With so many social issues in the United States being traced back to antebellum American slavery, it’s easy to forget that slavery still exists. This week an Australian human-rights group called the Walk Free Foundation released a study of contemporary global slavery: the Global Slavery Index. Everyone ought to read it.
What it says, in short, is this: According to Gallup surveys of 167 countries, there are 45.8 million slaves worldwide. Walk Free defines a slave as someone owned, someone working as a forced laborer or prostitute, someone in debt bondage or in a forced marriage.
In a single country — India, which is the worst offender — there are currently 18 and a half million slaves. To put that into perspective, there are six and a half million more slaves in India right now than were imported to North America, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands combined during the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade — 373 years, from Columbus’s discovery of the Americas to the end of the Civil War.
This is an unbelievably serious problem, which virtually no one is discussing. Most modern slaves are held in Central and East Asia, and Central Africa. The top ten countries on the list, in total slaves, are India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia. Among them, they have 30 and one-quarter million slaves. Which is roughly 100 times more than the total number of slaves imported to the U.S., and territory that would become part of the U.S., between the founding of Jamestown and the end of the Civil War (258 years). Those American slaves were enough to trigger America’s bloodiest war — and, I dare say, one of its proudest moments: the abolition of American slavery. But since slavery was abolished in the United States, none of us seems to be interested any more.
And we should be interested. Who but us will do anything about it? Certainly not the U.N. After all, two of the ten largest slave-holding countries — China and Russia — are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.