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Slavery Was Never Abolished – It Affects Millions, and You May Be Funding It

posted by mrpg on Friday October 19 2018, @02:19PM   
from the or-suffering-it dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

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.

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[Edit: fixed ILO links]

Original Submission

• Re:Slavery currently extensive in the US (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday October 20 2018, @07:42AM

  by khallow (3766) on Saturday October 20 2018, @07:42AM (#751314) Journal

  As an aside, humans have a considerable ability to make up shit to excuse any evil. Consider what else can be rationalized as harm to others - the wrong political or religious beliefs, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong vocations (scientist or humanitarian, for example), being in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. Historically, remarkably flimsy excuses have been used for cracking down. Thus, as a minimum in a free society we should criminalize only that which has clear harm to others each time it occurs. None of the victimless crimes meets that threshold.

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