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Documenting Disposable People

Slavery may be illegal but it’s by no means defunct (even if its guises have changed). More than 27 million people are still trapped in one of the world’s oldest forms of oppression. Documenting Disposable People features newly commissioned photo essays by eight renowned Magnum photographers – Ian Berry, Stuart Franklin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steele-Perkins and Alex Webb – on diverse instances of contemporary global slavery.

With texts on each of these projects and an essay by expert and author Kevin Bales, this compendium explores a range of examples, including child labor in Bangladesh, sex slavery from Ukraine to Western Europe and the sexual enslavement of South Korean women by Japanese troops during the Second World War. Documenting Disposable People shows how the unfortunate emergence of a new kind of slavery is inextricably linked to the “ascent” of a global economy.

Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy

Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history’s oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales’s disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a “new slavery,” one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable.

Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded the world’s labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable individuals.

Bales’s vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation.

Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of “naming and shaming” corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today’s global economy.

All of the author’s royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world.

The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today

In this riveting book, authors and authorities on modern day slavery Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter expose the disturbing phenomenon of human trafficking and slavery that exists now in the United States. In The Slave Next Door we find that slaves are all around us, hidden in plain sight: the dishwasher in the kitchen of the neighborhood restaurant, the kids on the corner selling cheap trinkets, the man sweeping the floor of the local department store. In these pages we also meet some unexpected slaveholders, such as a 27-year old middle-class Texas housewife who is currently serving a life sentence for offences including slavery.

Weaving together a wealth of voices – from slaves, slaveholders, and traffickers as well as from experts, counselors, law enforcement officers, rescue and support groups, and others – this book is also a call to action, telling what we, as private citizens, can do to finally bring an end to this horrific crime.

Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, coerced to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world’s most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such “processing,” and can be repeatedly “consumed.”

Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, in the first journey of its kind, he traveled across four continents to investigate these crimes and take stock of their devastating human toll. Kara made several trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them.

In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all.

The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves.

Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective

This book examines all forms of human trafficking globally, revealing the operations of the trafficking business and the nature of the traffickers themselves. Using a historical and comparative perspective, it demonstrates that there is more than one business model of human trafficking and that there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world.

Drawing on a wide body of academic research – actual prosecuted cases, diverse reports, and field work and interviews conducted by the author over the last sixteen years in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the former socialist countries – Louise Shelley concludes that human trafficking will grow in the twenty-first century as a result of economic and demographic inequalities in the world, the rise of conflicts, and possibly global climate change. Coordinated efforts of government, civil society, the business community, multilateral organizations, and the media are needed to stem its growth.

This is No Ordinary Joy: How the Courage of Survivors Transformed My Life

Many people are looking for deeper meaning in their lives. This book is for anyone who has ever wondered “Is this all there is? Is this really the best I could be doing with my life?” When Sarah Symons discovered that human trafficking and slavery were destroying the lives of millions of young girls worldwide, she was compelled to take action. In this deeply persaonl and brutally honest memoir, she shares how she took on this enormous cause, personally and professionally, and how it changed her and her family’s lives forever. Told in a warm, story-telling fashion, Symons shares why and how she decided to make a dramatic change to re-purpose her comfortable and successful life as a musician/composer and mother of two young children with a husband who aided in their financial stability as an investment banker. The death of Symons’ beloved mother threw her into a life-altering state where she, for the first time in her life, was faced with overwhelming sadness. A series of a fateful events beginning on her mother’s birthday took Symons to Tribeca Film Festival where she saw a documentary about global human trafficking and slavery.

Ten years later, having come through tremendous challenges, pitfalls, frustrations and miraculous events, Symons has founded and grown the organization Made By Survivors – an international nonprofit organization employing and educating survivors of slavery and other human rights abuses ”I hit some real crisis points over the past eight years ,” Symons admits. “At times, I was tempted to give up. It seemed every time I was at a low point, something miraculous would happen to help us over a hurdle.” She adds, “The biggest miracle is the one we see every day: survivors who once seemed irreparably damaged restored to wellness and radiating joy.” In 54 short evolving chapters, Symons shares her inspiring journey and exposes readers to:

Human rights issues – slavery does not occur randomly and is related to other social ills.

Heartwarming survivor stories and the difference people all over the world are making.

Solidarity in the modern day Underground Railroad movement.

The limitless opportunities to affect change in seemingly unstoppable atrocities

Human Trafficking Around the World: Hidden in Plain Sight

This unprecedented study of sex trafficking, forced labor, organ trafficking, and sex tourism across twenty-four nations highlights the experiences of the victims, perpetrators, and anti-traffickers involved in this brutal trade. Combining statistical data with intimate accounts and interviews, journalist Stephanie Hepburn and justice scholar Rita J. Simon create a dynamic volume sure to educate and spur action.

Hepburn and Simon recount the lives of victims during and after their experience with trafficking, and they follow the activities of traffickers before capture and their outcomes after sentencing. Each chapter centers on the trafficking practices and anti-trafficking measures of a single country: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Niger, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Syria, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examining these nations’ laws, Hepburn and Simon reveal gaps in legislation and enforcement and outline the cultural norms and biases, societal assumptions, and conflicting policies that make trafficking scenarios so pervasive and resilient. This study points out those most vulnerable in each nation and the specific cultural, economic, environmental, and geopolitical factors that contribute to each nation’s trafficking issues. Furthermore, the study also highlights common phenomena that governments and international anti-traffickers should consider in their fight against this illicit trade.