Interview: Modern slavery

Academic, campaigner and Friend Kevin Bales talks to Ian Kirk-Smith about modern slavery

by Kevin Bales and Ian Kirk-Smith 29th September 2017

How certain can we be, as Friends, that we are not supporting slavery?

Sadly, we cannot be more sure than anyone else that we are not supporting slavery. And that is despite the fact that it was Friends who first invented the concept of conscious consuming and originated the first consumer campaigns to support human rights.

There are some products, especially those that come through the Fairtrade network that can be thought of as ‘safe’, likewise locally-sourced goods are more likely to be slave-free, as well as goods from those companies that make it clear in their labelling (like Monkee Genes) that they are slave-free. For the rest it can be a puzzle and a challenge to trace the supply chains all the way to the criminal first link where slavery exists.

Remember that slave-made goods and commodities represent a very, very tiny fraction of the global economy. In the global economy slavery is trivial at best, but enormous as a threat to human rights. So, we have to keep telling the companies that we buy from that we don’t want slavery in their products; that actually works to push them along.

What is the biggest misperception about slavery today?

There are two big misperceptions. The first is that it is something that happens ‘somewhere else’. There is slavery in all countries and crossing the borders of most countries. It is not all one kind of slavery – there are many types, and criminals invent new ways to enslave all the time.

The second and greater misperception is that it is a problem that can never be solved. In fact, the 40.3 million people in slavery today represent the smallest fraction of the world population that has ever been in slavery. Slavery is standing on the precipice of its own extinction. We know how to end it, we know how much that would cost, and we know where to go to address it. And Friends could play a significant role in ending slavery today, just as they did in ending legal slavery in the past.

How do you define ‘modern slavery’?

A person is in slavery when he or she is under the complete control of another person, that control is enforced with violence, and the point of that control is exploitation, whether economic or sexual or both. Trafficking is simply the mechanism or conduit that draws people into slavery. The system of slavery differs from place to place (and takes many forms even in the same country): it might be debt, it might hereditary, it might be enslavement by one’s own government, and so on.

You have described a modern slave as someone who ‘cannot walk away’. Could you talk about this?

Whenever I face a situation that I suspect to be slavery, my ‘rule of thumb’ is to ask: ‘Can this person walk away, even into a worse situation?’ It sounds odd, but in freedom a person is able to make bad choices as well as good, to go from better to worse, but in slavery one cannot even choose to ‘walk away’ no matter how precarious the destination might be.

In what countries are modern slaves found today?

All countries with the possible exception of the tiniest island countries with populations under 100,000. I used to think Iceland was slavery-free; it’s not.

Where do they come from?

Slaves come from everywhere, but the patterns of enslavement rest upon vulnerability. Women are often more vulnerable than men, and children more vulnerable than adults. There are many drivers of slavery: war and conflict; environmental damage and disasters; prejudice and discrimination; and the use of lies and coercion by criminals to bring people under their control.

Greed is a powerful driver, and so is gender inequality. A key thing to understand is that almost anything that diminishes human dignity and wellbeing can drive slavery.

What are the key areas/forms of work where you find modern slavery?

Think of work that is dirty, dangerous and demeaning. If there are slaves in mines, they work with hand tools and no safety equipment. If in agriculture, it is primitive and often dangerous. Slaves, today, make bricks not in factories but the same way the enslaved Israelites did in Egypt. They are regularly used in commercial sexual exploitation. So, slaves are found in extractive industries or fishing or cutting down forests – and they are often moved from one type of work to another.

How many people are affected in the world, Europe, the UK?

In the UK we have around 13,000 people in slavery. In the world about 20.4 million people are in slavery at any one time, with as many as eighty-nine million flowing into and out of slavery over a five-year period.

Do you think most companies know if there is slavery in their supply chain?

Rarely. It is the moral responsibility of companies to know their supply chain all the way to the last link, but criminal slaveholders work hard to conceal their use of slaves, and other criminals aid and abet that concealment. There is a need for constant vigilance, but supply chains can be made slavery-free with enough time and money.

You have travelled all over the world and seen the reality of this issue. Could you talk about that reality – the human cost of modern slavery – and how it affects you?

It’s hard to talk about the misery of slavery. Remember that slaves are brutalised, recipients of often constant physical attack, they are starved, they are not allowed to sleep, they are mentally abused even as they are in a state of trauma and shock. And crucially they are raped. It doesn’t matter what sort of work slaves are forced to do, they will also be sexually assaulted. It is truly a crime so monstrous it is hard to fathom.

But what must always be remembered is that every slave has within them the possibility and power of recovery and wholeness. We must never think of them as ‘victims’, people who should be pitied, this only perpetuates their suffering. Within every slave is a survivor of slavery waiting, a person yearning for wholeness and all the things we have – families and love and self-determination and fulfillment.

Is there a link between modern slavery and climate change – environmental destruction?

Climate change and environmental destruction drive slavery, creating the vulnerability to enslavement. At the same time slaves are being used all over the world, to destroy the environment – forced to do so by criminals who don’t care about either. If slavery were a single country (with only forty million inhabitants) its carbon emissions would be the third largest in the world after China and the USA. These two key challenges are tightly linked, and the solution to one is wrapped up in the solution to the other. My recent book, Blood and Earth, explores this fact.

What drives you in your work?

I stumbled into the knowledge of modern slavery in the early 1990s. It took some time to get a sense of the size and shape of global slavery, but as that knowledge grew so did my sense as a Friend that we, Quakers, had given up before we finished the job. Friends started the first human rights campaign in human history, inventing many of the campaigning tools we still use today, but we stopped with the end of legal slavery and in that we failed.

We are a people that may be slow to discern and commit, but once our discernment and commitments are made we don’t give up. No one is saying, ‘the world war is over, we can shelve the Peace Testimony’ – we’re going to work for peace until there is peace. I know in my heart I have to work for the end of slavery – all slavery. It’s a promise we made to the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is still not fulfilled.

What can Friends do to help today?

Friends should do what Friends always do – talk and learn and read and plan and pray and think deeply, wait in the Light for a shared discernment and leading, and then act. Friends know how to change the world, we’ve done it before, and we do it a little every day. When we decide to finish the job we took on 230 years ago, we can finish it – it may take fifty years, it may take 100 years, but this is exactly our work.

Kevin is professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham and co-author of the Global Slavery Index. He was co-founder of Free the Slaves.

Comments

Please login to add a comment