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The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery
Contrary to conventional wisdom, slavery has not disappeared from the world. Social
scientists are trying to explain its persistence
By Kevin Bales
...........
SUBTOPICS
The New Slavery
Free Your Mind Instead
Plausible Deniability
Forty Acres and a Mule
MORE TO EXPLORE
RELATED LINKS
Image: CRAIG CHIVERS AP Photo
BRAZIL: Maria Rodrigues Ferreira Rocha, mother of Jefferson (seated) and Marta,
works at a charcoal kiln in Grao Mogol. She says she has been a slave since age
five.
For Meera, the revolution began with a single rupee. When a social worker came
across Meera's unmapped village in the hills of Uttar Pradesh in India three years
ago, he found that the entire population was in hereditary debt bondage. It could
have been in the time of their grandfathers or great-grandfathers--few in the village
could remember- -but at some point in their past, the families had pledged
themselves to unpaid labor in return for loans of money. The debt passed down
through the generations. Children as young as five years old worked in quarry pits,
making sand by crushing stones with hammers. Dust, flying rock chips and heavy
loads had left many villagers with silicosis and injured eyes or backs.
Calling together some of the women, the social worker proposed a radical plan. If
groups of 10 women agreed to set aside a single rupee a week from the tiny sums
the moneylenders gave them to buy rice, he would provide seed money and keep the
funds safe. Meera and nine others formed the first group. The rupees slowly
mounted up. After three months, the group had enough to pay off the loan against
which Meera was bonded. She began earning money for her work, which greatly
increased the amount she could contribute to the group. In another two months,
another woman was freed; the following month, a third came out of bondage.
At that point, the other members, seeing that freedom was possible, simply
renounced their debts and declared themselves free. The moneylenders quickly
moved against them, threatening them and driving them from the quarries. But the
women were able to find jobs in other quarries. New groups followed their example.
The social worker has taken me to the village twice, and on my second visit, all its
inhabitants were free and all their children in school.
Less than 100 kilometers away, the land turns flat and fertile. Debt bondage is
common there, too. When I met Baldev in 1997, he was plowing. His master called
him "my halvaha," meaning "my bonded plowman." Two years later I met Baldev
again and learned that because of a windfall from a relative, he had freed himself
from debt. But he had not freed himself from bondage. He told me:
After my wife received this money, we paid off our debt and were free to do whatever
we wanted. But I was worried all the time--what if one of the children got sick? What
if our crop failed? What if the government wanted some money? Since we no longer
belonged to the landlord, we didn't get food every day as before. Finally, I went to
the
landlord and asked him to take me back. I didn't have to borrow any money, but he
agreed to let me be his halvaha again. Now I don't worry so much; I know what to do.
Lacking any preparation for freedom, Baldev reenrolled in slavery. Without financial
or emotional support, his accidental emancipation didn't last. Although he may not
bequeath any debt to his children, his family is visibly worse off than unbonded
villagers in the same region.
To many people, it comes as a surprise that debt bondage and other forms of slavery
persist into the 21st century. Every country, after all, has made it illegal to own and
exercise total control over another human being. And yet there are people like
Baldev who remain enslaved--by my estimate, which is based on a compilation of
reports from governments and nongovernmental organizations, perhaps 27 million of
them around the world. If slaveholders no longer own slaves in a legal sense, how
can they still exercise so much control that freed slaves sometimes deliver
themselves back into bondage? This is just one of the puzzles that make slavery the
greatest challenge faced by the social sciences today. Despite being among the
oldest and most persistent forms of human relationships, found in most societies at
one time or another, slavery is little understood. Although historians have built up a
sizable literature on antebellum American slavery, other types have barely been
studied. It is as if our understanding of all arachnids were based on clues left by a
single species of extinct spider. In our present state of ignorance, we have little
hope
of truly eradicating slavery, of making sure that Meera, rather than Baldev, becomes
the model.
Image: ALEXANDER NEMENOV AFP Photo
MACEDONIA: Tanja, age 24, sits in a refugee center in Skopje. She escaped from
prostitution after ethnic Albanian guerrillas raided the bar where, she says, she was
enslaved. She is waiting to return to her native Moldova.
The New Slavery
Researchers do know that slavery is both evolving and increasing in raw numbers.
Like spiders, it permeates our world, typically hidden in the dark spaces of the
economy. Over the past few years, journalists and activists have documented
numerous examples. Human trafficking--the involuntary smuggling of people
between countries, often by organized crime--has become a huge concern,
especially in Europe and Southeast Asia. Many people, lured by economic
opportunities, pay smugglers to slip them across borders but then find themselves
sold to sweatshops, brothels or domestic service to pay for their passage; others are
kidnapped and smuggled against their will. In certain areas, notably Brazil and West
Africa, laborers have been enticed into signing contracts and then taken to remote
plantations and prevented from leaving. In parts of South Asia and North Africa,
slavery is a millennia-old tradition that has never truly ended.
The plight of these people has drawn the attention of governments and organizations
as diverse as the Vatican, the United Nations, the International Organization for
Migration, and Amnesty International. Two years ago the U.S. government
established a central coordinating office to deal with human trafficking. Academic
researchers are beginning to conduct intensive studies. The anecdotal and
journalistic approach is slowly transforming into the more rigorous inquiry of social
science. For example, Urs Peter Ruf of the University of Bielefeld in Germany has
documented the evolution of master-slave relations in modern Mauritania. Louise
Brown of the University of Birmingham in England has studied women forced into
prostitution in Asia. David Kyle of the University of California at Davis and Rey
Koslowski of Rutgers University have explored human smuggling. I have posited a
theory of global slavery and tested it through case studies in five countries.
A common question is why these practices should be called slavery rather than just
another form of superexploitation. The answer is simple. Throughout history, slavery
has meant a loss of free will and choice backed up by violence, sometimes exercised
by the slaveholder, sometimes by elements of the state. That is exactly what other
researchers and I have observed. Granted, workers at the bottom of the economic
ladder have few options to begin with, but at some point on the continuum of
exploitation, even those options are lost. These workers are unable to walk away.
Human suffering comes in various guises, yet slavery has a distinctive horror that is
evident to those of us who have seen it in the flesh. Even when it does not involve
beating or other physical torture, it brings about a psychological degradation that
often renders victims unable to function in the outside world. "I've worked in prisons
and with cases of domestic violence," says Sydney Lytton, an American psychiatrist
who has counseled freed slaves. "This is worse."
Although each of the manifestations of slavery has unique local characteristics, one
of the aims of social scientists is to understand their universal features, so that
therapies developed in one place can be applied elsewhere. Foremost among these
commonalities is the basic economic equation. In 1850 an agricultural slave cost
$1,500 in Alabama (around $30,000 in today's dollars). The equivalent laborer can
be had for around $100 today. That payment might be made as part of a "loan" or as
a "fee" to a trafficker. A young woman in Southeast Asia or eastern Europe might be
sold several times, through a series of brokers and pimps, before she ends up in a
brothel.
Throughout HISTORY, slavery has meant a loss of free will and choice backed up by
VIOLENCE, sometimes exercised by the slaveholder, sometimes by elements of the
state.
One should not read too much into these specific dollar amounts, because what the
slaveholder purchases is somewhat different in each case. The basic point is that
forced labor represents a much smaller percentage of business expenses than it
used to. It took 20 years of labor for an antebellum American slave to repay his or
her purchase price and maintenance costs; today it takes two years for a bonded
laborer in South Asia to do the same. This fall in price has altered not only the
profitability of slavery but also the relationship between slave and master. The
expensive slave of the past was a protected investment; today's slave is a cheap and
disposable input to low-level production. The slaveholder has little incentive to
provide health care or to take care of slaves who are past their prime.
Several trends could account for this shift. The world's population has tripled since
World War II, producing a glut of potential slaves. Meanwhile the economic
transformation of the developing world has, whatever its benefits, included the loss of
community and social safety nets, matched by the erection of vast shantytowns. But
the vulnerability of large numbers of people does not make them slaves; for that, you
need violence. The key factor in the persistence of slavery is the weak rule of law in
many regions. Widespread corruption of government and police allows violence to be
used with impunity even when slavery is nominally illegal.
Free Your Mind Instead
Image: JEAN-MARC BOUJU AP Photo
SUDAN: Akuac Malong (left), age 13, walks home to her village, Madhol, in southern
Sudan. She says she was kidnapped and held for seven years as a domestic slave
in northern Sudan.
A second commonality among different forms of slavery is the psychological
manipulation they all involve. The widely held conception of a slave is someone in
chains who would escape if given half a chance or who simply does not know better.
But Meera's and Baldev's stories, among numerous others, suggest that this view is
naive. In my experience, slaves often know that their enslavement is illegal. Force,
violence and psychological coercion have convinced them to accept it. When slaves
begin to accept their role and identify with their master, constant physical bondage
becomes unnecessary. They come to perceive their situation not as a deliberate
action taken to harm them in particular but as part of the normal, if regrettable,
scheme of things.
One young woman I met in northeastern Thailand, Siri, has a typical story. A woman
approached her parents, offered to find their 14-year-old daughter a job, and
advanced them 50,000 baht (at the time, about $2,000) against her future income.
The broker transferred Siri to a low-end brothel for twice that sum. When she tried to
escape, her debt was doubled again. She was told to repay it, as well as a monthly
rent of 30,000 baht, from her earnings of 100 baht per customer.
Siri had little idea what it meant to be a prostitute. Her initiation took the form of
assault and rape. Shattered, the teenager had to find a way to carry on with life. In
the world in which she lived, there were only those with total power and those with no
power. Reward and punishment came from a single source, the pimp. Young women
in Siri's position often find building a relationship with the pimp to be a good
survival
strategy. Although pimps are thugs, they do not rely solely on violence. They are
adept at fostering insecurity and dependence.
Cultural norms have prepared these young women for control and compliance. A girl
will be told how her parents will suffer if she does not cooperate and work hard, how
the debt is on her shoulders and must be repaid. Thai sex roles are clearly defined,
and women are expected to be retiring, nonassertive and obedient--as the women
are repeatedly reminded. The pimps also cite religion. The young women are
encouraged to believe that they must have committed terrible sins in a past life to
deserve their enslavement and abuse. They are urged to accept this karmic debt, to
come to terms with it and to reconcile themselves to their fate.
To live in slavery, the young women often redefine their bondage as a duty or a job
or a form of penance. To accept their role and the pimp's, they must try to diminish
their view of themselves as victims who have been wronged. They must begin to see
their enslavement from the point of view of the slaveholder. At the time of my visit,
the women in Siri's brothel were at various stages in this process of submission.
Some were even allowed to visit their families during holidays, for they always came
back.
A similar psychology operates in a different form of slavery, one that involves
domestic servants that African and Asian diplomats and business executives have
brought with them to Europe and North America. As an employee of the Committee
against Modern Slavery, Cristina Talens worked for several years to free and
rehabilitate domestic slaves who had been brought to Paris. She told me that
liberating the body was much easier than freeing the mind:
In spite of the violence, and the living and working conditions, people in slavery have
their own mental integrity and their own mechanisms for surviving. Some may
actually like different aspects of their life, perhaps the security or their
understanding
of the order of things. When you disrupt this order, suddenly everything is confused.
Some of the women who were freed have attempted suicide. It is easy to assume
that this happened because of the abuse they had lived through. But for some of
these women, slavery had been the major psychological building block in their lives.
When that was destroyed, the meaning of their life was like a bit of paper crushed up
and thrown away. They were told: "No, this is not the way it is supposed to be. Start
all over again." It was as though their life had no meaning.
Plausible Deniability
Image: MICHAEL ST. MAUR SHEIL Black Star
BENIN: Constant Ayitcheou, age 13, says he was trafficked at eight years old by a
friend of his father. Promised education and money, he was instead taken to become
a domestic servant in Nigeria. "PAFAJESD" is the French acronym of the aid
organization that helped to free him.
The psychology of the slave is mirrored by that of the slaveholder. Slavery is not a
simple matter of one person holding another by force; it is an insidious mutual
dependence that is remarkably difficult for slaveholder as well as slave to break out
of. Branding the slaveholder as pure evil may in some way comfort us, but
maintaining that definition becomes difficult when one meets actual slave masters.
Almost all the slaveholders I have met and interviewed in Pakistan, India, Brazil and
Mauritania were family men who thought of themselves simply as businessmen.
Pillars of the local community, they were well rewarded financially, well integrated
socially, and well connected legally and politically. Their slaveholding was not seen
as a social handicap except, possibly, by "outsiders" who, they felt, misunderstood
the local customs of business and labor.
How is it that such nice men do such bad things? A government official in Baldev's
district who held bonded workers was frank about his slaveholding:
Of course I have bonded laborers: I'm a landlord. I keep them and their families, and
they work for me. When they aren't in the fields, I have them doing the household
work washing clothes, cooking, cleaning, making repairs, everything. After all, they
are from the Kohl caste; that's what they do, work for Vaisyas like me. I give them
food and a little land to work. They've also borrowed money, so I have to make sure
that they stay on my land till it is paid back. They will work on my farm till it is
all paid
back. I don't care how old they get; you can't just give money away!
After all, there is nothing wrong in keeping bonded labor. They benefit from the
system, and so do I. Even if agriculture is completely mechanized, I'll still keep my
bonded laborers. You see, the way we do it, I am like a father to these workers. It is
a
father-son relationship; I protect them and guide them. Of course, sometimes I have
to discipline them as well, just as a father would.
Other slaveholders also have told me that their slaves are like their children, that
they
need close control and care. They make the argument of tradition: because the
practice has been going on for so long, it must be the natural order of things. For
others, it is a simple question of priorities: they say that enslaving people is
unfortunate but that their own family's welfare depends on it. Often slaveholders have
interposed many layers of management between themselves and the slaves. They
purposely deny themselves the knowledge of what they are doing and thus the
responsibility for it.
Forty Acres and a Mule
All this points to the need for a highly developed system of rehabilitation for freed
slaves and slaveholders alike. Physical freedom is not enough. When slaves were
emancipated in the U.S. in 1865, the government enacted no such rehabilitation.
General William Tecumseh Sherman's promise to give each former slave "forty
acres and a mule" never materialized. The result was four million people dumped
into a shattered economy without resources and with few legal protections. It can be
argued that America is still suffering from this liberation without rehabilitation.
Human-rights worker Vivek Pandit of the Vidhayak Sansad organization in India has
been liberating bonded laborers for more than 20 years. He is adamant that real
liberation takes place in the mind, that physical freedom isn't enough--as was the
case with Baldev. Conversely, mental freedom can bring about physical freedom--as
it did for Meera.
Pandit's organization has devised a program of education that prepares former
bonded laborers for a life of freedom. They are taught basic science to promote their
curiosity and attention to detail; role-playing to stimulate problem solving; and games
to develop strategic thinking and teamwork. This training comes after a challenging
public dialogue in which the laborer recounts and renounces his or her bondage. The
renunciation is recorded and read out in the village. "When the ex-slave has fixed his
thumbprint to this public document," Pandit says, "they can't go back."
Several models of liberation and rehabilitation are currently being field-tested.
[Editors' note: Visit www.sciam.com/explorations/2002/ 031102gabon for a case
study of a program in Gabon.] The experience of these programs suggests that a
combination of economic support, counseling and education can lead to stable,
sustainable freedom. This kind of work is still in its early stages, though. No
systematic evaluations of these programs have been carried out. No social scientist
has explored a master-slave relationship in depth.
Slave economics are another puzzle. How can would-be liberators crack the dark
economy and trace the slave-made products to our homes? Why are such large
numbers of people being trafficked across continents, how many of these people
really are enslaved, and why are these flows apparently increasing? What is the
impact of this workforce on national economies? What are the links among the traffic
in people, drugs and guns?
Studying bondage can be socially and politically controversial. Researchers in the
field face numerous ethical dilemmas, and clarity and objectivity are all the more
difficult to achieve when individuals and governments seek to conceal what they are
doing. If there is good news, it is the growing recognition of the problem. The plight
of
enslaved child workers has drawn significantly increased funding, and new
partnerships between antislavery organizations and industries that use slave-made
commodities provide an innovative model for abolition. But if our figures are correct,
only a small fraction of slaves are reached and freed every year. Our ignorance of
their hidden world is vast.
Further Information:
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Kevin Bales. University of
California Press, 1999.
Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia. Louise Brown. Virago, 2000.
Ending Slavery: Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania. Urs Peter
Ruf. Transcript Verlag, 2001.
Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by David Kyle and Rey
Koslowski. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Related Links:
The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in India. Human Rights Watch,
1996. Available at hrw.org/reports/1996/ India3.htm
Crime and Servitude: An Exposé of the Traffic in Women for Prostitution from the
Newly Independent States. Gillian Caldwell, Steven Galster and Nadia Steinzor.
Global Survival Network, November 1997. Available at
www.globalsurvival.net/femaletrade/ 9711russia.html
International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary
Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime. Amy O'Neill Richard. Center for the
Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, November 1999. Available at
usinfo.state.gov/topical/global/traffic/report/homepage.htm
Antislavery Web sites:
www.freetheslaves.net
www.antislavery.org
The Author
KEVIN BALES is a professor of sociology at the University of Surrey Roehampton in
London. He is a trustee of Anti-Slavery International and a consultant to the United
Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings, to the Economic
Community of West African States, and to the U.S., British, Irish, Norwegian and
Nepali governments. Bales began studying slavery in the early 1990s, when few
Westerners realized it still existed. Unable to secure funding for his research, he
took
on a commercial research project and devoted the profits to travel. The outcome--his
book Disposable People--was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. His work won
the Premio Viareggio for services to humanity in 2000, and a television documentary
based on it (shown on HBO and on Britain's Channel 4) won a Peabody Award in
2000.
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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