Modern Day Slavery Essay

The word “slavery” brings back horrific memories of human beings. Bought and sold as property, and dehumanized with the risk and implementation of violence, at times nearly inhumane. The majority of people in the United States assumes and assures that slavery was eliminated during the nineteenth century with the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth; rather, slavery and the global slave trade continue to thrive till this day. In fact, it is likely that more individuals are becoming victims of human trafficking across borders against their will compared to the vast number of slaves that we know in earlier times. Slavery is no longer about legal ownership asserted, but instead legal ownership avoided, the thought provoking idea that with old slavery, slaves were maintained, compared to modern day slavery in which slaves are nearly disposable, under the same institutionalized systems in which violence and economic control over the disadvantaged is the common way of life. Modern day slavery is insidious to the public but still detrimental if not more than old American slavery.
Slavery has been a part of human practices for centuries and dates back to the world’s ancient civilizations. In order for us to recognize modern day slavery we must take a look and understand slavery in the American south before the 1860’s, also known as antebellum slavery. Bouvier’s Law Dictionary defines a slave as, “a man who is by law deprived of his liberty for life, and becomes the property of another” (B.J.R, pg. 479). In the period of antebellum slavery, African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, homes, out on fields, industries and transportation. By law, slaves were the perso...

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...ot defined. Also, debt can be transferred from parent to child, which allows the slaveholder to determine when the complete payment of the debt and interest is paid off (Professor Jun, Lecture, 2014).

The last form of slavery that exists in the modern world is contract slavery. This type of slavery is when contracts are offered to people to work in factories or workshops, but once transported they then discovered the contracts were not real and learned they have become slaves (Professor Jun, Lecture, 2014). Usually these types of contracts are offered to people who are in desperate need of employment and will fall for anything in order to make slavery look legitimate. Also these so called “contract workers” are really slaves who are forced by violence, lack freedom, and paid nothing. One of the best examples of contract slavery today is in the country of Brazil.