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Many people bristle to hear the word “slave” used to describe a modern practice of exploitation. Deeply engrained in the collective psyche of Western culture is the notion that slavery ended in the 19th century. It certainly was a momentous day in 1833 when the British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act that gave freedom to all slaves held captive in the Empire. Likewise, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1865 at the conclusion of the Civil War, left no ambiguity to the legal standing of slavery in America. The establishment of laws that criminalized the slave trade meant a major advancement in the cause for human freedom. Though slavery persisted for decades thereafter, legislation gave abolitionists an effective tool to hold slaveholders accountable. Abolition laws eventually spread to nearly every nation in the world.
In our own day, however, a thriving black market in human beings has emerged once again. It is a criminal enterprise involving both local scoundrels and sophisticated international syndicates. Corruption among law enforcement agents and government officials play a key role in its success. And it’s not limited to one specific region of the world—it respects no borders. Due to all these factors, modern slavery cannot be eliminated with a single stroke of the pen like Abraham Lincoln achieved when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Indeed, more slaves are in bondage today than were bartered in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Nowhere has its impact been felt more brutally than on children in underdeveloped nations. Slaveholders prey on the defenseless, and children so easily become vulnerable. A 2004 U.N. survey titled “Ten Million Children Exploited for Domestic Labor” found 700,000 children forced into domestic labor in Indonesia alone, with staggering numbers as well in Brazil (559,000), Pakistan (264,000), Haiti (250,000), and Kenya (200,000). “These youngsters are usually ‘invisible’ to their communities, toiling for long hours with little or no pay and regularly deprived of the chance to play or go to school,” the report states.
That “invisible” tag often gets attached to descriptions of modern slavery. Just as I never suspected that my favorite restaurant had become a hub for a trafficking ring, slavery likely crosses our path on a regular basis without our awareness. We may pass a construction site and never think twice whether the laborers work of their own volition. Or we might drive along city streets at night, see young girls on a street corner peddling their bodies, and wonder how they ever could “choose” such a life.
That’s the paradox: slavery is in reality not invisible. Except in rare circumstances, slaves toil in the public eye. To learn that slaveholders press children into forced labor in the cacao plantations of the Ivory Coast may not surprise us. But we regard it unthinkable that an otherwise upstanding citizen might be a slaveholder.
KIM MESTON WISHES that she had not been so invisible to her New England community. In a rural town near Worcester, Mass. the minister of the local church used her as his domestic sex slave for five years without raising suspicion in the community. Kim’s parents were Tibetan exiles living in a refugee camp in southern India. When Kim was in her teens, her sister’s husband introduced the family to a church minister visiting from the United States. He offered to bring Kim to America where he would provide a formal education and opportunities for a better life. “He told my parents that he would treat me as his own daughter,” Kim recounts.
Her brother-in-law lobbied the family persuasively to let Kim go. He even offered to accompany her to Delhi where he could help her to secure a visa to travel to the United States. In the ultimate betrayal, the brother-in-law made his own financial arrangement with the minister to traffick Kim.
At the age of 16, Kim began a double life in America. Everything would have appeared normal to the casual observer—she attended the local high school, ran on the track team, and attended church on Sundays. The minister even had a wife and a stepdaughter living in his home. But behind closed doors, she became the household servant, doing nearly all the cooking, housecleaning, ironing, and even tending the church grounds. Moreover, the minister sexually abused Kim on a frequent basis over a five-year period.
The minister threatened to have Kim’s Tibetan family back in India thrown into jail if Kim told her school friends about her treatment. So she suffered in silence, and no one in the community thought to ask how she might be faring. They simply assumed the best intentions of the minister and his family. “His deception was well constructed,” notes Kim. “The minister was a pillar in the community and I was viewed as the poor child from the Third World who was the lucky beneficiary of his generosity.”
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