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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520257962 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2007 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 274 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ending Slavery
How We Free Today's SlavesBy Kevin Bales
University of California Press
Copyright © 2007 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25470-1
Chapter One
The ChallengeUnderstanding the World of New Slavery
It is just like a fisherman going to fish.... If he don't put out the bait, he can't get a fish. So they tell the parents a lovely story, you know, what [their children] will encounter when they come to the United States. But behold, when they get into the United States the picture is completely different. LOUIS
Louis works for the phone company near Washington, D.C. He also frees slaves. When he got together with family and friends for the Thanksgiving holiday a few years ago, Louis did what everyone does-he got out his video camera. As he recorded the holiday gathering, he noticed something strange: in the large group of family and friends, one teenage girl always tried to hide when he turned on the camera.
And I asked myself, you know, what's wrong with the young lady? At first I asked her, where do you come from? She told me she was visiting from Indiana. That is, she was staying with my cousin there. But something stuck in my mind.
Louis had visited his cousin in Indiana several times and didn't remember ever meeting this young woman. Driving home from the party, he asked his wife what she knew about the girl. His wife had heard that the girl had eloped and was now hiding with their cousin. Yet this seemed a little odd as well, because normally a girl seeking refuge would look first to her own family.
Louis had come to the United States from Cameroon, West Africa, in 1985 and eventually became a U.S. citizen. With a degree in management from an American university, he had a good job and served as an elder in his Presbyterian church. Living in the suburbs in Virginia, Louis and his family were pursuing the middle-class dream of stability and security. By his late forties, Louis had achieved much of his dream. But he found himself deeply unsettled by this strange and troubled girl in the middle of his family's Thanksgiving holiday. Things just weren't adding up, so a few days later he drove over to visit a relative, where the young woman was staying.
And then she began to tell me the story. And I felt so bad about it.... I mean everyone has a human feeling, if you hear a story which is so terrible, you are moved, being human. I began to put down in writing the stories she told me, and probably if you read the whole report that I wrote, you would come to the conclusion that something was really, really wrong.
The more Louis heard, the more sickened he became. There was no elopement in this girl's past. He listened as, confused, isolated, and still in shock, she painfully recounted years of slavery in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Her name was Rose. Back in Cameroon, at the age of fourteen, she had just begun her school's summer vacation when a friend of her aunt stopped by her house. This woman explained that a Cameroonian family in the United States needed someone to help around the house. In exchange, the family would help Rose go to school in America. It sounded like a great opportunity to Rose and to her parents. They talked it over carefully and agreed that she could go right away. Since the summer vacation had just begun, she would have time to settle in before starting school in the United States. Away from her parents, Rose was introduced to the family she would be working for. They bought her air ticket and escorted her through customs and immigration, passing her off as one of their family when they reached the United States. Everything seemed normal until they reached Rose's new home in America. Then the trap closed.
The husband and wife showed Rose the jobs they wanted her to do. Soon the jobs filled her day completely, rapidly taking control of her life. Up at six in the morning, Rose had to work until long past midnight. When she began to question her treatment, the beatings began. "They used to hit me," Rose said. "I couldn't go for three days without them beating me up." The smallest accident would lead to violence. "Sometimes I might spill a drink on the floor by mistake. They would hit me for that," she said. In a strange country, locked up in a strange house far from home, Rose was cut off from help. If she tried to use the phone, she was beaten; if she tried to write a letter, it was taken away from her. "It was just like she was lost in the middle of a forest," said Louis; "she was completely isolated."
Under the complete control of others, subject to physical abuse, paid nothing, working all hours, this fourteen-year-old schoolgirl had become a slave. The promise that she could go to school in America was just the bait used to hook her. In Cameroon her parents received no word from her, only occasional reassuring messages from the family who had enslaved their daughter. The beatings and constant verbal attacks broke Rose's will, and her life dissolved into a blur of pain, exhaustion, work, abuse, and fear. Rose lived in slavery for two and a half years.
Someday we may know the details of what happened in these years, but probably not. Until recently Rose was often nervous and withdrawn, still suffering from the trauma of her enslavement. Demonstrating remarkable resilience, she has moved on to a new life, and it would be understandable if she never wants to revisit that period of unspeakable pain. Her mind has deeply buried her memories. What we do know is that not long after she had turned eighteen, Rose was found trying to talk to a neighbor by the woman who controlled her. Dragging her away, "the woman started yelling at me, started cursing me," Rose explains, "and I couldn't take it anymore. I just had to run away." Later that day she ran to the home of a friend of her "employer." She pleaded for help, but this woman called the family who had enslaved her. When Rose realized the betrayal, she ran again, this time to the parking lot of a nearby K-Mart. Her only hope was a Cameroonian man she had met in her employers' home. He had seemed nice, and she had learned his phone number. Begging change from a stranger to make a phone call, she managed to leave a message for the man, asking him to pick her up. Without a coat, with no other place to go in the cold November night, she waited in the parking lot outside a store. Four hours later, at nearly 11:00 p.m., she was picked up and taken home to the man's family. This man was Louis's cousin.
Although in safety, Rose was still in limbo. The family she was staying with simply did not know what to do with her, and she feared that in time her "employers" would try to take her back. Then came Thanksgiving and the meeting with Louis. As Louis gently drew out Rose's story, he was shocked and saddened:
I felt terrible, I mean, I felt really terrible, because I couldn't imagine, not even in my slightest imagination, that in this day and age someone would treat somebody's child the way she was treated. It made me sick in my stomach.
Soon Louis took Rose to stay with his own family, and as she opened up to him, more shocking facts came tumbling out. It occurred to Louis to ask Rose if she knew any more girls in the same situation. "Oh, yes," she replied. Following up on what Rose could remember, he found two more young women in slavery, and by himself, with real daring, he liberated them. One of them, Christy, had been brought to the United States at seventeen and had spent five years as a domestic slave. Sally had been brought at age fifteen and had spent three years in bondage. Now Louis had three young women staying with his family, with their care and support coming from his own pocket. His first job, he decided, was to reassure the women's families, so he took videos of all three relaying messages to their families and then traveled to Cameroon. He showed the video footage to the girls' families, who were shocked but overjoyed, as Louis explains:
They were very happy to see me, and especially the fact that I took the video of their children, they were extremely happy, because even if they now saw what their daughters had gone through, at least they had firsthand information from their children. I felt good about it because it was like a conclusion to me that I had done the right thing. I could see their faces, and I could see that they realized at least that someone was concerned about the lives of their children.
More than a year before, Sally's family had been told that their daughter had died in America, and their emotions at seeing her alive are hard to imagine. Meanwhile Louis was investigating the connections that had smuggled the girls into the United States. He found a network that recruited girls from poor families by promising education and jobs. One woman provided a house where the girls were taken after leaving their families and were prepared for the trip to America. Some respected members of the Cameroonian community in the United States were involved, and Louis began to understand that he was up against something big.
With the help of lawyers from an organization called CASA Maryland, the girls' "employers" have now been prosecuted in both criminal and civil courts. Rose bravely went through the ordeal of being cross-examined and having her slavery and abuse exposed in open court. The trial resulted in a conviction, and the couple who enslaved her were sentenced to nine years in prison and ordered to pay her $100,000 in restitution. Of course, being awarded restitution and actually getting it are two different things, and Rose will probably never see the money. She'll also never see her parents again; they both died in 2002.
Christy's "employers" got five years in prison and were ordered to pay $180,000 in back wages. So far, Christy has received about $2,000. She and Rose live together now, sharing an apartment in the Washington, D.C., area. Both are working as nursing assistants and dream of being nurses. For the moment they can't afford to go to college, because much of what they earn is sent back to Cameroon to support their families. Christy's remittances are building a house for her parents and are paying the school fees of her younger brothers and sisters. Louis supported the three girls as long as they needed help. Although he slowly used up his savings, he is convinced that he did the right thing. "People treat dogs better than these girls were treated," he told me. "Anyone who cares about other people would do what I did."
If the story of these young women were unique, it would be shocking enough. That there are slaves in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the capital of the land of the free, might cause us to question our assumptions about this country. Our questions become more troubling when we face the fact that Rose's story is one of many such tales in the Washington, D.C., area, and one of thousands in the United States. The U.S. Department of State estimates that as many as 17,500 people are brought into the country each year and forced into agricultural work, prostitution, domestic service, or sweatshop labor. These are not poorly paid migrant workers; these people are slaves. According to conservative estimates, there are tens of thousands of slaves in America today. And the thousands in the United States and other developed countries are just a fraction of the total across the globe. The estimated twenty-seven million slaves in the world today equals more than twice the number of people taken from Africa during the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade. But given that legal slavery no longer exists, how can we call these people slaves?
WHAT MAKES A SLAVE?
Slavery has been with us since the beginning of human history. When people began to congregate in Mesopotamia and make the first towns around 6800 B.C., they built strong external walls around their towns, suggesting the occurrence of raiding and war. We find the first depiction of slavery in clay drawings that survive from 4000 B.C.; the drawings show captives of battle being tied, whipped, and forced to work by the Sumerians. Papyrus scrolls from 2100 B.C. record the ownership of slaves by private citizens in Egypt and list the first documented price of a slave: eleven silver shekels. When money began to be used, slave trading became a way of making a living, and we see records showing slave-raiding expeditions from Egypt capturing 1,554 slaves in Syria in one season. Around 1790 B.C., the first written laws introduced the legal status and worth of slaves. These Babylonian law codes clearly stated that slaves are worth less than "real people," a principle that is repeated for the next four thousand years. The ancient code is gruesomely clear: a physician making a fatal mistake on a patient, for example, is ordered to have his hands cut off, unless the patient is a slave, in which case he only has to replace the slave.
In past centuries, people had no problem understanding who was a slave and who wasn't, even given the existence of temporary enslavement. Slaves then and now share one central condition: violence is freely used to control them or punish them. The Babylonian code again: "If a slave strike a free man, his ear shall be cut off"; and the Louisiana Slave Code of 1724: "The slave who will have struck his master, his mistress, the husband of his mistress, or their children, either in the face or resulting in a bruise or the outpouring of blood, will be punished by death." For nearly four thousand years the right to inflict violence on a slave was enshrined in law. When the legal ownership of humans ended, as it did in the United States in 1865, many people thought that slavery had ended as well.
But even when people in the United States no longer owned slaves legally, they often continued to control them-by restricting their housing and food supply, refusing them education, limiting their movements, and threatening them with violence. This fact does not diminish the great achievements of the abolitionists and the slaves who fought for their freedom; if there are tens of thousands of slaves in the United States today, it is worth remembering that there were once four million. Still, no matter how many laws were passed against it, de facto slavery never stopped. Throughout history, slavery has meant taking total control of a person and exploiting that person's labor. The essence of slavery is neither legal ownership nor the business of selling people; the essence of slavery is controlling people through violence and using them to make money. Before laws gave one person the right to own another person, even before the invention of money as a means of exchange, slavery was part of human life. Today the laws allowing slavery have been repealed, but people around the world are still brutalized and broken and reduced to slavery through violence. Their free will is taken away. Their labor, their minds, and their lives are consumed by someone else's greed. Slavery, at its most fundamental, has just three elements: control through violence, economic exploitation, and the loss of free will. Slavery is not about race, color, or ownership. Any one or all of these may be used to justify slavery, but they are not essential for its existence.
If people are not legally recorded as being slaves, how can we really call them slaves? The answer is relatively simple, though as with most human conditions, there are always cases that defy clear definition. We can start by asking, Can this person walk away from the situation without fear of violence? If the answer is no, if the person is beaten when trying to leave, then you have one indication of slavery. Another question we can ask: is this person paid nothing, or at a level that barely keeps the person alive from one day to the next? Look again at Rose. She couldn't leave because of the threat of violence, she was paid nothing, she was given only enough food to keep her alive, and she was economically exploited. Her ability to exercise free will was taken from her. Rose was a slave. The newspapers might have called her condition "virtual slavery," or said she lived in "slavelike" conditions, but make no mistake: like women in bondage in ancient Babylonia or the antebellum American South, Rose was a slave.
Slavery is also not a matter of duration. The fact that Rose spent "only" two and a half years in bondage does not make her any less a slave. Slavery isn't necessarily a permanent condition. That was never the case, even when slavery was legal. The ancient Babylonian law and the Louisiana Slave Code both allowed for temporary enslavement. For thousands of years people have been captured, snared, coerced, tricked, sold, kidnapped, drugged, arrested, swindled, seduced, assaulted, or brutalized into slavery. A fortunate few have then managed to make their way out again through any number of exits. Some were released when their health and strength broke down and they were no longer useful. Some managed to escape after decades, and others after just weeks. For some families of slaves, it took generations. On rare occasions a master would free a slave as a gift, but that did not change the fact that the person had been a slave. The same is true today.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ending Slavery by Kevin Bales Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
The Challenge: Understanding the World of New Slavery 5
Building the Plan 21
Rescuing Slaves Today 36
Home-Grown Freedom 61
Governments: Carrying the Biggest Stick 96
Global Problem, Global Reach 139
Ending the (Product) Chain 177
Ending Poverty to End Slavery to End Poverty to End Slavery 213
Conclusion: The Beginning of the End of Slavery 229
Coda: What You Can Do to End Slavery 233
Measuring the Effectiveness of Antislavery Work 237
Notes 243
Index 255