Joe and Biden, two minors, sit in despondency on the porch of a fisherman’s house who bought them from their mother two months ago. Their day starts with the hope that their mother will fetch them by paying back the debt, but in the nights all goes to vain. These debtors and many others face exploitation of modern slavery in the form of human trafficking, tourism transplant, child soldiering and bonded labor. Internationally, around 40 million individuals are shackled in these chains with no voice to put up their cause.
Modern slavery includes all forms of forced bondage backed by vulnerabilities of poverty. It is only a new garb of the same old slavery surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Contemporary slave transactions sum up to an annual profit of $150 billion residing in states like Australia where 15,000 are forced laborers, limited mostly to the private business sector, for monetary benefits.
With the changes in the national and international security environment, modern slavery has also sensed a protraction in its reaches. Transplant tourism has been added into the heinous acts of slavery. Reports project that such transactions are emanating from the periphery states and pouring into the core states.
Furthermore, globalization has allowed non-state entities to exploit slavery tools to meet their ends. According to the equation of a United Nations Report, drafted in 2016, around 11,500 minors were used as soldiers by non-state actors.
In despondence, humans are slaves, regardless of the social, political or economic setup they reside in. Every individual in the society in bound up by certain conditions for his survival, whether at the workplace or within the household system. Upon the failure of realizing these necessities, he dives into a suicidal enigma eventually leading to his demise. Additionally, individuals feel trapped in the cycle of haplessness, where slavery seems the most viable means to their definite ends. For this very reason Fredick Douglass said, “I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.” Until and unless states do not uphold the social contract made with their citizens, modern slavery will keep flourishing. The state has to cater to the hesitations of its individuals before they turn into stateless beings. State-sponsored slavery inculcates with the dent in the basic necessities visible in societies under strict socialist scrutiny.
Domestic articulations and international conventions on the elimination of modern slavery, and conventions on positive and negative rights must be upheld in true letter and spirit.
Individuals should egg out of the perception of creating a correspondence between servitude and vocation, or else faith will lie in a deeper state of destitute. The International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), should reform its mechanisms for swift detection of all forms of human trafficking through the sea lanes of communication. (SLOC). States should value artificial intelligence and satellites for slave trade surveillance. Similarly, the so called misnomer of ‘being born at the wrong place and at the wrong time’ should be discouraged at the individual level within the social realm, as it gives legitimacy to the phenomenon of modern slavery.
The modern West should discourage neo-colonialist policies that ripen up the slave trade. Furthermore, meaningfulness of celebrating the events of the Tran-Atlantic slavery should be brushed under the carpet, as it has hindered the destruction of modern slavery. This cause has been widely highlighted by the postmodernist school of thought. Lastly, established inter-subjectivity of connecting colored beings with nomenclatures such as ‘negroes’ and treating them accordingly must be eschewed strictly as per the constructive paradigm.
