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When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called "traditional forms" of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas.
But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today's global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.
The article asserts that much of today's slavery is being driven by the demand for electronic goods.
[Edit: fixed ILO links]
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Slavery Was Never Abolished – It Affects Millions, and You May Be Funding It
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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 19 2018, @03:47PM (3 children)
One of the very common situations for slaves is being sold into prostitution. What, you thought all those 14-year-olds in Bangkok were choosing their profession freely?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday October 19 2018, @05:01PM
This is happening in the US. There's even an unofficial connection to the criminal justice system.
Turns out, if you post bail for someone, you can revoke it at any time and they go back to jail.
There are crooked bail bondsmen who will bail out a woman and then inform her that she has a new job in sex work where she doesn't keep the earnings, and if she doesn't like it she gets locked up again. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/29/revealed-how-us-sex-traffickers-recruit-jailed-women-for-prostitution-the-trap [theguardian.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 19 2018, @08:29PM (1 child)
There's been a huge propaganda push WRT the Asian Massage Parlour "rub n tug" being slavery and human trafficking.
The situation with the morality police is such that its not entirely clear if this is true or just a weird angle along the lines of marijuana "Reefer Madness" style BS.
I'm not sure it really works as propaganda, given the historical straw dogging about pre-civil war black slavery and whipping blacks to death for not picking enough cotton or starving them, it's a hard PR sell that its horrible that some asian women has a nice office job that occasionally involves some hand jobs, compared to how awful the working conditions are at some perfectly legal yet higher paying jobs. Given that a lot of strip malls have the Asian trifecta of the rub -n- tug, the nail salon, and the Chinese take out, you can kinda see the long term career progression path, such that rub -n- tug isn't even the worst working conditions of their lives, although maybe its clearly the most prurient for PR purposes. Assuming they aren't ending up as "long pork" in the stir fries, its not all that bad of a life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday October 20 2018, @03:52PM
Some massage parlors are legit. Some are thinly veiled prostitution fronts. Some of both of those are slavery operations, and if you're a customer you may not recognize them as such because you aren't supposed to pick up on it.
The reason many slaves are forced into prostitution is that it's a highly lucrative business and requires basically no capital expenses other than the people being prostituted. And it's worth noting that enslaved prostitutes are an issue even in places where prostitution is completely legal, such as the Netherlands.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.