© Jonas Gratzer/Getty Images
More than 70 percent of enslaved people today are women and girls—such as this woman from Nepal, who was sold by her parents as a child.
While in Accra, Ghana, in 2001, I befriended a young woman at a nightclub. I was flabbergasted that Fola (a pseudonym) was taking a keen interest in me. When we left the club and strolled along the beach, I noticed a few men were following us. I could tell she was a bit frightened, and when I asked her about it, she began to cry. When she propositioned me a few minutes later, I knew something was wrong. I gave her an extra cellphone that I had, and my number, telling her she could always call to talk. The next afternoon she told me her story: She and all of the women in the club that night had been prostituted, controlled by a Nigerian syndicate that trafficked women, guns, and narcotics.
Fola and the other women at that club aren't alone.
Forced labor, forced marriage, and forced sex work are rife around the world, often right under our noses in unrecognized forms. Yet when I ask the anthropology students in my classes when slavery ended, most say something like "with the 13th Amendment" or "at the end of the Civil War."
Only a handful realize that modern slavery is everywhere.
Researchers estimate there are at least
40 million people enslaved today. This is by no means a problem isolated to the developing world. In the 1990s, my friend and activist Alice Jay
was kidnapped at the age of 11 in Western Michigan by the Mexican Mafia. She was trafficked for more than 15 years throughout the United States and is now a heroic survivor running her own nongovernmental organization called
Sister Survivors in Detroit.
I am a cultural anthropologist who studies and lives in both the United States and the West African country of Togo. Even I have been strikingly naïve about this situation. Growing up near Flint, Michigan, I saw massage parlors, strip clubs, and cheap motels everywhere. In hindsight, I now wonder if these places were populated by people who were trafficked, perhaps even some children, coerced into exploitation.
In Togo, many of the things I first considered to be a normal part of life-the children married before the age of 15, the hundreds of
children working daily on fishing boats, and the dozens of poor girls who head to market each day for a 12-hour stint of haggling-I now consider to be manifestations of slavery.
Comment: See also: