MemeMachineGo!

There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Victoria’s odyssey began when she was 17, fresh out of school in Chisinau, the decayed capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova. “There was no work, no money,” she explained simply. So when a friend?”at least I thought he was a friend”?suggested he could help her get a job in a factory in Turkey, she jumped at the idea and took up his offer to drive her there, through Romania. “But when I realized we had driven west, to the border with Serbia, I knew something was wrong.”

It was too late. At the border she was handed over to a group of Serb men, who produced a new passport saying she was 18. They led her on foot into Serbia and raped her, telling her that she would be killed if she resisted. Then they sent her under guard to Bosnia, the Balkan republic being rebuilt under a torrent of international aid after its years of genocidal civil war.

Victoria was now a piece of property and, as such, was bought and sold by different brothel owners ten times over the next two years for an average price of $1,500. Finally, four months pregnant and fearful of a forced abortion, she escaped. I found her hiding in the Bosnian city of Mostar, sheltered by a group of Bosnian women.

From the journalist’s field notes :

While I was in Costa Rica, I met some very young kids and listened to them talk about their horrible trafficking experiences in the sex industry. Young girls are enslaved in areas like San Jose’s Gringo Gulch, where a lot of American sex tourists go for a “good time.”
I heard hundreds of stories like this during my assignment, and just when I thought I heard the worst one, it wasn’t long before something else topped it. Sometimes I just wanted to throw up.

I meant to write about this before Halloween: You got slavery in my chocolate .

An investigative report by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 2000 indicated the size of the problem. According to the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children are being purchased from their parents for a pittance, or in some cases outright stolen, and then shipped to the Ivory Coast, where they are sold as slaves to cocoa farms. These children typically come from countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo. Destitute parents in these poverty-stricken lands sell their children to traffickers believing that they will find honest work once they arrive in Ivory Coast and then send some of their earnings home. But that’s not what happens. These children, usually 12-to-14-years-old but sometimes younger, are forced to do hard manual labor 80 to 100 hours a week. They are paid nothing, are barely fed, are beaten regularly, and are often viciously beaten if they try to escape. Most will never see their families again.

In that case, at least, public pressure has led to a pact , which, among other things, calls for establishing standards to identify cocoa produced without slavery… by July 2005.