‘If you look at slavery across all human history, and you sort of strip away the packaging, whether it’s racialized or religious-based, and you look at the actual core of the slavery, it’s one person completely controlling another one’ Kevin Bales

Short extracts from Chapter 5 on racial, ethnic, and religious aspects of modern slavery (from Modern Slavery (Beginner’s Guides, 2011) by Kevin Bales; Zoe Trodd; Alex Kent Williamson; Oneworld Publications (academic)

………. race and ethnicity do play a role in slavery’s supply and demand. So too does religion. In numerous countries around the world, religion forms the dividing line between slaves and free without wholly defining the system of bondage. Beyond its role in creating social exclusions and economic vulnerabilities, as in India’s Hindu caste system, or in shaping ritual slavery, as in Ghana and India, religion is a weapon for traffickers and slaveholders adept at applying its doctrines……..

……… Though officially outlawed, India still has an internal Hindu “caste” system – a hierarchy of social differences ascribed at birth. According to India’s 2001 census, the “scheduled castes” population is close to 170 million persons, constituting around sixteen percent of the country’s total population. Caste discrimination shapes all political, economic, and social relations. The people of the lowest caste, the dalit, are segregated, and denied access to land, education, and employment……….

….. Just as racialized slavery has been a long-standing tradition in Mauritania, so a religion-based slavery has existed for centuries in a different West African nation: Ghana. The system of trokosi (a Ewe word meaning “wife of the gods” or “slave of the gods”) is prevalent among two patrilineal groups……….

Local organizations estimate there are between 5000 and 20,000 Ghanian women currently held as trokosis, predominantly in the rural Volta region. Children under the age of ten comprise a tenth of the total number…….. This ritual slavery revolves around atonement.,,,,,,,