Slavery Today

Wasn’t slavery abolished in 1865? Surely there aren’t any slaves today. Unfortunately there are considered to be between 2.5million and 25million slaves today depending on your definition. Bonded labour, forced migrant labour, child labour, sex slavery, forced marriage and child marriage are all more common today than they should be. See Wikipedia.

Traffickers from Thailand go into neighbouring countries (Laos and Cambodia) and convince poor parents that they have jobs for their children in the city and they will send them money. Of course they never see the money nor their children ever again. These kids are then taken to “breaking” facilities where they are beaten and starved until they become compliant and can be controlled.

They are then sent out on the streets to beg for money or put to work as prostitutes. Many of these encounters are filmed and sold as pornography in the West. Zoe Child Rescue is just one of the organisations combating this problem in Thailand.

Traffickers from South America promise people a better life in America, so they smuggle them across the border but don’t give them any legitimate paperwork, so they are forced to work illegally as domestic servants for very little money under the control of these traffickers.

The Trump administration is currently working very hard to prosecute these traffickers in an attempt to eradicate the practice.