“In other words… Slavery has not been completely abolished” – Dr Angela Davis, “Slavery and the Prison Industrial Complex.”

Davis, who grew up in the segregated southern city of Birmingham, Alabama, home of the 1963 terrorist bombings against the black community in which four little girls died, has dedicated her life to the struggle for social justice and civil rights, specifically within the black community in the USA. Her work on the abolition of the prison industrial complex, which has gained greater prominence following the 2016 Netflix documentary “13^th”, has spanned over five decades and includes more than ten books. In her work, Davis, who was imprisoned following time spent on the FBI’s most-wanted list in 1970 and was realised in 1972 after a global campaign for her freedom, explores the institution of prisons as an enterprise, and the corporations whose profits are rooted at the centre of mass incarceration.

The title of Ana DuVernay’s award-winning Netflix documentary takes its name from the 13^th Amendment. The political doctrine which was ratified in 1865 by congress and amended the American Constitution, ‘banning’ slavery, except, as the documentary highlights, as a punishment for crime.

Following the introduction of the 13^th Amendment, the ‘liberation’ of slaves left huge gaps in the American labour market. Work that had once been carried out by force, for free, was no longer being completed. Meaning former slave owners and heads of industries that once utilised slave labour needed another way to fill the void of labour following the ‘end’ of slavery. The 13^th Amendment provided a legal means through which this chasm could be bridged.

The introduction of the laws of the Jim Crow era in 1870 (which ran until 1965) meant that black people were to be racially segregated and could be arrested, en masse, for offences such as looking at a white woman, shaking hands with a white person or showing public affection to another black person. These laws ensured the continuation of white supremacy following slavery. Enabling prisoners to be declared ‘slaves of the state’; convict leasing allowed convicts to be ‘leased’ to private parties, such as plantation owners, mine owners and other corporations.

Labour as Penitence

Of course, if someone is convicted of a crime, they should be punished. But to what extent should this involve forced labour?

Not all crimes are worthy of the sentences inferred on them, if any, and with growing awareness of police violence towards (specifically) young black men in America, the systemic and disproportionate imprisonment of people of colour, means we can ascertain that the state of America’s criminal justice system doesn’t always protect those most vulnerable to its predatory laws.

American holds 25% of the world’s prisoners but just under 5% of the world’s population. In 1970, the prison population was 357,292. By 2014, the prison population was 2,306,200. Whilst one in 17 white men will serve time in prison, one in three African-American men will spend time behind bars and one out of four prisoners in the world, is imprisoned in the USA. This means more than half of all adult black women in America have at least one family member locked up.

Prisoners are forced to carry out labour to buy necessities, often at premium rates, such as clothing or shoes that fit (most prisoners can expect ‘one-size-for-all clothing and shoes upon arrival), soap (the cheapest soap is a 4-pack of Ivory for $3.50), toothpaste, phone-calls, pain-killers (a small packet of Aspirin is $1.50) or food. This factory-style labour can range from production lines for private companies, such as stitching $90 underwear for Victoria’s Secret, dealing with customer returns for Walmart or packaging coffee for Starbucks, earning as little as 23 cents to $1.15 per hour.

Fighting Fire with Fire

Not only are inmates being recruited to fight fires for a basic wage of around $2 a day plus $1 an hour, (compared to the average wage of a civilian firefighter in California coming in at $73,860 per year) they are also more likely to be injured whilst at work. During an active fire, inmates can be expected to work 24-hour shifts and given that more than 1,500 inmates received injuries so bad they required hospital treatment between June 2013 and August 2018, including being 8 times more likely to suffer smoke inhalation than civilians, the impact of this intensive work can have lasting impacts, long after their sentence has been served.

Beyond the health implications of working as an inmate firefighter, taking part in the programme doesn’t equate to opportunities for employment on the outside. With 65 million US adults holding a criminal record and 90% of employers carrying out criminal background checks, unemployment rates for former inmates soars to 27.3%, compared to 3.8% for the general public. With 4000 inmates working on the front line to tackle California’s wildfires last year, it’s inconceivable to think that after training for the position, these men won’t qualify for the same job once released.

Modern Slavery and America

The forced labour of America’s inmates, a disproportionate number of whom are people of colour (67%) – 94% of which are sentenced without trial – is so akin to the financial and state-protected infrastructure of slavery, that evaluations such as Dr.Davis’ are difficult to deny. Whether forcing humans to make up the production lines for designer outlets, filling up call centres with free labour for private corporations or allowing men to lose their lives fighting fires for less than the price of a bar of soap, the prison industrial complex and its ties to slave-era labour must be as Dr.Davis suggests “radically abolished” to make way for restorative justice and reconciliation that allows for true rehabilitation of offenders. A justice that allows for those most vulnerable in society to move access fair, unbiased and appropriate penance.

L'articolo The Inmate Firefighters Risking Their Lives For $1 An Hour proviene da InsideOver.

Every year, tens of thousands of people from Turkmenistan are forced into picking cotton by the government. According to a report by Anti-Slavery, during the cotton harvest, workers from both the public and private sectors are made to fulfil quotas by picking cotton in what was described as “hazardous and unsanitary conditions”. It revealed that doctors, dentists, teachers, students, and military personnel are some of those obliged to abandon their normal duties to be transported to the cotton fields.

Anti-Slavery International’s partner Alternative Turkmenistan News (ATN) estimated that during the 2016 cotton harvest around 49,000 teachers – in a country with a population of less than 6 million – were working in the cotton fields as part of Turkmenistan’s forced labour program.

Like neighbouring Uzbekistan – one of the world’s largest cotton exporters with a similar state-orchestrated system of forced labour – Turkmenistan’s centrally command economy means that the government controls the production of cotton; the pricing structure for harvested cotton; and the required quotas produced from local regions. Forcing people to work in the cotton fields is the only way to meet the pressures of those quotas. Since there are not enough manual labourers within agriculture to meet demands, the government intervenes by forcing other workers from within the public to travel to the cotton fields under threat of penalty.

Those who have the means, opt to bribe the officials to escape the gruelling work obligation. Others, who are not able to afford to do so, are resigned to the arduous work conditions where they have limited access to drinking water, showers, and toilets.

Unlike Uzbekistan, where efforts to end this state-sponsored system are creating some small steps towards change, this is not necessarily reflected in the same manner in Turkmenistan. This was illustrated by the three-year imprisonment of Gaspar Matalaev – a reporter with Turkmen.news – who was arrested just two days after the publication of his article on the systematic use of forced adult and child labour in Turkmenistan during cotton harvesting. Matalaev was allegedly tortured by electric shock and held incommunicado, before being released this just earlier month after serving his full sentence.

Despite a ban on child labour in 2017 due to poor harvest, one region’s local education department ordered children to be sent to the cotton fields during their scheduled school term break. Witnesses attested seeing truckloads of these young students arriving for duty and being sent off to the fields. Early indications suggest that this year’s harvest is, again, likely to be below par once again which would make quotas difficult to meet.

Joanna Ewart-James, Executive Director of Freedom United, the world’s largest community for ending human trafficking and modern slavery, explained, “The reduction in the use of forced labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry in recent years and the Roadmap of Reforms to end Systematic Forced Labour in Uzbekistan developed by the Cotton Campaign coalition shows that it is possible to implement a better system.”

“However alongside a clear commitment from the government towards an aspiration of an end to reliance on forced labour, structural reforms must be enacted, and civil society must be empowered to ensure transparency. This must all be backed up with accountability across every aspect of the reform process. “

James also believed that most people are unaware that they might be inadvertently supporting this system every time they go shopping for clothes, and that it is often difficult to detect. “Because the labelling system typically displays the final country of manufacture and not the country of origin of the raw product, it is not easy to avoid cotton from Turkmenistan, which is sold to countries with garment industries where the cotton is used in retail products,” she said.

“However, there are facilities in Turkmenistan that produce manufactured goods. Towels bearing ‘Made in Turkmenistan’ labels were for sale on the websites of Amazon, Wal-Mart, and eBay in the US at the end of 2018 despite a ban on the import of cotton from Uzbekistan by the US Customs and Border Protection in May 2018. More recently, T-shirts bearing ‘Made in Turkmenistan’ labels were found being sold in Bulgaria at an Austrian superstore.”

The only current strategy against this dilemma is to ask the retailer questions about the origin of the cotton in the goods and if they have signed up to the Cotton Pledge Against Forced Labour.

In 2018, the US banned the import of cotton from Turkmenistan and 70 companies have now pledged to not knowingly source cotton from Turkmenistan because of the systematic use of forced labour and questionable slavery implications in its production. It is hoped that both these mechanisms will support other efforts to call on the government of Turkmenistan to take action that will bring an end to this system.

L'articolo How You May Be (Unknowingly) Supporting The Cotton Slave Trade proviene da InsideOver.

157 child slaves were rescued by Interpol in Nigeria and Benin in April 2019.

Rescued during “Operation Epervier II”, the child slaves worked as market peddlers, “carrying heavy loads or fetching water”. Of the 121 girls and 36 boys, some worked as housemaids and others worked as (forced) prostitutes.

Nigeria – although oil-rich – has been, “long hobbled by political instability, corruption, inadequate infrastructure, and poor macroeconomic management.”

According to UNICEF, “the end of the oil boom in the late 1970s coupled with mounting poverty has driven millions of children into labour [in the twenty-first century].” As a result, Sub Saharan Africa’s largest economy has 62% of its more than 181 million population living in extreme poverty.

Modern slavery

Nigeria is one of the top scoring African nations with an “estimated vulnerability to modern slavery”.

Forced labour – including child labour – is a significant money-making business in the nation. Nigeria is a “major source, transit, and destination country for forced labour and sex trafficking.”

According to End Slavery Now, “more than a quarter of the world’s slaves are children. These children are forced to commit commercial sex acts, forced into a system of domestic servitude or employed in occupations that are mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful.”

In Nigeria, 31.1% of children, aged 5 to 14, work. 26.8% of children, aged 5 to 14, combine work with primary school. Only 73.8% of students aged 5 to 14 complete primary school.

Free and compulsory education in Nigeria is federally mandated by the Education Act. However, compulsory education is often not enforced from state to state. School is also often a for-profit business in a country where free schools are considered the worst option for students. Furthermore, there is a lack of teachers nation-wide and “inadequate sanitation facilities, particularly for girls.”

A review by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor concluded that: “Children in Nigeria engage in the worst forms of child labor, including in quarrying granite and gravel, commercial sexual exploitation, and armed conflict. These children work in hazardous conditions with little food, small pay and no medical care.

Other examples of child labour in Nigeria include forced begging, agricultural labour, forced recruitment for army groups, including rebel groups, forced recruitment in armed robbery and drug trafficking, automotive repair and construction.

Nevertheless, according to the Global Slavery Index of 2018, the nation has been “proactive in responding to modern slavery”, despite “the Africa region ha[ving] the lowest average regional government response score.”

International Child Slavery

The problem of child slavery in Nigeria is an international one. UNICEF reports that “in West Africa’s Lake Chad region” Boko Haram has devastated the lives of “millions of families.”

Thousands of people in this region rely on smugglers daily to get them out of the country. Often, they end up trapped in Libyan detention centres, “where they are beaten, abused and indefinitely detained.”

Many Nigerian young women and girls are sold and forced into prostitution in southern and western Europe. Currently, there are over 10,000 Nigerian prostitutes in Italy. This figure, according to Mr Arinze Orakwe, the director of public enlightenment at the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).

At a June conference for action on illegal migration and trafficking, Mr Orakwe claimed that over 20,000 Nigerian girls are currently in Mali, waiting to cross over into Europe through the Sahara desert, North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea.

Paul Stanfield, Interpol’s director of organised and emerging crime attributes human trafficking in Nigeria to “organised crime groups who are motivated by money.”

0.8 per cent of the Nigerian population are estimated to live as slaves. While the nation has improved its response to tackling slavery, the problem will not be solved until the nation’s deep social, political and economic wounds are tackled.

L'articolo Ending Child Slavery in Nigeria and Europe proviene da InsideOver.

Jessica (whose name has been changed for anonymity) arrived in the UK in 2017 – bright-eyed and hopeful – for opportunities in the promised land. Leaving her three other children back home, she brought her youngest son with her to embark on their shiny new life. A family friend from her village had arranged paid work for her. She was promised more money than she could have ever dreamt of earning in Lithuania – how could she say no?

Yet, all that glittered did not shine of gold. Jessica was in for a sobering wake-up call. Ruthlessly exploited, she was forced to work punishing hours in a factory during the day and to stay in accommodation owned by her traffickers at night, cementing the fact that there could be no escape. Her earnings were withheld and treated as a form of “debt bondage” to cover the costs of her and her son’s journey to the UK.

Jessica’s young son was bullied by their traffickers to commit vehicle theft and assault with other young boys also trapped in the dark web of exploitation.

After a year, Jessica finally reported her case of modern-slavery to the police. She and her son were transferred to various safe houses before arriving at Medaille Trust’s family project in London. There, Jessica was able to receive a range of much-needed support such as finding a job, a new home, re-integrating her son back into education, and re-learning parenting skills after her trauma saw her spiral into heavy drinking.

Modern slavery is a lucrative, immoral enterprise that has been growing exponentially in the UK. Feeding on a voracious demand for cheap services across many sectors and the general presumption that slavery was abolished over 200 years ago, many are unaware of how abundantly it thrives in Great Britain. This means that British citizens are not vigilant against it in their own communities, and so, traffickers are able to operate in plain sight.

Medaille Trust is the largest provider of safe house accommodation for victims of modern slavery in the UK – running nine safe houses across England by supporting women, men, and families rescued from human traffickers.

Medaille Trust’s CEO, Garry Smith explained, “The need for this support is increasing for both positive and negative reasons. Positively, more victims are being identified due to increased awareness among civil society, businesses, the police, and public services – with much thanks to the world-leading 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Negatively, more victims are being identified because trafficking into the UK is on the rise.”

Unbeknownst to most, modern slavery reaches every community in every flourishing western country. Coming from poverty-stricken areas where work opportunities are sparse, victims are especially vulnerable to this type of exploitation. Offered seemingly good work prospects, they are lured to the UK on the premise of the “better life”, only to find themselves toiling in dire conditions with little to no pay. The threat of violence – to themselves or their families – is used to keep them in place. Furthermore, language barriers and lack of funds entrap them further, with little opportunity for escape.

Most commonly, trafficking can be found within industries synonymous with manual labour such as car washes, agriculture, construction, and factories. Women and girls are also prime targets for sexual exploitation.

“Today, slavery in the UK doesn’t look like people bound in chains. It looks like domestic and construction workers; nail bars and brothels; car washes, and fruit pickers. This is a vast business – there are an estimated 136,000 victims in the UK. Most remain hidden in plain sight – only 6,933 potential victims were referred in the UK system in 2018,” Smith said.

In July, 8 people were jailed after the largest modern-slavery ring was uncovered in the UK. The gang, led by a Polish family, orchestrated the trafficking of around 400 people who ranged from the age of 17 to 60. The traffickers raked in millions whilst their victims often worked for as little as 50p a day. Forced to live in squalor and rat-infested accommodation, they frequently faced starvation during their tenure on farms, factories, and recycling centres. The operation, which ran from June 2012 to October 2017, was described by presiding Judge Mary Stacey as “the most ambitious, extensive and prolific.”

“There needs to be a continued and increased awareness-raising programme throughout the UK,” Smith added. “This should tackle three areas: warning the vulnerable about the risks of trafficking; educating the public on the scale of modern slavery and how to spot the signs in their own communities; and ensuring that professionals in public services who may come into contact with victims are as equally well trained on how to respond to potential cases of modern slavery as they are to other safeguarding situations such as child abuse.”

L'articolo Modern Slavery Thriving In the United Kingdom proviene da InsideOver.

As torrents of tears rolled down her face, Habi Mutraba told the Guardian, “I have been hit, tortured, humiliated – I’m always the first to wake up and the last to go to sleep.”

Mutraba, who has been a slave since birth, is one of some 600,000 trapped in a system of modern-day slavery in the West African state of Mauritania. Her mother was made pregnant by her “master” and when Mutraba was born, she was given away to one of his family members. As she grew, the cycle would repeat itself. Regularly raped by the head of the household and his son, Mutraba became pregnant and gave birth to a child who, as tradition dictates, would also be a slave. Most of those entrenched in slavery come from generations of slaves and as such, have no knowledge of what life is like outside of slavery.

Like other Mauritanian slaves, Mutraba was not allowed to go to school or to have identity documents such as a passport or birth paper. Slaves are also routinely punished and tortured in ways that render them permanently scarred, disfigured, or relegated to a life of chronic pain.

Instead, Mutraba’s life is one of servitude that revolves around tending to her “owner’s” livestock and household chores. She despaired that no one could help her out of her demise and that she is at the mercy of her masters.

In 1981, Mauritania became one of the last countries in the world to abolish slavery. Despite the government routinely refuting claims that the practice still persists, thousands remain in bonded labour with experts estimating that around 20% of the population is enslaved. Slaves are traded like animals amongst those who find themselves in the upper echelons of the society’s caste system, which includes government officials.

The persistence of a slavery system in Mauritania has remained largely unchanged over history. For hundreds of years, a discriminatory system has thrived where those enslaved are the dark-skinned Haratine and Afro-Mauritanian ethnic minorities, while their “owners” are light-skinned Arab-Berbers. This caste system dates back to as early as the 8^th century. The Haratines who are free, are resigned to doing jobs that Arab-Berbers consider to be demeaning. Some of those roles may involve garbage collection, butchery, and working in the local markets. Furthermore, Haratines are denied various rights such as education, equal land ownership, and political representation.

To further bolster the custom, there has been continued intimidation and harassment of anti-slavery activists in Mauritania, who have been accused by the government of inciting unrest and creating disharmony in society because of their anti-slavery activism. Over the years, many have been imprisoned by the government.

Freedom United is an organisation which has campaigned for prominent Mauritanian anti-slavery activists to be released from prison, including Biram Dah Abeid, a presidential candidate in 2018 and founder of an anti-slavery endeavour called the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA),

Joanna Ewart-James, Executive Director of Freedom United explained, “On the one hand, the national government refuses to recognise the extent of slavery in Mauritania, claiming that it does not exist, or that only “vestiges of slavery” remain. On the other hand, policies and legislation the government has passed to outlaw slavery are neither effective nor implemented.

“Fundamentally, Mauritania needs to address structural racism in society which fuels slavery in the country.”

As with the slave trade in the West, the slavery that exists in Mauritania is heavily dominated by racial tensions and profiling. The light-skinned and affluent Arab-Berber population makeup around 30 per cent of society and regulate the country’s political and economic infrastructure. As such, since they rank at the top and may own slaves themselves, there is little incentive to alter a system that works in their favour.

According to the Global Slavery Index, Mauritania is estimated to be amongst the top ten countries in the world for a high prevalence of slavery within its population. This system often takes the form of generational chattel slavery, meaning people are seen as the property of their “masters”. It is especially complex in comparison to other countries because this system is deeply intertwined with racism and colourism. Children born to those enslaved are treated as the “property” of the “masters”, illustrating the hereditary nature of this descent-based slavery.

“We know that ethnic Haratine continue to be trapped in chattel slavery, and when they speak out against abuses they’re being silenced by the government suggesting that the country is not ready to make this shift. As there are cases of people being rescued from their abusive “masters” receiving no official recognition of their victim status by the government, with little in the way of rehabilitation support, let alone economic opportunities to get back on their feet, a sustainable end to the conditions in which it thrives remains far off,“ Ewart-James added.

L'articolo The Country Where Slavery Still Exists proviene da InsideOver.

Abolition doesn’t necessarily mean eradication. At least this is the lesson the history of slavery is trying to teach us, because despite being abolished in the UK in 1833, it continues to ruin lives in 21st Century Britain. And as the recent jailing of eight gang members in the West Midlands reveals, it still serves as a big counterweight to any notion that the UK is becoming an increasingly humane or free country.

Between 2012 and 2017, the eight members of the now-jailed gang clandestinely operated a slave network comprising 400 people, whose forced servitude and labor earned them around £2 million across the five-year period. They enticed their victims to migrate from Poland to England, where said victims were promised gainful employment and a ‘better life,’ only to be coerced into remaining in vermin-infested accommodation and into working extremely low-level jobs.

This story is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the Walk Free Foundation, which publishes the Global Slavery Index, there were approximately 136,000 people living in modern slavery in the UK in 2018. This means there are 136,000 people residing in the UK who have been unwillingly pushed into situations involving domestic servitude, enforced labor, organ harvesting, sexual exploitation, or other forms of exploitation.

Given that the National Crime Agency (NCA) reports just under 7,000 victims of modern slavery for 2018, it’s clear that the UK government is underestimating the scale of this issue and failing to address it fully. Admittedly, it was responsible for seeing the Modern Slavery Act through Parliament in 2015, a piece of legislation which established an anti-slavery commissioner for the UK, which bans prosecutions of slavery victims who were forced to commit crimes, and which requires corporations to report on how they’re preventing the use of slavery in their supply chains. However, even the government’s own figures have revealed a jump in the number of potential victims reported since the act’s passage, surging from 3,804 in 2016 to 5,142 in 2017, and then to 6,993 last year.

There is, in other words, a need for more to be done to tackle the insidious problem of modern slavery, and a need for the government to take more than a narrow, legislative and criminal view of the issue. This doesn’t apply only to the UK’s unenviable record on modern slavery, but also to many other developed nations, since increases in slavery numbers, in human trafficking or in risk factors for slavery have also been recorded in other EU nations over the past few years, as well as in Australia and the United States. The problem therefore needs to be tackled in structural terms, since, as the International Labour Organisation said in 2016, “poverty and lack of education” have a direct causal relationship with slavery.

A big clue to how modern slavery should be tacked can be gleaned from the statistics describing its social composition. As the 2018, Global Slavery Index reveals, 71% of the victims of modern slavery are female, indicating that discrimination and relative deprivation is a big driver of modern slavery. Because women generally lack the opportunities, the social standing and the freedom of movement of men, they’re more likely to be vulnerable enough to become victims. Similarly, the Global Slavery Index also reveals that vulnerability is exacerbated by poverty, by troubled home lives, and by social exclusion.

To return to the UK, British children and adults are also victimized by modern slavery, which is all-too often characterized as being restricted to immigrants. According to ECPAT UK (Every Child Protected Against Trafficking), at least 28 percent of children suspected or identified as having been trafficked into slavery have gone missing from social care at least once. Likewise, the Global Slavery Index also states in its 2018 report on the UK that gangs often target children who “are vulnerable due to neglect at home, previous experiences of sexual and physical abuse, parental drug and alcohol use, or low self-esteem.” And in the international context more generally, the Global Slavery Index evaluates vulnerability in terms of five dimensions: “governance issues, lack of basic needs, inequality, disenfranchised groups, and effects of conflict.”

This is why the UK – and other nations – need to take more than a simple legislative, crime-focused approach to modern slavery. It and other nations need to work to close gender gaps, to reduce inequality and poverty, and they also need to reconsider their immigration policies, which can often make it harder for at-risk individuals to seek help. As the Global Slavery Index concludes in its latest survey, Europe has seen “a tightening of migration policy and a reduction in the protections available to migrants in recent years [… this] renders these individuals more vulnerable to modern slavery.”

So while nations such as the UK can be applauded for passing modern slavery legislation, they also need to be vigorously reminded that this kind of legislation is only the beginning. Because without a structural, systemic approach to slavery, more cases like the one recently closed in the West Midlands will unfortunately have to be opened.

L'articolo Jailing of Gang Members Underscores UK’s Modern Slavery Problem proviene da InsideOver.