent history scarcely less euphemistic than were "servant" or "peculiar institution" before the U.S. Civil War, noting current preferences for "gender-based violence" or "rape as a weapon of war" to describe what goes on in eastern Congo. "If rape becomes the more comfortable word than slavery," CdeBaca says, "you know slavery is a highly emotive term."
But if the president of the United States has nevertheless embraced the term "slavery," as Barack Obama has now done with his speech at the Clinton Global Institute in September, you know it's also an emotive term whose time has come -- or come again. The State Department, meanwhile, now answers the question "What is modern slavery?" by implying, virtually to the point of stating, that it now considers "slavery" the umbrella term for crimes of "trafficking":
Over the past 15 years, "trafficking in persons" and "human trafficking" have been used as umbrella terms for activities involved when someone obtains or holds a person in compelled service.
The United States government considers trafficking in persons to include all of the criminal conduct involved in forced labor and sex trafficking, essentially the conduct involved in reducing or holding someone in compelled service. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as amended (TVPA) and consistent with the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), individuals may be trafficking victims regardless of whether they once consented, participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked, were transported into the exploitative situation, or were simply born into a state of servitude. Despite a term that seems to connote movement, at the heart of the phenomenon of trafficking in persons are the many forms of enslavement, not the activities involved in international transportation.
(Emph. added)
CdeBaca understands the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Palermo Protocol that State mentions here, both dating from 2000, to be crucial preconditions for the change in social conceptions about human trafficking and forced labor that have followed. Usually the dynamic is the other way around, CdeBaca says: A social movement grows and, if it's successful, after 10 years or so, Congress passes legislation or the UN (or some other international body) passes a resolution. With contemporary slavery, more than a decade of governmental and trans-governmental initiatives have seeded the social conversation, which has in turn taken the lead in articulating the emerging consensus around the language of contemporary slavery.
CdeBaca thinks this consensus is hugely consequential, not just domestically in the U.S. -- where Obama has now not only embraced this language but issued an executive order to remove human trafficking and forced labor from federal contracting -- but globally. "The fact that we're able to come into a place like Burma, which has come so far so fast just in the last 10 or 12 months, with this unified message is wonderful," he says, "because the government here isn't going to have to unlearn those differences. When we talked to the government [on Friday], they were talking about forced labor and forced prostitution as though they're the same concept. We didn't have to talk through 'here's why you need to care about forced labor as much as you care about forced prostitution,' or 'here's why the girls in the brothels matter.' They got it. And I think it's because they come into this at this moment, now."
The New Abolitionism
It's to the not-modest credit of modern civilization that the awareness of slavery has always given rise to anti-slavery movements. Abolitionism today may be more complex than what went before it only because it has to be. Contemporary slavery is, as Ethan Kapstein wrote in Foreign Affairs back in 2006, "a product of the same political, technological, and economic forces that have fueled globalization" -- or as Andrew Forrest, the chairman of Fortescue Metals Group and founder of the anti-slavery group Walk Free, has it, "Slavery is the dark side of globalization."
In essence, organizations like Walk Free, or the Global Business Coalition Against Trafficking (gBCAT), want harness the good, or at least potentially good, aspects of globalization to eliminate its most evil aspect. Forrest believes that it now makes maximum sense for big global businesses to integrate their risk-management strategies with their corporate-social-responsibility strategies and their procurement strategies, cleaning their supply chains once and for all of any involvement with forced labor. Forrest believes in the constructive power of potential shame, too, with his current campaign to recruit major businesses around the world to sign on to Walk Free's "zero tolerance for slavery pledge."
Slavery today is driven by the same political, technological, and economic forces as globalization itself. Projects like this won't necessarily be easy; in fact, their success will necessarily be a tough question. There are certainly precedents for it: Nike may be one of the most slave-free garment manufacturers in the world today, because it got hammered for its labor practices in the 1990s by a very successful campaign against it as a brand -- brand equity being a very important, very bottom-line issue for a company like Nike. But what if we're looking instead at a mining company that needs to procure concrete for railway tracks to get its materials out, and the best deal on concrete is made by slave labor in Abu Dhabi by some nameless supplier? There's no brand equity at stake there. Mineral extraction is a similarly faceless industry. We all know who makes our cell phones; few of us know who makes the tantalum and coltan that go into them. That doesn't have to be note of cynicism, but it does get at the complexity of the challenge in leveraging global business's better angels against its worst instincts.
There will meanwhile be new opportunities for political will against slavery, particularly now that Obama has used the word -- new legislative efforts, new instruments of international cooperation -- and new opportunities to build important capacities, with law enforcement, with victim care and rehabilitation, and so on.
And then there will be social-awareness campaigns -- which may represent the one strand of the contemporary anti-slavery movement skeptical observers are more inclined to be cynical about than they are about the leadership of global business on the issue. If you're tempted to think that way, consider before anything else that here in Rangoon, it's not only perfectly reasonable but a vital public-service announcement to say, "Kids, this is how you recognize it if someone's trying to trick you into slavery, and this is what you do about it ...." When I asked Ma Moe, who'd been sold into slavery by a friend, what was the most important thing she wanted people to understand about her experience, she lit up emotionally in a way she hadn't up to then, insisting emphatically on how crucial it is that people in Burma -- especially young people -- get the coaching they need to insulate themselves and their families from the risk of being trafficked, particularly given how sophisticated traffickers are at profiling victims and preying on trust.
Neither is any of this the hard part compared with the complex task of modulating or outright changing kinds of social norms that heighten the risk of capture by traffickers, particularly in contexts governed by a caste system or other forms of entrenched social hierarchy. Which aren't uncommon across South and Southeast Asia, and which can create barriers to human empathy every bit as powerful as what morally and psychologically enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.
Precedents
There are historical reasons why social awareness of slavery could be more effective on the global level than we might first be inclined to think.
"Stowage of the British Slave Ship 'Brookes' Under the Regulated Slave Trade, Act of 1788" (Thomas Clarkson)
As Bales likes to remember, there have been three major anti-slavery movements in the modern era prior to the nascent contemporary one. The first was started in 1787 by Anti-Slavery International -- or as it was called at the time, the Society for Effecting the Termination of the Slave Trade -- in London. Twenty years later, the slave trade in the British Empire was finished. This worked completely through social mobilization; in fact, it was one of the first major social movements in the West. The Society inundated parliament with huge petitions against slavery -- 517 altogether. It passed around anti-slavery cameos that fashionable women wore in bracelets and pins. And it disseminated Thomas Clarkson's drawing of the Liverpool-based slave ship Brookes, showing the horrible reality that slaves were forced to cross the Atlantic packed in like sardines, lying in their own excrement and vomit, for months. This picture was extremely shocking -- and effective.
The second anti-slavery movement was marked by some of the most decisive moral leadership in U.S. history, but it was also thwarted by a virtually total social division between the North and the South, with virtually total Southern intransigence, and culminated an enormous war that resulted in more than a million deaths, counting civilian casualties, and ended in results for the United States' former slaves that abolitionists could only be very partially proud of, if at all, and that has cast a long shadow since.
Hierarchical societies still create empathy barriers as powerful as what enabled the open slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. The third movement is less well known but offers a precedent for contemporary abolitionism that may be in some ways as compelling as the first. This was the global movement, which included luminaries like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt, against the enslavement of between 5 and 10 million people in the Congo as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The purpose of this enslavement was to feed new technologies, particularly pneumatic rubber tires. But the breakthrough for this movement was also thanks to new technologies: portable cameras that enabled abolitionists to do magic-lantern shows in big theaters everywhere -- a kind of documentary film before there were documentary films -- detailing the destitution in the Congo, which truly freaked viewers out and helped mobilize the public broadly. After this anti-slavery campaign captured the photos it captured and showed them across Western Europe and in North America, Leopold, who had completely denied everything until then -- and he could, because there was no way to prove what he was doing -- gave up, ended the enslavement, and, in 1908, relinquished the Congo to the Belgian government.
Let's see what the fourth one does. The most optimistic view says that as massive as slavery is today, it's also on the edge of its own extinction, needing only the right push. If the global slave population is 27 million, it's still 27 million out of a total of 7 billion, making it -- and here's the paradox -- the smallest fraction of the global population to be enslaved ever. If slavery generates between $30 billion and $45 billion a year to the global economy, it's a big industry, but it also amounts to the smallest ratio of the global economy ever represented by slave labor and slave output. While slavery has grown in absolute terms, it's shrunk in relative terms, and so, the theory goes, it's increasingly vulnerable.
A possibly less optimistic but still hopeful variation on this theme -- well clear of the most pessimistic view, at any rate, which would be that slavery is simply endemic to global capitalism -- is that slavery isn't just growing more slowly than the rest of the world is; it's also increasingly toxic to the rest of the world; and it's increasingly toxic in ways that the rest of the world will be forced to defend itself against. The same interests responsible for human trafficking and forced labor are, after all, also responsible for fostering other types of crime, as well as the kinds of corruption that slave-labor operations need for survival. If developed countries let slavery go unchecked, it will threaten to corrode the bilateral and multilateral agreements, and the international rule of law, that the whole global economy depends on. If developing countries don't check it, it may or may not mean slower short-term growth, but it definitely complicate long-term growth growth, or stunt it altogether, as outside investors bring more scrutiny and demand more transparency. In the meantime, the more visible an issue slavery becomes globally, the less inclined I'd be to forget some of the social uses mobile technology and social media been put to around the world in the last two years -- or to ignore the analogies between these uses and some of the tactics of the first and third modern anti-slavery movements.
The relationship between a country's tacit willingness to abide slavery and that country's risk of being left behind by the currents of global civilization isn't one that Burmese officials are necessarily inclined to discuss candidly. When I asked Brigadier General Kin Maung Si, the chief of police and head of the ministry of home affairs's human-trafficking office, about his government's emerging commitment to eliminating forced labor, he spoke only of poor economic conditions as a cause of slavery, not of slavery as a cause of economic stagnation. But it's a relationship that his government's new commitments acknowledge implicitly.
It's also a relationship that the leading exponents of the second modern anti-slavery movement were emphatic about and staked their own political reasoning on. As The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote in the magazine's endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860:
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise. ... We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organization.
This reporting was sponsored by MTV EXIT
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