Continued…..
1) BOOKS & HUMAN RIGHTS
‘Targeting oppression and silence, the modern slave narrative has emancipatory power as a linguistic weapon of the violated’. (From To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves, edited by Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, 2013, Cornell University Press)
To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves is made up of ninety-five narratives of people who have suffered slavery or are still enslaved. The editors of this book claim that these stories can be understood as continuing a tradition begun in the 19th century by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and the many former slaves who used narrative as a tool for abolition. They also write that the phrase, “to plead our own cause” encapsulates the power of the slave testimony and that 19th century antislavery organizations had recognized this power by employing former slaves as lecturers and then publishing the lectures as narratives. Those first-hand descriptions of bondage and their assertions of humanity became abolitionism’s most effective genre of writing.
Some of the narrators in this book told their stories in order to raise public awareness of slavery today and protest; others were seeking changes or were trying to help end the ongoing enslavement of a loved one. Some told their stories at congressional sessions on the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the End Demand for Sex Trafficking Act. One survivor told her story to the U.S. Congress and included calls for public awareness campaigns, the education of at-risk populations and monitoring of job agencies, and the removal of shame from slavery.
Trauma narratives serve many purposes like the desire to effect change with storytelling, to protest and reach out to other slaves and people in power. James Bale and Zoe Trodd write that the survivors who produced these narratives made themselves subjects of a story instead of objects for sale and asserted their humanity in the wake of being “less than human” and that ‘new slave narratives may also be considered within the explosion of storytelling in the human rights field over the last twenty years’.
The book is divided into five parts and each part offers narratives of different forms and contexts of slavery: state prison camp slavery, war slavery, sex slavery, contract slavery in work places, bonded labor in stone quarries, carpet loom slavery and slavery in religious contexts. The stories are narrated by women, children and men, enslaved within their own countries or trafficked across international borders.
2) 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates……
Due to the fact that modern slavery is a hidden crime and is especially hard to measure a group of researchers came together to develop the Global Slavery Index, which measures slavery as accurately as possible. The 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates there are 45.8 million people worldwide in slavery today, which is more than the entire population of Canada, Poland, Uganda or Malaysia. In an attempt to measure the incidence of slavery with greater accuracy, the Global Slavery Index surveys individuals, but also households and families to see if anyone knows someone who has experienced slavery. Α statistical technique called multiple systems estimation (MSE) can provide reliable estimates of these hidden populations.
