The Truth About Slavery in the United States and Around the World

Prologue

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution declared that Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Formally abolishing slavery in the United States, the 13th Amendment was passed by the Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.

Introduction

Slavery, it appears, is a status that many people in modern times have come to believe is a stigma belonging solely to the United States of America, its founders and its history. The current concept of slavery for many is limited only to the idea that many blacks were abducted from Africa and brought to the United States and that the blacks were suppressed by the ‘white’ owners. And there is a lot of truth in this concept. Slaves were indeed often abused, mistreated, suppressed, and remaining uneducated and subject to the dictates of their owners. However, not all owners were ‘white’. As history records, there were more than a few blacks and other nationalities, including Native American Indians, who were slave owners as well. These owners were little different from the British colonists who imported slaves not only from Africa, but from almost every nation. And not every slave was black or African.

Opinion, at least of some of the present-day citizens of the United States, is that the concept of slavery was a sin against humanity and that the United States alone is the offender, and should atone for its sins and make reparations to descendents of former slaves. There is an undercurrent of thought that many, even most, of the difficulties affecting the education, the employment and even the very lifestyle of these descendents were caused and are being caused today by the effects of past slavery. That makes a good crutch for politicians seeking votes, but in retrospect has only some extremely small basis in fact. There is a lot of evidence to the contrary as the presence of minorities (including females) as the large number leaders of business, entertainment and politics show.

Not that discrimination hasn’t been – and still is – a cold hard fact of life; it exists now and has existed since man discovered that there was a difference in color and in race. Discrimination existed between nationalities in Asia, Africa and Europe long before there was a New World, and discrimination still exists in many if not most of areas of the world, including the United States. And it is likely that discrimination in one form or another will continue until the end of the world.

Being a descendent of a coerced Irish indentured servant great-grandfather who never found freedom from his enforced servitude and a captive English servant girl (England deported poor females and women of dubious reputation to service the colonists, some whom actually got married but most of whom did not) on my paternal side and a captured gypsy slave woman with whom a German vagrant was bred to generate other slaves on my maternal side, and having lived for some seventy-four years through a lot of changes, some good, some bad, in the United States and the world, perhaps my viewpoint is somewhat different. My siblings and I attended all white schools, worshiped in all white churches, shopped in mostly all white shops, ate in all white restaurants (when and if we had the money). White people did not date black people, white adults did not associate with black adults – at least socially – and white people did not marry black people. Nor did the ‘good people’ (white) associate with Asians. Nor did they socialize with the Irish. That was just the accepted status and most children weren’t even aware that discrimination existed as black and white children frequently played together.

It wasn’t until I became a member of the United States Armed Forces and attended basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, that I came to understand how severely society in the mid-1950’s actually discriminated against races. And it wasn’t until my sister married a black man, was forced to leave her job as the head nurse at a large North Carolina hospital and move to California to avoid the racial slurs and malicious spite that I realized how deep the division between races was in reality. While there has been some healing, the division and much of the hatred still exist and unfortunately a lot of the bigotry is exacerbated by sections of the media and especially political and religious leaders for purposes of their own. After all, if a percentage of the population remains under-educated, it can easily be persuaded by eloquent leaders.

The basic truth is that slavery is a situation that has existed as long as man has walked the earth, or if the theories of the evolutionists are right, even before he could walk. The very earliest of records reveal that slavery prevailed. The original writings of scripture in the Bible and in the religious texts of the oldest forms of religion show that slavery existed and slaves were frequently slaughtered in sacrifice to the gods of the time. And not just by the bad guys.

Slavery is ever a vile situation; the fact that it was not only legal but morally acceptable in most instances by most people in most societies notwithstanding. The very fact that one human being can own another person and do with that person as the owner wishes is a concept that is contrary to every moral principle known to man today, yet it is a situation that has existed – legally, for the most part – throughout the ages. The fact that leaders of civilization after civilization have used slavery as a form of repressing human beings is indisputable. It has only been in the modern times that slavery is slowly being eradicated throughout our civilization, yet it is only the legal form of slavery that is being extinguished. There still exists slavery today, slavery in many different forms, and in all its evil devious guises slavery is illegal. Despite laws in every nation abolishing slavery, illegal types of slavery persists in face of all the efforts to totally eliminate the problem. And these forms of slavery will remain in existence so long as there is the potential of profits involved. And in most cases of illegal slavery there is a lot of profit involved.

The indisputable facts are that illegal slavery does not exist in just one nation; rather it survives in virtually every nation, no matter whether capitalist, socialist or communist. Not wishing to draw a cover over the guilt of the United States – where illegal slavery, whether debt or sexual, is certainly firmly established – none the less, one must admit that all nations share the shame of allowing slavery of any kind to exist. Slavery, if it is to be totally abolished, must be confronted with a combined effort by all nations, including those nations that deliberately turn a blind eye to the existence of involuntary servitude – or, as more commonly known, slavery.

It is unlikely that one writer or one book will alter the concept that some people have of slavery. Nor is that the author’s intent. However, perhaps a somewhat different slant on the subject might provide a small amount of knowledge that has either been forgotten or overlooked altogether. And perhaps one reader may just make the difference. So, let’s take a look at this despicable action against humanity.

The Meaning of Slavery

Slavery:

1. A system based on enslaved labor: the practice of, or a system based on, using the enforced labor of other people.

2. Condition of being enslaved labor: the state or condition of being held in involuntary servitude as the property of someone else.

3. State of being dominated: a state of being completely dominated by another.

Enslave:

1. Claim ownership of somebody: to take somebody prisoner and claim legal ownership of that person and his or her labor.

2. Subject somebody to a controlling influence: to subject somebody to a dominating influence that takes away his or her freedom.

Enslaved Labor:

1. Forced work relations: work in which people are employed against their will by the threat of violence, destitution, detention, or other hardships, including death, to themselves and/or members of their family.

2. Enforced work: work performed as a result of captivity or coercion under the threat of force without the laborer receiving personal benefit of any sort.

Throughout history, and even more so during the late 20th Century and early 21st Century, slavery is – and has been – a contentious word that arouses strong emotions in everyone who hears it or who uses it or even those who just read it. Slavery, in all its devilishly devious guises, is also a situation that has likely touched the life of literally every human being on earth in one form or another, at one time or another. And slavery, the word and the deed, is just not going to go away; no matter what laws may try to abolish it. After all, slavery has been around for more than five thousand years. Slavery is a complex subject, in a large part because the word ‘slavery’ and the definition of slavery differs from country to country, from society to society, and even from person to person, depending on the ancestry of the person. Even more complex, the definition of slavery and the status of slaves vary from time period to time period in history and even in modern times. To properly have a grasp on the scope of slavery, it is important to examine the various conditions of slavery and realize that there are multiple forms of slavery; how each form of slavery impinges on people of various ethnic groups and how it affected each nation. It is also important to realize that slavery, in most of its forms, was completely legal under the laws and regulations at the time. Only those forms of slavery involving crimes against humanity were illegal from their inception, while the enslavement of people through captives of war, through barter and exchange, or through heredity were completely legal and approved of by most societies.

A short list of types of slavery includes chattel slavery, debt slavery, human trafficking, penal slavery, peonage, sexual slavery, serfdom, and wage slavery. Even this list is likely to be incomplete; however, most situations wherein an individual is subject to the domination of another in whatever form could be a sub-part of one of these categories.

Before delving into the history of slavery and its effect on nations and their economies and their people, a brief explanation and the understanding of each genre may be in order.

Part 1

Types of Slavery

Chattel Slavery

The first known form of slavery and undoubtedly the most widely recognized status of human bondage is chattel slavery. In this classification, the slave is owned, legally, body and soul, by his or her ‘master’. In most civilizations, the master, or owner, had total and complete liberty to treat the slave as he wishes, without penalty in many cases. The master could abuse the slave, beat the slave, lease out or sell or trade the slave, prevent the slave from having family. The master could kill the slave if he so chose, again without penalty in most cases.

The master could and often did breed the slave with a member of the opposite sex in order to generate additional slaves. In many instances this effort insured an adequate and continuous supply of slaves. And breeding was not always between two slaves. History is replete with instances where the female slaves are raped by their owner, and the offspring – if there were children as a result the sexual relations – were for the most part, themselves slaves. Not so frequent but still a matter of record were instances when a female member of the owner’s family would have sexual relations with a slave.

The slave was the personal property of the owner and, under most circumstances, was treated as property, just as a horse, or mule or a parcel of land; not as a person. In the majority of civilizations the owner was also responsible for the actions of the slave in relationship to others, and had to atone for any damages the slave may have caused. In the instance when a slave would try to escape, the owner could offer a return for the slave’s return and any person helping the slave to escape was subject to punishment under law, up to and including time in prison. In many societies, if the escaping slave was killed by someone trying to recapture the slave, there would be no penalty.

Virtually all of the slaves during Antiquity were of the chattel group. While some slaves were sold into slavery by their family as part of a debt, these were only a small minority. The majority of these slaves were taken prisoner during war or were the children of captured prisoners. Occasionally an entire nation or tribe would be taken as slaves and raids on neighboring communities for the purpose of obtaining slaves were common. These prisoners were used for the more difficult kinds of labor, predominately in mines or in agriculture. In some instances, ransom was offered and accepted for the captives, especially for those of higher rank, but the majority seldom obtained freedom.

Under other forms of chattel slavery was that criminals could be and often were sentenced to slavery as punishment. Another form of slavery was debt slavery. While it existed during Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, debt bondage was extremely rare, as most civilizations forbade the enslavement of their own citizens except in the case of crime. However, apprenticeship was, and still is in many countries, an acceptable form of service wherein the apprentice would serve as unpaid labor to the tutor, and the apprentice, once sufficiently skilled, could open his own business.

During the 16th and 18th century, as the British Empire began to establish colonies in North America, demand for products that were plentiful in the new land grew beyond the capability of the British Isles to produce, thereby generating the need for importation from the colonies. The demand expanded faster than the availability, thus the growing need for labor became acute. This situation led to the creation of a different type of slavery known as indentured servant slavery. Even with this source of workers, the need for labor continued to grow faster than the supply of manpower. In response to the demand for more labor, especially workers who could do the hard labor jobs, the importation of slaves into the British Colonies increased dramatically. The majority of these imported slaves came from Africa. Pirates and raiders would capture Africans and transport them to the new land, where they would be sold to the highest bidder. As the need for additional slaves grew, leaders of African tribes would sell captives they had taken in war to the raiders in exchange for supplies. In addition, the leaders of the tribes would often sell members of their own tribes, especially dissenters or members who had committed crimes against other members of the tribe.

This trade continued to expand until the colonists rose up in rebellion – The American Revolutionary War – and after achieving independence from England began to address the problem of slavery. Violent differences between the states over slavery eventually led to a civil war and to the establishment of the law abolishing slavery. (The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America)

Debt Slavery

Debt slavery – or to use the terminology that in order to be less offensive to some people has come into play in early part of the 21st Century (commonly referred to as being ‘politically correct’), debt bondage – is classically defined as a situation when a person provides a loan of money or services to another and uses his or her labor or services to repay the debt; when the value of the work, as reasonably assessed, is not applied towards the liquidation of the debt or is not sufficient to repay the debt, the situation becomes one of debt bondage. This was not uncommon in Ancient Greece, Asia and the Roman Empire, as well as many of the other ancient societies, although serfdom and feudal systems were more widely spread in the ancient civilizations, especially during the latter periods of the civilizations. During the middle of the 15th Century, a slave in debt bondage became known as an indentured servant.

Like chattel slaves, indentured servants could not own property, could not move from one place to another, could not marry without the permission of their owner, were subject to physical punishment (like many young ordinary servants), and saw their obligation to labor enforced by the courts. To ensure uninterrupted work by the female servants, the law lengthened the term of their indenture if they became pregnant.

While there was little difference in the treatment of the indentured servant from that faced by the chattel slave, indentured servants, unlike chattel slaves, could look forward to a potential release from bondage at sometime in the future, if they survived. If the servant did survive their period of labor, the servants would as a matter of course receive a payment known as freedom dues, often little more than a new suit of clothes and three dollars (in the North American British colonies, less in many other civilizations), and become free members of society. One could buy and sell indentured servants' contracts, and the right to their labor would change hands, but not the person as a completely owned piece of property, although there was little difference in the end.

On the other hand, this ideal situation was not always a reality for indentured servants. Both male and female laborers could be subject to violence, flogging, rape, and beatings, occasionally even resulting in death. In some cases, an indentured servant was treated more harshly than chattel slaves, as the owner of the chattel slave had a lifetime right of ownership and a substantial investment in the chattel slave and a much less investment in the indentured servant. Richard Hofstadter, a noted historian and Professor of American History at Columbia University, writes that as Asian and black slaves arrived in greater numbers after 1700, white laborers became a privileged stratum, assigned to lighter work and more skilled tasks.

The most prominent use of debt slavery in available records took place in the settlement of the British Colonies in North America. A shortage of workmen made it necessary that the settlers find additional manpower to overcome the difficulties of establishing colonies in the new land. Travel from England, Scotland, Ireland and Europe was expensive, especially for young, unemployed men and females. This brought about a new version of slavery: indentured servitude. An indentured servant was typically a young, mostly unskilled laborer who came to the Americas under contract to work for an employer for a fixed period of time, typically three to seven years, in exchange for their ocean transportation, food, clothing, lodging and other necessities during the term of their indenture. They included men and women; most were under age twenty-one, and most became helpers on farms or house servants. They were not paid wages and thus were unable to generate income to repay the indenture, requiring in many cases, extended periods of servitude as the holder of the indenture contract was allowed by law to charge interest on the debt without any ceiling limit.

Workers that, among others, included Europeans, in particular Irish, Scottish,English, and Germans, immigrated to Colonial America in substantial numbers as indentured servants, particularly to the British Thirteen Colonies. In the 17th century, nearly two-thirds of English settlers came as indentured servants, although indentured servitude was not a guaranteed route to economic autonomy. Given the high death rate, many servants did not live to the end of their terms, as it was a frequent practice for the owner of the indentured servant’s services to add a high rate of interest to the debt, extending the term of servitude for years, often lasting until the death or disability of the indentured servant.

In the 18th and early 19th century, a great number of Europeans traveled to the North American colonies as redemptioners, a form of indenture. Redemptioners were European immigrants that did not include British, Irish or Scottish citizens, who gained passage to America (most often to the colony/state of Pennsylvania) by selling themselves into indentured servitude to pay back the shipping company which had advanced the cost of the sea voyage.

British indentured servants generally did not arrive as redemptioners after the early colonial period due to certain protections afforded them by law. Redemptioners, on the other hand, were at a severe disadvantage because they negotiated their indentures upon arrival after a long and difficult voyage with no prospect to return to their homelands. They were forced to negotiate their indentures with their future master at the worst possible time, before they were allowed to leave a stinking, vermin-infested ship at the end of a long voyage.

It has been estimated by historians that the redemptioners comprised more than fifty percent of the total white emigration to America prior to the Revolution,and as much as eighty-five percent of all Europeans were redemptioners.

Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is the illegal trade in human beings for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation or for forced labor, a modern-day form of slavery, very much in the same vein of slave trade during ancient days. However, slave trade, for the most part, was legal and acceptable in many countries, while human trafficking is illegal in all nations.

Trafficking of people is a very lucrative industry. According to official estimates made during the early 21st century, it is now the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. Globally, it is tied with the illegal arms trade, as the second largest criminal activity, following the drug trade. The great majority of the victims of human trafficking are women and children.

The total annual revenue for trafficking in persons is estimated to be between five billion dollars and nine billion United States dollars. The Council of Europe states, People trafficking has reached epidemic proportions over the past decade, with a global annual market of about forty-two and one-half billion United States dollars. The United Nations estimates nearly two million five hundred thousand people from one hundred and twenty-seven different countries are being trafficked around the world.

Human trafficking differs from people smuggling. In the latter, people voluntarily request or hire an individual, known as a smuggler, to covertly transport them from one location to another. This generally involves transportation from one country to another, where legal entry would be denied upon arrival at the international border. This action is especially prominent in the United States, as hundreds and thousands of individuals enter the US illegally every day. There may be no deception involved in the (illegal) agreement. After entry into the country and arrival at their ultimate destination, the smuggled person is usually free to find their own way. This trafficking has resulted in multitudes of illegal residents in virtually every state in the United States.

While smuggling requires travel, trafficking does not. Much of the confusion rests with the term itself. The word trafficking includes the word traffic, which is often equated with transportation or travel. However, while the words look and sound alike, they do not hold the same meaning. Human trafficking does not require the physical movement of a person (but must entail the exploitation of the person for labor or commercial sex). Additionally, victims of human trafficking are not permitted to leave upon arrival at their destination. They are held against their will through acts of coercion and forced to work or provide services to the trafficker or others. The work or services may include anything from bonded or forced labor to commercialized sexual exploitation. The arrangement may be structured as a work contract, but with no or low payment or on terms which are highly exploitative. Sometimes the arrangement is structured as debt bondage, with the victim not being permitted or able to pay off the debt.

Bonded labor, or debt bondage, is probably the least known form of labor trafficking today, and yet it is the most widely used method of enslaving people. Victims become bonded laborers when their labor is demanded as a means of repayment for a loan or service in which its terms and conditions have not been defined or in which the value of the victims’ services as reasonably assessed is not applied toward the liquidation of the debt. The value of their work is greater than the original sum of money borrowed.

Forced labor is a situation in which victims are forced to work against their own will, under the threat of violence or some other form of punishment, their freedom is restricted and a degree of ownership is exerted. Men are at risk of being trafficked for unskilled work, which globally generates thirty-one billion US dollar according to the International Labor Organization. Forms of forced labor can include domestic servitude; agricultural labor; sweatshop factory labor; janitorial, food service and other service industry labor; and begging. A major example would be the exploitation of agriculture workers in Florida, Arizona, Texas and California.

Sex trafficking victims are generally found in dire circumstances and easily targeted by traffickers. Individuals, circumstances, and situations vulnerable to traffickers include homeless individuals, runaway teens, displaced homemakers, refugees, and drug addicts. While it may seem like trafficked people are the most vulnerable and powerless minorities in a region, victims are consistently exploited from any ethnic and social background. Kidnapping, especially among the less affluent, is an increasing industry in Mexico, South America and Asia.

Penal Slavery

Penal labor or penal servitude is a form of unfree labor, or labor that an individual is forced to do against his or her consent. The term may refer to several related situations: labor as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labor, and labor as a form of occupation of convicts. These situations can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts. Large-scale implementations of penal labor include labor camps, prison farms, and penal colonies.

Punitive labor, also known as convict, prison, or hard labor, is a form of unfree labor used in both past and present as an additional form of punishment beyond imprisonment alone. Punitive labor occupies a spectrum between two types: productive labor, such as industrial work; and intrinsically pointless tasks used as primitive occupational therapy and/or physical torment. Sometimes authorities turn prison labor into an industry, as on a prison farm. In such cases, the pursuit of income from their productive labor may even overtake the preoccupation with punishment and/or reeducation as such of the prisoners, who are then at risk of being exploited as slave-like cheap labor (profit may be minor after expenses, e.g. on security). On the other hand, in Victorian prisons, inmates commonly were made to work the treadmill: in some cases, this was productive labor to grind grain; in others, it served no purpose. Similar punishments included the crank machine (a device where prisoner had to turn a crank that merely pushed paddles through sand in a drum), and shot drill, carrying cannonballs around for no purpose.

In the British Empire in the 19th century, hard labor became a standard feature of penal servitude as penal transportation, the exportation of criminals to other colonies, was phased out. Although it was prescribed for severe crimes (e.g. rape, attempted murder, wounding with intent, per the Offences against the Person Act 1861) it was also widely applied in cases of minor crime such as petty theft and vagrancy, as well as victimless behavior deemed harmful to the fabric of society.

Notable recipients of forced labor under British law include Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer and poet, who sued his lover’s father for libel, but lost and then was himself convicted for gross indecency, and John William Gott (a terminally ill trouser salesman convicted of blasphemy).

The British penal colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1868 provide a major historical example of convict labor, as described above: during that period, Australia received thousands of transported convict laborers, many of whom had received harsh sentences for minor misdemeanors in Britain or Ireland.

The Penal Servitude Act of 1853 (16 & 17 Vict. c.99) substituted penal servitude for transportation, except in cases where a person could be sentenced to transportation for life or for a term not less than fourteen years. Section 2 of the 1857 Penal Servitude Act (20 & 21 Vict. c.3) abolished the sentence of transportation in all cases and provided that in all cases a person who would otherwise have been liable to transportation would be liable to penal servitude instead. Sentences of penal servitude were served in convict prisons and were controlled by the British Home Office and the Prison Commissioners. After sentencing, convicts would be classified according to the seriousness of the offence of which they were convicted and their criminal record. First time offenders would be classified in the Star class; persons not suitable for the Star class, but without serious convictions would be classified in the intermediate class; and habitual offenders would be classified in the Recidivist class. Care was taken to ensure that convicts in one class did not mix with convicts in another.

As late as 1885, seventy-five percent of all prison inmates were involved in some sort of productive endeavor, mostly in private contract and leasing systems. By 1935 the portion of prisoners working had fallen to forty-four percent, and almost ninety percent of those worked in state-run programs rather than for private contractors.

In the People's Republic of China, laojiao (Re-education through labor) and laogai (Reform through labor) have been used as a way to punish political prisoners. They were intended not only for criminals, but also for those deemed to be counter-revolutionary (political and/or religious prisoners).

Most Japanese prisoners are required to engage in prison labor, often in manufacturing parts which are then sold cheaply to private Japanese companies. This practice has raised charges of unfair competition since the prisoners' wages are far below market rate.

The 13th Amendment of the Constitution for the United States of America in 1865 explicitly allows penal labor as it states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. However the convict lease system became popular in the South in the late 19th century. Since many impoverished state governments could not afford penitentiaries, they leased out prisoners to work at private firms. Douglas A. Blackmon, the American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, argues that it was Southern policy to intimidate blacks; tens of thousands of black Americans were arbitrarily arrested and leased to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations.

The state governments maximized profits by putting the responsibility on the lessee to provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical care for the prisoners, which resulted in extremely poor conditions, numerous deaths, and perhaps the most inhumane system of labor in the United States.

Reformers abolished convict lease in the Progressive Era, stopping the system in Florida in 1919. The last state to abolish the practice was Alabama in 1927.

Penal labor is still often used as a punishment in the U.S. military.

Another historically significant example of forced labor was that of political prisoners and other persecuted people in labor camps, especially in totalitarian regimes since the 20th century where millions of convicts were exploited and often killed by hard labor and bad living conditions. For much of the history of the Soviet Union and other Communist states, political opponents of these governments were often sentenced to forced labor camps. The Soviet Gulag camps were a continuation of the punitive labor system of Imperial Russia known as katorga, but on a larger scale.

Between 1930 and 1960, the Soviet regime created many Lager labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. There were at least four hundred and seventy-six separate camp complexes, each one comprising hundreds, even thousands of individual camps. It is estimated that there may have been between five million and seven million people in these camps at any one time. In later years the camps also held victims of Stalin’s purges as well as World War II prisoners. It is most likely that approximately ten percent of prisoners died each year. Out of the ninety-one thousand Germans captured alive after the Battle of Stalingrad, only six thousand survived the Gulag and returned home.

Peonage

Labor was in great need to support the expanding agriculture, mining, industrial, and public-work jobs that arose from conquerors settling in the Americas. To generate sufficient product for internal consumption as well as export to foreign lands, a great number of laborers were needed. To account for these jobs a system came about where creditors forced debtors, against their will, to work for them. This system of involuntary servitude was called peonage. Peonage was formally banned by the United States government in 1833, ruling that debtor’s prison for federal debts was in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Most states enacted similar laws shortly thereafter.

The origin of this form of involuntary servitude goes back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico when conquistadors having conquered the country and enslaved the natives, forced these natives to work for Spanish planters and mine operators. Peonage was prevalent in Spanish America especially in the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. It remains an important part of social life, as among the Urarina of the Peruvian Amazon.

Peonage also became common in the South of the United States after the American Civil War. Poor white farmers and freed slaves and their families who could not afford their own land would farm another person's land under a lease arrangement. This was called sharecropping and initially the benefits were mutual. The land owner would pay for the seeds and tools in exchange for a portion or percentage of the money earned from the crop and a portion of the crop. However, as time passed, many landowners began to abuse this system. Instead of the benefits remaining mutual, the landowner would force the tenant farmer to buy seeds and tools from the land owner’s store which had highly inflated prices. Other tactics included debiting expenses against the sharecropper's profits after the crop was harvested and miscalculating the net profit from the harvest, thereby keeping the sharecropper in perpetual debt to the landowner. Since the tenant farmers could not offset the costs they were forced into involuntary labor due to the debts they owed the land owner. In all too frequent instances, the tenant farmer would never be able to escape this forced labor situation. Without the ability or the means to survive otherwise, the servitude would continue on with the descendents of the initial tenant farmer with the land owner claiming the debt of the deceased farmer against his surviving family.

Sexual Slavery

Sexual slavery or forced sexual slavery is the organized coercion of unwilling people – male, female and children – into different sexual practices. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies. Sexual slavery will include single-owner sexual slavery, ritual slavery sometimes associated with traditional religious practices, slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes where sex is common, or forced prostitution.

According to the Rome Statute (Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court) (Article 7(2)(c)), sexual enslavement means the exercise of any or all of the powers attached to the right of ownership over a person. It comprises the repeated violation or sexual abuse or forcing the victim to provide sexual services as well as the rape by the captor. The crime has the character of a continuing offence. The Rome Statute's definition of sexual slavery includes situations where persons are forced to domestic servitude, marriage or any other forced labor involving sexual activity, as well as the trafficking of persons, in particular women and children.

Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) constitutes a form of coercion and violence against children and amounts to forced labor and a contemporary form of slavery. A declaration of the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996, defined CSEC as:

‘sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child or a thirperson or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object and as a commercial object’

CSEC includes the prostitution of children, child pornography, child sex tourism and other forms of transactional sex (survival sex) where a child engages in sexual activities to have key needs fulfilled, such as food, shelter or access to education.

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Child sexual prostitution

The prostitution of children is a form of commercial sexual exploitation of children in which a child performs the services of prostitution, most often for the financial benefit of an adult.

In India, the federal police report that around one million two hundred thousand children are believed to be involved in prostitution. A CBI statement said that studies and surveys sponsored by the ministry of women and child development estimated that about forty percent of all India's prostitutes are children.

Thailand’s Health System Research Institute reported that children in prostitution make up at least forty percent of prostitutes in Thailand.

In many parts of the world, child prostitution is tolerated and ignored by the authorities. Reflecting an attitude which prevails in many developing countries, a judge from Honduras says, on condition of anonymity: If the victim [the child-prostitute] is older than twelve years old, if he or she refuses to file a complaint and if the parents clearly profit from their child's commerce, we tend to look the other way.

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Child sex tourism

Child sex tourism (CST) is a travel to a foreign country for the purpose of engaging in commercially facilitated child sexual abuse. Child sex tourism results in both mental and physical consequences for the exploited children, that may include disease (including HIV/AIDS), drug addiction, pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism, and possibly death, according to the State Department of the United States. Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil and Mexico have been identified as leading hotspots of child sexual exploitation.

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Forced prostitution

Sexual slavery encompasses most, if not all, forms of forced prostitution. The terms forced prostitution or enforced prostitution appear in international and humanitarian conventions but have been insufficiently understood and inconsistently applied. Forced prostitution generally refers to conditions of control over a person who is coerced by another to engage in sexual activity.

The laws from Sweden, Norway and Iceland--where it is illegal to pay for sex, but not to be a prostitute—define all forms of prostitution as inherently exploitative, and abusive, and reject the notion that prostitution can be voluntary. In contrast, prostitution is a recognized profession in countries such as Netherlands and Germany.

The question of whether prostitution should be considered a free choice or a form of exploitation of women is dividing Europe.

In 1949 the UN General Assembly adopted the ‘Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (the 1949 Convention)’. The 1949 Convention supersedes a number of earlier conventions that covered some aspects of forced prostitution. Signatories are charged with three obligations under the 1949 Convention: prohibition of trafficking, specific administrative and enforcement measures, and social measures aimed at trafficked persons. The 1949 Convention presents two shifts in perspective of the trafficking problem in that it views prostitutes as victims of the procurers, and in that it eschews the terms white slave traffic and women, using for the first time race- and gender-neutral language. Article 1 of the 1949 Convention provides punishment for any person who [p]rocures, entices or leads away, for purposes of prostitution, another person or [e]xploits the prostitution of another person, even with the consent of that person. To fall under the provisions of the 1949 Convention, the trafficking need not cross international lines.

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Crime against humanity

The Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum – which defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court – recognizes rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity as crime against humanity if the action is part of a widespread or systematic practice. Sexual slavery was first recognized as crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued arrest warrants based on the Geneva Conventions and Violations of the Laws or Customs of War. Specifically, it was recognized that Muslim women in Foca (southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina) were subjected to systematic and widespread gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement by Bosnian Serb soldiers, policemen, and members of paramilitary groups after the takeover of the city in April 1992.

The indictment was of major legal significance and was the first time that sexual assaults were investigated for the purpose of prosecution under the rubric of torture and enslavement as a crime against humanity. The indictment was confirmed by a 2001 verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that rape and sexual enslavement are crimes against humanity. This ruling challenged the widespread acceptance of rape and sexual enslavement of women as intrinsic part of war. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found three Bosnian Serb men guilty of rape of Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) women and girls (some as young as 12 and 15 years of age), in Foca, eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. The charges were brought as crimes against humanity and war crimes. Furthermore two of the men were found guilty of the crime against humanity of sexual enslavement for holding women and girls captive in a number of de facto detention centers. Many of the women subsequently disappeared.

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Sexual slavery during armed conflict and war

Rape and sexual violence have accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era. Before the 19th century, military circles supported the notion that all persons, including unarmed women and children, were still the enemy, with the belligerent having conquering rights over them. To the victor goes the spoils has been a war cry for centuries and women were included as part of the spoils of war.

Institutionalized sexual slavery and enforced prostitution have been documented in a number of wars, most notably the Second World War.

Comfort women are a widely publicized example of sexual slavery. The term is a euphemism for the two hundred thousand women who served in the Japanese army’s camps during World War II. Historians and researchers have stated that the majority of these enslaved women were from Korea, China, and other occupied territories part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (a bloc of Asian countries controlled by Japah), and were recruited by kidnapping or deception to serve as sex slaves. Many women were raped to death or killed by torture such as having their breasts sliced off or having their abdomens slit open. Each slave was raped …an average of ten rapes per day (a number that most authorities consider a much too low estimate), and a five day work week, each comfort girl was raped fifty times per week or two thousand five times per year. For three years of service – the average – a comfort girl was raped seven thousand five hundred times. (Parker 1995 United Nations Commissions on Human Rights)

Germany established brothels in the concentration camps for sexual gratification of collaborating prisoners (Lagerbordell). The women forced to work in the concentration camp brothels came from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Soldier’s brothels (Wehrmachtsbordell) were usually organized in already established whorehouses or in hotels confiscated by the Germans. The leaders of the Wehrmacht were interested in running their own brothels when sexual disease spread among the soldiers. In the controlled brothels, the women frequently had a medical check for her personal benefit and the German soldiers’ protection.

It is estimated that a minimum of thirty-four thousand one hundred and forty women from occupied states worked as prostitutes during the Third Reich. In Eastern Europe the local women were often forced into prostitution. On 3 May 1941 the Foreign Ministry of Polish Government in Exile issued a document describing the mass raids made in Polish cities with the aim of capturing young women, who later were forced to work in brothels attended by German soldiers and officers. There were often escape attempts, with at least one mass attempt by women in Norway.

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Contemporary Sexual Slavery

Official numbers of individuals in sexual slavery worldwide vary. In 2001 International Organization for Migration estimated four hundred thousand, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated seven hundred thousand and UNICEF estimated one million seven hundred and fifty thousand.

A common misconception is that sexual slavery and sex-trafficking only occur in poor countries. In fact, most countries of destination for victims of human trafficking are wealthy countries from the Western World, where customers can afford to buy sex from these victims. Trafficking victims from Eastern Europe, as well as from Asia, Latin America and Africa, to Western Europe, for the purpose of sexual exploitation, is a serious problem.

In Netherlands, it is estimated that there are from one thousand to seven thousand trafficking victims a year. Most police investigations relate to legal sex businesses, with all sectors of prostitution being well represented, but with window brothels being particularly overrepresented. In 2008, there were eight hundred and nine registered trafficking victims; seven hundred and sixty-three were women and at least sixty percent of them were forced to work in the sex industry. All victims from Hungary were female and were forced into prostitution.

Out of all Amsterdam's eight thousand to eleven thousand prostitutes, more than seventy-five percent are from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, according to a former prostitute who produced a report about the sex trade in Amsterdam, in 2008. An article in Le Monde in 1997 found that eighty percent of prostitutes in the Netherlands were foreigners and seventy percent of them had no immigration papers.

In Germany, the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe is often organized by people from that same region. Authorities identified six hundred and seventy-six sex-trafficking victims in 2008, compared with six hundred and eighty-nine in 2007. The German Federal Police Office BKA reported in 2006 a total of three hundred and fifty-seven completed investigations of human trafficking, with seven hundred and seventy-five victims. Thirty-five percent of the suspects were Germans born in Germany and eight percent were German citizens born outside of Germany.

In Greece, according to NGO estimates, there are thirteen thousand to fourteen thousand trafficking victims in the country at any given time. Major countries of origin for trafficking victims include Nigeria, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Albania, Moldova, Romania, and Belarus.

In Switzerland, the police estimates that there may be between one thousand five hundred and three thousand victims of human trafficking. The organizers and their victims generally come from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Cambodia, and, to a lesser extent, Africa.

In Belgium, in 2007, prosecutors handled four hundred and eighteen trafficking cases, including two hundred and nineteen economic exploitation and one hundred and sixty-eight sexual exploitation cases. The federal judicial police handled one hundred and ninety-six trafficking files, compared with one hundred and eighty-four in 2006. In 2007 the police arrested three hundred and forty-two persons for smuggling and trafficking-related crimes. A recent report by RiskMonitor Foundation found that seventy percent of the prostitutes who work in Belgium are from Bulgaria.

In Austria, Vienna has the largest number of trafficking cases, although trafficking is also a problem in urban centers such as Graz, Linz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. The NGO Lateinamerikanische Frauen in Oesterreich–Interventionsstelle fuer Betroffene des Frauenhandels (LEFOE-IBF) reported assisting one hundred and eight trafficking victims in 2006, down from one hundred and fifty one in 2005.

In Spain, in 2007, officials identified one thousand thirty-five sex trafficking victims and four hundred and forty-five labor trafficking victims.

In Africa the colonial powers abolished slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth century, but in areas outside their jurisdiction, such as the Mahdist empire in Sudan, the practice continued to thrive. Now, slavery has been banned worldwide, but there are numerous reports of women sex slaves in areas without an effective government control, such as Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, northern Uganda, Congo, Niger and Mauritania. In Ghana, Togo, and Benin, a form of religious prostitution known as trokosi (ritual servitude) forcibly keeps thousands of girls and women in traditional shrines as wives of the gods, where priests perform the sexual function in place of the gods.

Recently, the supreme court of India stated that India is becoming a hub for large scale child prostitution rackets, and suggested the setting up of a special investigating agency to tackle the growing problem.According to Save the Children India, clients now prefer ten- to twelve-year-old girls. The soaring number of prostitutes believed to have contracted HIV in India’s brothels has helped give India the