slavery in the modern world

Slavery in the world today

One may think that the slavery is a concept of the past centuries and that in a modern society every person is free. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word "slave" has wider meaning than the commonly used one.

A person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.

• a person who works very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation
• a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something

Slave Trade Abolition was passed in March 1807 and both United Kingdom and the United States enacted the law in 1807 and 1808 respectively. However, more than 200 years after that countries around the world fight with slavery. Nowadays the most victims of slavery are children and woman that are sold as servants, factory workers or sex slaves. Problem mainly concerns poor regions of Middle East and Africa but America and Europe are not free of the slavery problem either and have noticeable amount of sex slavery cases.  In Europe and America immigrants from poorer countries are sometimes taken advantage of and forced to work for smaller than minimal or no salary.

Facts about slavery around the world

Few examples of slavery in modern world and todays slave trade 

• In 2005 UNICEF and United Arab Emirates signed the agreement to free more than 1000 children slaves from Middle East involved in camel racing.
• Remnant of the cast system in India exacerbate the children slavery problem which are often forced to work in carpet factories. Although carpet manufacturers and carpet importers to the US and Europe deny it, South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude estimates that between 200 000 and 300 000 children are slaved in India. Estimated numbers for Pakistan and Nepal are of the same order.
• Led by false promises of employment in hotels or restaurant women immigrants are sold and forced to prostitute in Europe and North America.
• Sugar cane slavery is problem in Dominica Republic where people are kidnaped by or sold to Dominican soldiers and forced to harvest sugar cane for low or no wages.

Your slavery footprint

If you are curious if and how many people were abused or worked as slaves to manufacture goods that all of us use everyday check your slavery footprint. Service slaveryfootprint.org after collecting some informations about place you live and what is in your house and what do you eat everyday will show you how many people were abused making your life as it is. Service will also display a map with distributed fraction of slavery in your footprint.