Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery

By Jesse Sage

Today, millions of people are being held in slavery around the world. From poverty-stricken countries to affluent American suburbs, slaves toil as sweatshop workers, sex slaves, migrant workers, and domestic servants. With exposés by seven former slaves--as well as one slaveholder--from Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, this groundbreaking collection of harrowing first-hand accounts reveals how slavery continues to thrive in the twenty-first century. From the memoirs of Micheline, a Haitian girl coerced into domestic work in Connecticut, to the confessions of Abdel Nasser, a Mauritanian master turned abolitionist, these stories heighten awareness of a global human rights crisis that can no longer be ignored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781250083104

Jesse Sage

Jesse Sage is an associate director of the American Anti-Slavery Group. Sage has appeared on NPR, BET, Pacifica Radio, and has spoken widely across the country. Fast Company recognized him as one of its "Fast 50" social innovators for his development of activist web-portal iAbolish.com.

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INTRODUCTION

BEHIND THE STORIES

MODERN DAY SLAVERY IN CONTEXT

Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten

In 1856, just five years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Boston abolitionist Benjamin Drew published an anthology of narratives from African American slaves who had escaped to Canada. Titled The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada Related by Themselves, the book featured testimony of slavery survivors who recounted their ordeals in brutal detail.

Drew’s work was one of many slave narratives published in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Driven by the popularity of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (also published in Boston) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the slave narrative became a distinct genre in American literature. These first-person testimonies compelled Americans to confront the human experience underlying the political debate over slavery. Moreover, as the cases of Douglass and Jacobs attest, slave narratives produced icons for the anti-slavery movement, spotlighting individuals who came to represent the larger cause.

With the exception of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writer’s Project (WPA-FWP), which collected and edited over two thousand American slave narratives in the 1930s, the genre of slave narratives largely died out at the end of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, we are compelled to revive it today at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Slavery persists, and survivors of human bondage must once again share their stories to awaken the public. As abolitionists working in Benjamin Drew’s hometown of Boston, we have come to know many survivors of modern-day slavery. Several of these individuals have bravely agreed to recount their stories in the pages that follow. Like Douglass and Jacobs before them, they write on behalf of millions of others who remain silenced in slavery.

CONTEMPORARY SLAVERY

We do not invoke the term slavery as a metaphoric concept. The individuals victimized by modern-day slavery do not just have tough jobs or demanding bosses. They are not simply underage laborers or sweatshop workers. They are forced to work for no pay under the threat of violence.

Unlike the forms it assumed in past centuries, slavery today almost never involves the legal buying and selling of individuals. The moral argument against slavery has been definitively settled. No group stands up at the United Nations declaring slavery an integral part of its cultural or social identity. Every country in the world has legal codes officially outlawing human bondage. Nonetheless, millions of people—between 15 and 30 million, by various estimates—are today held as slaves. Many are women and children, society’s most vulnerable members.

Contemporary slavery assumes several forms, including chattel slavery, debt bondage, sex slavery, and forced labor. Chattel (from the French word for cattle) slaves are considered their master’s property and can be bought, sold, traded, and even inherited from generation to generation. This is the form of slavery most familiar from American history, though it remains only in a few pockets around the world today. In the northwest African country of Mauritania, for instance, black Africans make up an inherited slave caste known as haratines who serve their Arabo-Berber masters in a socially sanctioned form of chattel slavery. Although not all Mauritanian black Africans are haratines, estimates put the number of slaves at over half a million.

In East Asian countries like Pakistan and India, men and women young and old work as slaves in a system of debt bondage in which they remain held as collateral against a debt they or a relative owes. The debtor is forced to work to pay off the loan, which accrues interest at an astronomical rate, as well as repay the costs of housing and food. The debt continues to accumulate over many years and can even be inherited by the debtor’s children. A human being can thus be born into servitude and die in servitude.

Sex slavery ensnares millions of women and girls, some as young as four (young men and boys are also victims). These individuals are often kidnapped, deceived by the promise of legitimate jobs, or even enticed to work as prostitutes—only to find themselves coerced to work without pay and denied the freedom to leave or choose their clients. Some slaves in Thailand, home to a booming sex tourism industry, report being forced to service as many as 40 men a day. When illness strikes sex slaves, often as a result of forced abortion or sexually transmitted diseases, brothel owners throw them out on the street with no money or means to survive.

This collection includes stories from survivors of various forms of forced labor, including several examples of domestic slavery, in which individuals are held hostage in homes as unpaid maids. As the anthology’s testimony reveals, the terrifying journey into slavery often involves leaving home, crossing borders, and encountering unfamiliar situations where escape appears impossible. Indeed, contemporary human trafficking (a term used to refer to the modern-day slave trade) is a thriving international trade, a dark underworld in today’s global economy.

Economic, political, and social factors all contribute to the strength of today’s system of human trafficking, now estimated to be the second-largest international crime. (The slave trade is even more developed than illicit arms sales and exceeded only by the trafficking of drugs.) Economically, slavery pays big dividends. Trafficking humans demands from the traffickers a relatively low price for the product and offers the enormously valuable benefit of endless free labor. For instance, brothel owners not only collect every dime earned by their sex slaves, but also pay only minimal overhead costs for substandard food, shelter, clothing, and occasional medical services.

In other cases, dictatorships tacitly endorse slavery. Burma, China, Mauritania, and Sudan are just some of the countries where the ruling regime has in various ways supported the enslavement of its own citizens. Harry Wu, Abuk Bak, and Abdel Nasser Ould Yessa provide first-hand accounts of how repressive societies can go so far as to promote human bondage. Some, like China’s massive laogai forced labor camps, draw their inspiration from modern ideologies. Others invoke atavistic systems, like Sudan’s revival of centuries-old Arab slave raids against African civilians.

THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Behind the geopolitical factors and the grim statistics are millions of personal stories. Individuals become trapped in slavery, face physical and psychological abuse, and struggle to endure—hopefully long enough to taste freedom. They make choices, react to the coercion directed at them, and undergo a complex emotional journey.

The persistence of slavery, the fact that it continues to victimize millions, may seem inexplicable. How do people allow themselves to become enslaved? is a question we often hear. Why don’t they just refuse or run away? The stories in this collection reveal diverse answers. Most authors had a strong sense of self at the time of their enslavement, but nonetheless could not prevent becoming trapped. Some were lured, others violently abducted, and one individual actually grew up accepting slavery as a banal institution. Many did not comprehend the risk until it was too late.

Slaveholders use physical and psychological means to prevent slaves from escaping. Their tactics include beatings, verbal barrages, and other classic forms of intimidation. Rape and starvation are not uncommon. The stories that follow describe masters who whip, stab, gag, pull out hair, and sting with electric prods. One master for ten years calls his victim nothing other than black slave. Another brutally trains his victim to be utterly subservient to the most perverted whims. In essence, the master’s goal is the dehumanization of the slave. Stripping victims of their humanity and identity becomes a vital part of the enslavement

Reviews for Enslaved

[intplibrarian_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eye opening. With the exception of one of the narratives*, these people's stories are both heartbreaking and inspiring. I find it amazing that the state of modern slavery isn't a more discussed topic. The tales are horrific and I wouldn't recommend this to someone who has a hard time reading that sort of thing, but with that caveat, I'd recommend it to everyone else.*There's a narrative from a woman who was abducted and forced to serve as a sex slave in the U.S. It bothered me that this was included in this collection because I don't see that as "slavery." It was kidnapping and torture. Pure sadism. Comparing it to the other ex-slave's story that also took place in the U.S. one can see the difference. But, I don't want to give away too many details here. Even non-fiction can have spoilers!