Slavery Today

by Kevin Bales, Rebecca Cornell

Forced to work in back-breaking, under- or unpaid jobs from agricultural work to prostitution, slaves today — men and women, old and young — are trapped in the same spiral of brutality and control they have endured for centuries, with one crucial difference: a collapse in the price of human beings. Globalization, governmental corruption, and the population explosion have thrust billions of people into the pool of potential slaves. This huge surplus of impoverished people has pushed the human price tag to only $100, the cost of a pair of “designer” jeans. This means that it’s worse to be a slave today than ever before. Slavery Today traces the "products" created by this inhuman system from the jungle and farm through the global markets and into our lives and homes. It addresses the controversies over prostitution and the buying back of slaves while presenting solutions and ways readers can get involved in the growing global anti-slavery movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Justice, True Crime

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Why I had to write Blood and Earth ...

For years I traveled the world meeting people in slavery trying to understand the depth and truth of their lives. What I saw, heard, and learned changed me, and led me deeper into the work of ending slavery, but I was missing something important. Where there are slaves, the environment is under assault, forests are being destroyed, endangered species are dying, and climate change is worsening – and all of this destruction is driven by profits from products we buy.

Children, especially, are suffering: in the fish camps of Bangladesh, in the mines of Eastern Congo feeding the electronics industry, in mercury-saturated gold pits in Ghana, and when brutally used and disposed of by criminals decimating the Amazon forest. And beside the children, endangered species are being wiped out, or pressed to fight back - like the ‘protected' Bengal tigers that prey on child slaves in fishing camps.

After seven years of research and travel we now know that if slavery were a country it would be the third largest producer of CO2 in the world after China and the USA, though its population is only the size of Canada’s. The scale of this joint disaster has been too big to see, until now. Yet, it is precisely the role that slaves play in this ecological catastrophe that opens a new solution, one that unleashes the power of abolition to save and preserve the natural world.

To hear more about Blood and Earth tune in to NPR’s Fresh Air on Tuesday 19 January, and check out an excerpt in Scientific American HERE.

I'm a guy that grew up in Oklahoma thinking if the whole world is as quiet as this place I better cram life to the fullest. The good news: the world is often much more interesting than Oklahoma. I lived a long time in London, and now live in DC. For the last 14 years all my work has been about modern slavery - real slavery, not sweatshops, or bad marriages, or not being able to stop shopping. Back in 1999 I published a book about contemporary slavery that changed my life. It went into 10 languages, got made into a movie, won some prizes, stuff like that. Since then I've published three more books, and three more will come out in 2008.

In Sept 2007 I published a book that is a plan for the eradication of global slavery. It's called Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves. This is what people said about it:

“None of us is truly free while others remain enslaved. The continuing existence of slavery is one of the greatest tragedies facing our global humanity. Today we finally have the means and increasingly the conviction to end this scourge and to bring millions of slaves to freedom. Read Kevin Bales' practical and inspiring book and you will discover how our world can be free at last.” -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

“I was enslaved at age 11 as part of a human trafficking plot. I know modern slavery from the inside, and since coming to freedom I am committed to end it forever. Every human life has value. People have been sold for far too long and it's time to stop it. This book shows us how to make a world where no more childhoods will be stolen and sold as mine was.” Given Kachepa, former child slave in the United States.

“Ever since the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans have congratulated themselves on ending slavery once and for all. But did we? Kevin Bales is a powerful and effective voice in pointing out the appalling degree to which servitude, forced labor and outright slavery still exist in today's world, even here. This book is a valuable primer on the persistence of these evils, their intricate links to poverty, corruption and globalization--and what we can do to combat them. He's a modern-day William Lloyd Garrison.”
--Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves


Here's the other bio. stuff: My book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy published in 1999, was nominated for the

Reviews

[Josephine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's pathetic, but I think that, for most people, the issue of child prostitution only briefly entered their awareness when Ashton Kutcher and the weekly newspaper, Village Voice, engaged in a battle of words over the stats Kutcher used for his Real Men Don't Buy Girls campaign.

Village Voice claimed Kutcher was using phony stats to bring awareness to an issue that they didn't think was as big an issue as Kutcher was making it out to be; Kutcher shot back charges that, maybe Village Voice was entering the void left by Craigslist with their backpage sex ads that were actually helping pimps offer up child prostitutes.

And on and on it went...and I couldn't help but think that, for people who know next to nothing about modern-day slavery period, they should read Kevin Bales and and Rebecca Cornell's "Slavery Today," which is short primer on the issue that gives you the basics.

The only issue I have with this guide is that, for "journalists" like those from Village Voice, this guide is either too short on "facts" or it's not as compelling a read as it could have been.

Mind you, I'm only writing this from the perspective of someone who's read a lot on the issue (and I'm a huge admirer of Kevin Bales) and as someone who has written about complex things and tried to "dumb it down" for a broader audience.

The problem with jamming too many facts to prove something is that it makes for dry reading.

I know I'm not giving a lot of credit to most people here -- and I'm coming across as incredibly condescending -- but I know that when I was in journalism school, I was taught to write at a certain grade level so the audience will not only "get it" but also want to continue reading.

Fourth grade, amazingly, is the level you want to write at if you want people to continue reading -- because if you want a huge audience to read something, understand it, and care, then that's how simple you have to write.

But dry facts don't keep people reading -- stories do.

While Bales and Cornell had several examples of the various types of modern-day slavery that exist today, I think that if I'd had my crack at writing this guide, that's how I would have structured the book: focus on the stories of actual people who have suffered from child prostitution, debt bondage, and human trafficking.

You need to put a face to an issue because most people identify easier with just one face -- why else do you think that sponsorship programs like Plan make it seem like you're paired up with one child?

It's a hundred times better to be helping out a village, but for most people, the thought that they're giving one child a better shot at life is easier to comprehend -- and easier for them to believe that their money is doing something good.

And, of course, when you blow an issue up to the high level and you're just focusing on facts and statistics about the people out there who are currently enslaved, you then have people like Village Voice and also other media outlets like Business Insider who choose to quibble over numbers and think it's okay to focus on how "wrong" those numbers are as opposed to the real issue at hand.

Sure, some of us find it distasteful when Hollywood celebrities start getting preachy -- but often, I think that the awareness they bring to an issue is actually more helpful than anything else. It's really, really sad that even though Kevin Bales has been writing about modern-day slavery since 1999, it's only now that the media is turning more of a focus onto that issue...even though they're mostly focusing on one component of it.

Yes -- child prostitution in America is appalling. Yes -- Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are doing a good thing by trying to bring more awareness to that issue.

But, I really wish they'd chosen to throw all of their energies into helping an established organization like "Free the Slaves" instead of choosing to create their own organization.

And what I wish most of all is that writers for Village Voice and Business Insider would have read a book like "Slavery Today" to get at least some sort of basic understanding of the broader issue of slavery and then used their respective media platforms to help educate people rather than attack a celebrity like Kutcher, who only had the best of intentions.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the non-fiction unit I read Slavery Today by Kevin Bales and Rebecca Cornell. This book gives you a lot of information on slavery all around the world in present day. For example, he talks about how some people mistake slavery as an alien from a different country or a criminal. I agree with the author, that slavery needs to be addressed more. You can get slavery addressed by sending a letter to the government or if you wanted to start small, you could hold a town meeting about the issue of slavery. There are 27 million slaves all around the world today, and it is worse than ever before. The author says, that we can help stop slavery, by getting people more aware of the problem.

Reading this book, has taught me about all the different kinds of slavery in our world today and what parts of the world it happens in the most. For example, slavery mostly happens on the continent of Africa. New learning that I acquired is when a lot of things you buy profits slavery. For example, when you buy jewelry it profits slavery because a slave probably made it, and you are paying their “owner” or “master” instead of paying the slave, for what he or she did. I also learned about Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor was the president of Liberia in 1997-2003. He put Liberia in international debt, which caused to create more slavery in our world. This debt caused slavery, because this affected the economy in an awful way, making people desperate for money. The people who are desperate for money, could be the slaves or the slave “owner” or “master”. The slaves could put themselves in the situation they are in or the slave “owner” or “master” could take awful actions on people, to make money for themselves.

I liked the author’s style. He did not just write a bunch of facts down, it felt like he was having a conversation with you. I like this because it makes it more interesting to read and helps you focus. One thing I didn’t like about the author’s style, is I felt like he repeated himself a lot. He repeated “There are 27 million slaves in the world today”. I think he did this, because he wanted to make people want to do something about it, by reminding them about the number of people in the world are slaves. I didn’t like this because I wanted to hear something new, I didn’t want to read the same information over and over again. I wanted to know more about how many people are freed from slavery and how many people live their whole entire lives as slaves. I also wanted to know more about how it affects their lives after they are freed. He did talk a little bit about this information, but I wanted to know more.

I would recommend this book to middle schoolers and high schoolers, not to a younger student. I think this because, the book has a wide range of vocabulary that they wouldn’t understand. Also, there is some mature content in this book, that most kids at a young age, would not understand or could not handle. This book helped me understand that slavery still goes on in our world today, and it needs to be stopped

[Lela · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Elective reading, satisfies nonfiction/informational requirement)

Summary: There are forms of slavery in all parts of the world, and the brutality and pain is on the same level has it has been for centuries, only now the price of a human has lowered to the equivalent of a pair of designer pants. This book explores the facts of many different types of slavery in today's world and allows the reader to become an advocate for the anti-slavery movement.

Response: I think this book has amazing amounts of facts and an incredible amount of research poured into it. I believe the authors (Becky Cornell also helped write it) are very well-versed in this subject area. As a read, however, I did not find myself interested. That is a big deal for me, since slavery is a subject that I constantly read up on. This book covers all of the different types of slavery and how it happens in many different countries. However, the book is not kind to the reader. I feel like it is a text book, though a small one. There are stories and other "by the way boxes" throughout the book (those boxes throughout text books that are different colors or whatnot to make you realize that they are not part of the regular text), but I think they should have been integrated into the writing more. I had a very hard time reading this, and I don't know how we would expect young readers to read it unless we assigned specific pages to them for specific studies (like you would in a text book). I wouldn't want to call this a YA book, but the sentences within it are typed in such a way that I cannot call it a book for adults. While it is stuffed with information, the information is given in a way that makes an older reader feel talked down to.

Again, while this book is fantastic by way of wealth of information, it is not exactly a good read.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all read of trafficking in the news and slavery in other countries, and we acknowledge how horrific this is, but it's occurring over there, always over there. Mr. Bales brings it to your clothes rack, to the front door. This is a short intelligent book that assumes a brief history of slavery throughout time is all we need and that current history of forms of slavery is where we need to be educated.

Clarifying "debt bondage" and how inexpensive it could be to dismantle this was eye opening enough that I'm already googling Sankalp and Rugmark and all the Fair Trade organizations. I would recommend this book just to familiarize yourself with worldwide legislation and what can be accomplished today to change situations for others.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid introduction to issues of modern slavery. Clear and concisely written, helping you blaze through it in no time, and also feel like you really learned something. At just over 100 pages, this is a good book if you're wanting to learn about modern slavery, but aren't ready or interested in diving into longer works. The authors show the complexity of modern slavery and how we all end up purchasing goods produced by slave labor. They lay out some examples of slavery and how it has been overcome in different parts of the world, and then propose some possible ideas to help eradicate slavery. A quick, fascinating read.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the history of slavery up to the present time and a clear exposition of what strategies have worked to eliminate it in various places in recent years. Bales persuasively argues that slavery could be completely eliminated within the present generation. His nuts and bolts approach and the success stories in implementing them make this book much more than the usual upsetting read on the subject.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was aware of slavery still being in effect today, but was not aware of the full extent.....27 million men, women, and children...entire villages being kept as slaves...and it's rampant in our own backyard.
This is an excellent book in being thorough of the issue as well as ways to rid our world of this evil practice once and for all.

[Victoria (hotcocoaandbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a good reminder of some of the history of slavery up through the past centuries. There are actual slave accounts given as well as detailed information about slavery today. I enjoyed it, though not as much as some of his other books. It is a good introduction for those who may have just begun to learn about human trafficking.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really short synthesis of Kevin Bales' other books. If you're one of those tl;dr people, read it. If you care about modern slavery for real, skip this and read any/all other books by Bales.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book.