Today’s World Slave System

Child slavery refers to the slavery of children at a young age. In the past, many children have been sold into slavery in order for their family to repay debts or crimes or earn some money if the family were short of cash. Sometimes this is also to give the children a better life than what they had with their family or because the family did not want the child to live with them anymore.

In most institutions of slavery throughout the world, the children of slaves became the property of the owner. This was the case with, for example, thralls (serf or unfree servant in Scandinavian culture) and American slaves. In other cases, children were enslaved as if they were adults. Usually the status of the mother determined if the child was a slave, but some local laws varied the decision to the father. In many cultures, slaves could earn their freedom through hard work and buying their own freedom. The infamous Children's Crusade is believed to have led to the enslavement of many young pilgrims.

Although the abolition of slavery in much of the world has greatly reduced child slavery, the phenomenon lives on, especially in Third World countries. According to the Anti-Slavery Society, "Although there is no longer any state which legally recognizes, or which will enforce, a claim by a person to a right of property over another, the abolition of slavery does not mean that it ceased to exist. There are millions of people throughout the world — mainly children — in conditions of virtual slavery." It further notes that slavery, particularly child slavery, was on the rise in 2003. It points out that there are countless others in other forms of servitude (such as peonage, bonded labor and servile concubinage) which are not slavery in the narrow legal sense. Critics claim they are stretching the definition and practice of slavery beyond its original meaning, and are actually referring to forms of unfree labor other than slavery. In 1990 reports of slavery came out of Bahr al Ghazal, a Dinka region in southern Sudan. In 1995, Dinka mothers spoke about their abducted children. Roughly 20,000 slaves were reported in Sudan in 1999. "The handmade woolen carpet industry is extremely labor intensive and one of the largest export earners for India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Morocco." During the past 20 years, about 200,000 and 300,000 children are involved, most of them in the carpet belt of Uttar Pradesh in central India.

Many children in Asia are kidnapped or trapped in servitude, where they work in factories and workshops for no pay and receive constant beatings. Slaves have reappeared following the old slave trade routes in West Africa. "The children are kidnapped or purchased for $20 - $70 each in poorer states, such as Benin and Togo, and sold into slavery in sex dens or as unpaid domestic servants for $350.00 each in wealthier oil-rich states, such as Nigeria and Gabon"

About 10 cases of missing children are "being taken very seriously" in connection with the suspected abduction of a girl by a Roma couple in Greece, a spokesman for a Greek children's charity said Tuesday Oct. 22, 2013.

"They include children from the United States, Canada, Poland and France," said Panagiotis Pardalis of the Smile of the Child charity.

Trafficking of children includes recruiting, harboring, obtaining, and transporting children by use of force or fraud for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts, such as commercial sexual exploitation (including prostitution) or involuntary labor, i.e., enslavement. Some see human trafficking as the modern form of slavery. Human trafficking is the trade of human beings and their use by criminals to make money. The majority of trafficking victims are adults, predominantly made up women forced into prostitution (although men are trafficked also), but children make up a significant number of the victims forced into prostitution.

In Ukraine, a survey conducted by the non-governmental organization (NGO) “La Strada-Ukraine” in 2001-2003, based on a sample of 106 women being trafficked out of Ukraine found that 3% were under 18, and the US State Department reported in 2004 that incidents of minors being trafficked was increasing. In Thailand, NGOs have estimated that up to a third of prostitutes are children under 18, many trafficked from outside Thailand.

The United Nations Special Report on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography estimates that about one million children in Asia alone are victims of the sex trade.

Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Save the Children, World Vision and the British Red Cross have called for an immediate halt to adoptions of Haitian children not approved before the earthquake, warning that child traffickers could exploit the lack of regulation. An Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman said that child enslavement and trafficking was "an existing problem and could easily emerge as a serious issue over the coming weeks and months".

The United States Modern Slave System

In 1996, when Marie Pompee came to visit her relatives in Port-au-Prince, she offered to take their servant, an orphan named Williathe Narcisse, back to the United States to live with her. To 9-year-old Narcisse, the offer sounded like the answer to her prayers. But upon arrival, Narcisse tells a harrowing tale: her place in her new suburban Miami home was to be a domestic slave, forced to work under threat of violence for no pay.

When she did not complete her cleaning duties satisfactorily, Narcisse claims Pompee beat her and sometimes forced her to sleep in the garage.

Tempting as it may be to think of Haitian child slavery at a distance, confined to the troubled island, today an untold number of such slaves — known by the Creole euphemism restavèks, or "stay-withs" — suffer in bondage inside the United States.

Human trafficking is one of the world's fastest growing industries, where billions of dollars are made at the expense of innocent people. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of trafficked people. Many are children, ruthlessly exploited in the country’s.

Washington DC is among the places with the highest number of trafficked people. 

According to experts, an estimated 300,000 children in America are at risk of human traffickers.

Tina Frundt was once a part of this statistic. At the age of 14, she left home with what she thought was the man of her dreams. She had no idea what she was getting herself into.

“I didn’t know what a pimp he was. He didn’t come up to me and say, ’this is what you are going to do’. It was more of a domestic violence situation. You tell them too much information that they use against you,” Tina says.

Soon after, Ms Frundt realized that this man would force her into selling herself sexually.

“I was raped, forced to do that and I thought it was my fault. He told me, after all the stuff that he did for me, all the things he bought for me, how could I betray him like that?” Tina recalls.

But going from victim to survivor was never easy.

“I basically begged police to take me to a jail and ended up as a juvenile. I was there for a year. But no one really believed me, no one really cared,” Tina says. 

Not having law enforcement on your side made things all the more difficult.

“So then I realised basically everything everyone told me – police would never believe me, pimping was legal, nothing would ever happen to him. That’s exactly what happened – nothing ever happened to him.” 

So what does one do to escape when even the police cannot do anything?

The FAIR fund, an anti-human trafficking group in Washington DC, is not relying on anyone but the few people who work there and their partners at local schools and juvenile detentions. 

The group mostly deals with 14 and 15-year-olds, and they speak to the realities of human trafficking. And this group even helps girls beyond the borders of the U.S.

As these young women continue to work for their peers, pimps roam the streets of major cities all over the world looking for young girls. And there in Washington D.C., where power is concentrated in the hands of a select few, they seem to have no trouble finding their next victim.

This problem could affect you and your family

So my advice to you parents is to educate your children about this modern slavery problem. Besides the usual of not going with strangers or taking and eating candy from people you don’t know, you better tell them other information. You better talk to them about situation when they are taken, how to contact someone to get back home. They better learn their phone number and address as soon as they are able to talk. It may be a good idea to place a homing device under their skin so that they can be tracked in case of an abduction. Oh, you think that is funny or extreme? You would not think so if one day you were waiting for your love one to come home from school and they never show up!