slav•er•y (noun): what would your definition look like?
Picture yourself sitting in a classroom, about to take a test. Maybe you have that slightly jittery feeling that comes with holding your number-two pencil during the few minutes before the exam commences, hearing nothing but the tick of the second-hand on the clock (let’s face it, no matter how many years it has been since you attended high school, you know exactly what feeling I’m talking about). Mentally preparing yourself for the true-or-false questions soon to come, reviewing definitions that you have memorized… and the exam is handed out. You look at the questions.
Here’s an easy one:
1) True or False: Slavery in America ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.
The tip of that number-two pencil should snap off as you resoundingly circle “False.”
Now it might get a little trickier.
2) Define slavery.
How crafty; a question with no definitive answer! You can start by looking at the legal definition:
- The state of one bound in servitude as property of a slaveholder or household.
And you can think of this definition in terms of the 13th Amendment, passed in January of 1865, and designed to abolish slavery:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Though today, as modern day slavery defies all legality, it might be helpful to look at a more specified definition. Here is the definition of “severe forms of trafficking in persons” under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a federal law passed in 2000:
1) Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under 18, or
2) The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of subjecting that person to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.
However, even this definition doesn’t seem to do justice to the millions of people who are bound in servitude, controlled through violence, and forced to act without free will. End Slavery Now further explores how to measure and define slavery, highlighting important questions to ask when judging if an individual can be considered, and defined as, a slave: “Can this person walk away? Are they under violent control?”
At his 2010 speech for the TED Conference, a biannual event devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” Dr. Kevin Bales spoke about combating modern day slavery. Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, the author of “Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves,” and widely recognized as one of the foremost experts on modern slavery. In his talk, he discussed what it means to be a slave, and put forth his own descriptive definition of slavery:
“Agriculture workers in Africa, whipped and beaten… and I want to be very clear. I am talking about real slavery. This is not about lousy marriages, this is not about jobs that suck, this is about real people who cannot walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. It’s real slavery and exactly the way slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history.”
But let’s be honest… these are just definitions. Why do they matter?
Because slavery is not just something of the past. The importance of its definition, and its presence, did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation, or with the 13th Amendment (remember your pencil tip breaking as you definitively circled “False” for Question #1?!). As Bales stresses, slavery is not low wages, it’s not cultural manipulations, it’s not bad marriages. Slavery is not illegal immigration. And it’s certainly not a joke.
Once you understand what modern day slavery really is, you can understand what approximately 27 million people deal with daily. Every day, millions of people are dehumanized in the most drastic ways imaginable. They are treated as nameless, faceless objects: they are “bound in servitude as property.” By understanding the definition of what you are combating, you can find new and effective ways to expand this anti-slavery movement.
Let’s try one last question on that test:
Freedom is:
a) just another word for nothing left to lose
or
b) personal liberty, and what we are working to ensure for every human being on this planet
I’ll give you a hint: Freedom’s not just another word for nothing left to lose. It’s everything.
