“Victims of slavery tend to be isolated, relatively poor, and badly educated,” former U.S. ambassador at large on modern-day slavery John Miller writes in the current Wilson Quarterly. “They don’t hold press conferences.”
Miller gives an outline of the nuanced topography of today’s fight against slavery founded in both global policy and personal experience. He describes some of the slaves he has met around the world, from a young woman kidnapped by the LRA in Uganda and forced to serve as a concubine and killer until her jaw was shot off during combat, to a teenager terrorized for years by her Minneapolis pimp.
Miller keenly looks to historical abolitionists of other slave trades to point out the critical role of language in framing, describing, and awakening the world to the realities of slavery:
As I grappled with the enormity of the crimes I encountered and the near silence that surrounded them, I turned to history for insight, and especially to the example of William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the great British reformer who led the 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Atlantic … For today’s antislavery activists, I realized, much of the task is the same as it was in Wilberforce’s time: to awaken others to an abomination that most people barely recognize. It is a measure of the challenge that remains that activists still need to persuade human rights organizations and other groups to pay attention to slavery…
In Wilberforce’s day, slavery was shrouded in euphemism by its defenders: “field hand,” “laborer,” and “houseboy.” Today, the news media and academics unthinkingly use words—“forced laborer,” “child soldier,” and “sex worker”—that have their own anesthetic effect, and along with others I have insisted on calling slavery by its right name. I have never understood why we constantly use the bloodless, bureaucratic term “human trafficking.”
Wow, kinda amazing issue. I’m going to write about it too.