Written by:
Victoria A. Brownworth
» Order
this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 15#6
Last June, the Senate formally apologized for never having passed anti-lynching legislation. Nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War and 41 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 85 members of the Senate finally — after being pressured by the survivors of lynching victims — apologized. Fifteen — all Republicans, including former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. — did not.
Lynching is but one harrowing reminder of America’s painful history of slavery. According to the United Nations and the British-based organization Anti-Slavery International www.antislavery.org, there are more people living in slavery today than at any other point in history. Almost 30 million adult slaves, including victims of human trafficking, debt bondage and serfdom, are scattered across the globe. And the overwhelming majority of modern slaves — 75 percent — are women. According to the United Nations, 246 million children also live as slaves or in serfdom through unrestricted child labor, which the United Nations terms “virtual slavery.” The majority of these children are girls whose parents have sold them into slavery or indentured servitude. More than 50 percent of all domestic slaves are girls under the age of 12.
In India, where approximately 10 percent of female child slaves live, girls work the quarries and brick kilns, are kept as domestic slaves, and are sold into sexual slavery daily. Girls under the age of 12 spend 18 hours a day carrying triple their own weight in rocks and feeding them into gravel-making machines. Stone dust covers them, filling their lungs and leading to silicosis, a lung disease similar to that which killed hundreds of thousands of coal miners in the United States. The temperatures in the quarries and kilns reach over 125 degrees. There is no water, no food, no pay. Some girls die from the exertion. Because their bodies are still growing, lifting such heavy weight causes spinal curvatures, like the little girls who are shackled to looms in Pakistan, making rugs. In Kenya, little girls are the primary workers in coffee plantations where exposure to pesticides sickens many and kills others.
Most slaves live in Africa and Asia, but there are many in the United States — mostly in California, New York, the South and the Southwest. Close to 1 million children work as “virtual slaves” in the unregulated U.S. agricultural industry. These children, more than 70 percent of whom are girls, are as young as 6 and work seven days a week in fields across the country. They earn less than a penny per pound for whatever crop they are picking. Federal law does not require that there be water or toilet facilities for agricultural workers; diseases like pneumonia and cholera are common, and pesticide poisoning and cancer are rife. Those who survive are, according to child labor organizations like Fields of Hope, unlikely to rise out of poverty because they have no education. All those who think American child labor laws prevent such horrors (they don’t even begin to cover the range of work children are forced to do) need to be aware that not only is slavery more prevalent today than ever, but the United States participates in a slave trade where women and girls are the victims.
Slavery is not just happening “there.” It’s happening here. According to Anti-Slavery International and Fields of Hope (www.fieldsofhope.org), it would cost only $8 billion a year to put every child in the world who is not in elementary school into school. As of June 2005, the United States had already spent nearly $400 billion on the war in Iraq — the equivalent of five years of sending the world’s enslaved children to school.
Everyone concerned about slavery can join efforts to eliminate slavery, to invest in human beings and the humane treatment of women and girls globally. Yet the United States recently refused to be a signatory to the U.N. charters against the slavery of women and children worldwide. The United States also refused to be a signatory to the U.N. convention on the rights of the child (a Geneva Convention against child slavery, human and sexual trafficking in children and enforced serfdom). What’s more, the United States has granted favored-nation status in trade to countries that regularly employ slave labor.
Many of you may have considered a senatorial apology for lynching an anachronism. But slavery isn’t over.
What can you do? The first step is to participate in fair trade. Fair-trade products are not harvested or produced with slave, indentured or child labor. Coffee, sugar, tobacco and clothing are all likely to be produced with forced labor. Do not buy them if they are not fair-trade products.
Next, write your members of Congress about making the United States a signatory to anti-slavery conventions worldwide and enacting anti-slavery legislation at home to protect women and children.
Each of us can help, but indifference allows slavery to flourish. Give this column to a friend, to everyone you know. End the suffering of women and girls in our lifetime.
|
