A break from the usual electronics, DIY, and gadget-tinkering here.
I read about a new book on modern slavery last night on
Digg, which is normally full of geeky fluff. But this time I got a link to an article on
NPR, describing a journalist's travails as over four years he set out to document the modern-day slave trade. One of the few times I got something worth reading off Digg.
A quote from the NPR article, which is enough to make anyone cringe:
Though now illegal throughout the world, slavery is more or less the same as it was hundreds of years ago, Skinner explains. Slaves are still "those that are forced to work under threat of violence for no pay beyond sustenance."Something disturbing has changed however — the price of a human. After adjusting for inflation, Skinner found that, "In 1850, a slave would cost roughly $30,000 to $40,000 — in other words it was like investing in a Mercedes. Today you can go to Haiti and buy a 9-year-old girl to use as a sexual and domestic slave for $50. The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced."
Skinner obtained this specific figure through a very hands-on process. In the fall of 2005, he visited Haiti, which has one of the highest concentrations of slaves anywhere in the world.
"I pulled up in a car and rolled down the window," he recalls. "Someone said, 'Do you want to get a person?'"
The book is
A Crime So Monstrous, Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery, by E. Benjamin Skinner. The reviews have been glowing, but it is a somewhat turgid read. I know far more than I care to about Washington neo-con sensibilities. The book also praised G. W. Bush as the president who has done the most for slaves in the modern era.
Here's a brief excerpt (laboriously re-typed because Adobe Digital Editions won't allow cut-and-paste, damnable Digital Rights Management):
For our purposes, let's say that the center of the moral universe is in Room S-3800 of the UN Secretariat, Manhattan. From here, you are some five hours from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. Your slave will come in any color you like, as Henry Ford said, as long as it's black. Maximum age: fifteen. He or she can be used for anything. Sex or domestic labor are the most frequent uses, but it's up to you.
You can buy a twelve-year old girl in Haiti, for $50, which is little more than the cost of dinner. Of course $50 is FOB Port-au-Prince -- potential human traffickers beware: passport and visa issues are your problem, not the seller's. And, inevitably, these
restaveks ("stay-withs") or child slaves end up not just doing the dishes, but bending over for the overseer.
The Haitians (mostly) who employ such child slaves rationalize it as providing the children with better circumstances than back in their hinterland Haitian homes, where they would literally plant
kamote (actually, yams..) and live to the age of forty.
And the time-honored means to avail oneself of a Haitian child? apparently the
courtiers or.. dealers, for lack of a better word, pop up in these hinterland towns, and promise needy parents that their child will be given an education in Port-au-Prince, in exchange for light housework. So ironically, the parents pick the smartest, brightest child in their brood for this unprecedented blessing, only to consign their offspring to doom.
This reminds me of the oddly-parallel, but (hopefully) less coerced practice here in our country of plumbing the countryside for suitable
barrio lasses. The Haitians do not want their slaves from the slums of Cap Haitien, because apparently, street-smart kids run away really quickly. Same thing for middle-class Filipinos, apparently, who continue to lean on our provincial relatives for trustworthy domestic labor.
The really scary thing about what a
failed state Haiti is, is that the lower-middle class families which employ slaves earn around.. $30 a month. The upper-class Haitians don't want to be involved with slavery, and they have the money to hire proper servants. So for these Haitian "slave-owners," a purchase of a child is a major undertaking, much like a car payment.
The book also goes into detail about the trafficking of Eastern European women into prostitution. Moldova seems to be the go-to country when it comes to "value for money." But the book describes the long and odious process which ends up with Russian entertainers in Quezon City's finest clubs.
A Crime.. also describes the plight of indentured quarry workers in Bihar State, in India. Apparently, India has the world's highest number of slaves (anywhere up to ten million). Many of these Indian slaves, who generally are from the outcast castes, ended up in slavery due to tiny debts incurred by their fathers or grandfathers. The book describes the circumstances of Gonoo, a forty-something man whose entire family was enslaved because his grandfather borrowed $0.60 in the 1950's.
But let's not think that slavery is confined to Haiti, Sudan, India, and China. The author made it to Singapore (although he goes into no details in this book) where there's an alarmingly high rate of Indonesian maids falling from their employers' HDB flats. "Trouble with hanging out the laundry," is how Skinner describes the official response.
When I was in Singapore with Lalai last month, the news was all over the Straits Times about a Singaporean woman who had failed to pay her Indonesian maid for four years, fed her only scantily, and did not allow her any phone calls. Skinner adopts Kevin Bales' definition of slavery as
a human being who is forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. By that standard, the Indonesian maid in the Straits Times
was a slave.
A Crime So Monstrous, Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery is available in hard-cover (it was released on March 11) but can also be purchased online as an e-book (with DRM). I bought my copy for $12-odd dollars (a bit high to pay for three hours' information, but not outrageous) from
the Books on Board web site.
A Crime.. is also available in electronic form from Simon & Schuster, which is the publisher. However Simon & Schuster doesn't take Philippine credit cards, so...
Anyway, I paid for it using PayPal on the Books on Board web site, struggled a bit with Adobe DRM, and just finished the book. Appalling. If we Filipinos think we're in poor shape, we have to read this book.
What's even more appalling is that a lot of the practices done by human traffickers and described in the book, probably get done in our country as well. Those persistent car-tapping street kids, for instance, probably are in a similar hole.
The book ends with this: it's all down to
poverty. Slavery won't disappear until meaningful attempts have been made to address poverty.
Oh well, off my soapbox then. Because poverty is so entrenched and persistent, that it's more convenient (and guilt-free) for the middle class to collectively put its nose to the grindstone and concentrate on building our own lives.
