chapter 2 - Stiftung "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft"

Aidan McQuade
invisibility of forced labor is in part due to the lack of familiarity with the legal and practical definition of
forced labor. However, if the problem cannot be identified, it cannot be eradicated.
My case studies also demonstrate how slavery emerges at the juncture of poverty, prejudice and governmental
apathy and inaction. Clearly, slavery is as much a social issue as an economic or political one. Individuals
and groups who are the target of social prejudice are especially vulnerable to exploitation and slavery. These
groups include migrant workers in Western Europe and North America and people from scheduled castes in
South Asia. However, the abolition movement has historically neglected this social dimension, which in part
explains why slavery continues to persist despite political and social advances such as the promotion of democracy
and the reduction of poverty.
Over the past two centuries, the anti-slavery movement has tended to emphasize law and policy reforms,
including the legal prohibition of slavery. While these developments are a necessary first step and have undeniably
advanced the abolitionist cause, they are not sufficient to end slavery. As the ILO studies have demonstrated,
forced labor remains a widespread problem, even today. In societies where social prejudice is a
persistent problem, government authorities are also likely to be affected by these prejudices. As a result, government
authorities may delay or hinder the implementation of anti-slavery laws, and fail to initiate measures
to systematically tackle abuses. India, for example, still has millions of bonded laborers even though
bonded labor was officially banned in 1976.
In Europe, many states have ratified the 2005 Convention on Action against Trafficking on Human Beings,
which guarantees minimum standards of protection for people who have been freed from trafficking. However,
a 2008 European Commission report found that many states were failing to adequately implement the action
plan. In the United Kingdom, there are worrying reports that trafficked people continue to be threatened
with deportation. Once returned to their countries of origin, these men and women not only face the same
horrors that originally caused them to flee their homelands, but are particularly vulnerable to re-trafficking
and to added social prejudice as a result of their status as former forced laborers.
The fundamental social dimension of slavery also has implications for the modern development agenda. Development
and slavery have always been closely linked. The economies of Britain and other European slave
trading nations were built on the profits of the Atlantic slave trade. By the same token, the countries and communities
that have historically supplied trafficked labor have been further harmed by the economic and social
effects of this trade. For example, the social and economic divides that erupted in the Angolan civil war can be
traced back to the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade.
Anti-Slavery International’s experience in the struggle against contemporary slavery demonstrates that the
majority of slave laborers today come from the most impoverished and disadvantaged sections of society.
Slavery often exists in poor communities; sometimes poor people enslave even poorer people, justifying this
practice with prejudice and economic necessity. Once caught in a contemporary form of slavery, people are
unlikely to be able to break out of the cycle of poverty and forced labor.
Yet efforts to reduce poverty remain largely blind to the problem of slavery. It is entirely possible that even
if we achieve the Millennium Development Goals, slaves will not benefit from these advances. Indeed, humanitarian
and development efforts that fail to take into account the dynamics of power and prejudice in poor
communities can exacerbate the problem of slave labor. For example, during the West African famine of 2005,
the Niger anti-slavery and development organization Timidria discovered that some food-for-work programs
were employing slaves who had been sent there by their masters. When the enslaved workers returned home,
their masters confiscated their ration cards and collected the food for their own use. In other parts of West
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Stiftung EVZ
HUMAN RIGHTS AND HISTORY: A CHALLENGE FOR EDUCATION