It was over 150 years ago that the U.S. and Britain “abolished” slavery, and over 60 years ago that Article 4 of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade world wide. But slavery remains very much a global reality. A recent conference hosted by the Vatican at the United Nations in New York, Ending Human Trafficking by 2030, sought to highlight the extent of the problem and showcase several successful initiatives around the world.
The U.N. estimates that there are 27 to 30 million men, women and children enslaved today, more than at any time in human history. The cost of slaves follows the law of demand and supply. The average price of a slave in America in 1809 was $40,000 in today’s money. The average price today is $90.00 — supply is high. The numbers are staggering, and the human misery they encompass even more so.
Pope Francis calls human trafficking a crime against humanity, and rails against the idea that anyone should feel justified (in Abraham’s Lincoln’s words) in “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” Across the globe, in rich houses and slums, villages and big cities, in farms and pornography studios, factories and red light districts, victims toil away in broad daylight. Exploited as prostitutes, manual laborers, drug mules, unpaid maids-of-all-work, millions of children and adults are held under threat of violence for no pay at all besides subsistence.
The forms of contemporary slavery are legion, with about 80 percent involving manual labor and 20 percent sex work. Shockingly, 26 percent of slaves today are children. In India, Asia and South America there are millions of slaves laboring in debt bondage, some for tiny debts incurred by their grandparents.
Over 2 million people a year, 60 percent of them young girls, are recruited in poor countries and sold for sex in countries with large, sometimes legal, sex industries. UNICEF puts the number of child slaves in Haiti at 300,000. Islamist slavery is a horrifying and growing development in the Middle East and Africa, where Christian women and girls are bought and sold, raped and resold, with religious sanction and encouragement. A revolting slave price list is included in the Knights of Columbus report on Christian genocide.
Slavery is not the natural or inevitable byproduct of poverty or war. The fact that a 10-year-old girl can be bought on the streets of Port-au-Prince for perpetual cleaning and cooking, as well as sex, does not happen just because of poverty. That a Christian child aged 1-9 years should fetch exactly 200,000 dinars at the slave market does not happen just because of war. These things happen because of a willingness to treat human beings like objects to be bought and sold, used and discarded. In short, by treating people as instruments of gain rather than free and dignified persons.
It is fitting that the Church today under Pope Francis has called for the end of the scandal, suffering, and moral degradation of slavery and human trafficking. He is simply continuing the Christian revolution that shocked the pagan world 2,000 years ago with the idea, unknown to all previous civilizations, that all men and women are equal in dignity and deserving of the same respect and freedom. This idea comes from recognizing in the most vulnerable and marginalized the face of Christ.
It takes a personal conversion, first of all. The pope asked in an address to ambassadors to the Holy See: “How many times have we permitted a human being to be seen as an object, to be put on show in order to sell a product or satisfy an immoral desire? … Whoever uses human persons in this way and exploits them, even indirectly, becomes an accomplice of this injustice.”
But it also takes a shared sense of responsibility and firm political will across the globe to stop modern slavery. Concrete programs and initiatives toward this goal, like educating villagers to protect their families from traffickers, training government and police officials on how to recognize and combat slavery, and the prosecution of slaveholders and sex clients, must be put into place. And this must be done in the context of a worldwide mobilization — as Pope Francis said, “comparable in size to that of the phenomenon itself.”
In this the United Nations can lead the way, and is to be commended for putting the end of slavery as one of its most important development goals. None of us can be resigned to a world in which a significant proportion of the population lives abased in bondage and fear. One hundred and fifty years after the last slave ship docked with its miserable human cargo on our shores, it is an urgent moral imperative to finally and decisively end the abomination of slavery — putting it into the history books where it belongs.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie specializes in radiology in the Miami area and serves on the advisory board for The Catholic Association. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
