Human Goods

What’s happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain.  But it is a terrible, terrible thing.  To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible.  The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways.          -Arundhati Roy

Human Goods is intended to help everyday people understand the truth behind the modern global slave trade and the context of issues that enable it.  What is it?  Where does it happen?  Who does it hurt, and who does it serve?  What part do we all play in it?

The $32 billion a year shadow industry of modern-day slavery exists in a broader matrix of global connection, power, and control that leads to domination of the weak and commodification of the human — for sex, labor, organs, and soldiers, to name a few examples.  Even, on occasion, for performance, babies, or human “zoos” and “pets.”  It has been identified as the fastest growing black trade — rivaling the illicit exchange of both drugs and weapons — with an estimated 27 million people enslaved worldwide today.  That’s more than at any time in history, including the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Asia is home to the majority of the world’s slaves, many of whom are domestically trafficked into labor (agricultural, domestic, industrial) or the sex trade.

Human trafficking is defined by the United Nations as, “The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”

Men, women, and children around the world — including the “developed” world — are forced or coerced into situations that make them vulnerable to slavery through an array of interrelated issues.  These include land rights, natural disasters, development projects like roads and dams, climate change, gender inequality, political conflict and violence, racism, displacement, colonization (both political and cultural), technological development, unemployment, crime, health and disease, child abuse, drug use, tourism, globalization, structural adjustment and privatization, economic recession, fluctuations in global pricing, food supply, pornography, lack of education, and general trends of ethno-cultural and/or class dehumanization.

What is clear and confronting about the pervasive connections between these issues and slavery is the undeniable imbalance of power between the “First World” and the “Global South.”  Global economic and geopolitical frameworks create and fortify social, economic, and political structures that mire many countries in the poverty and instability that foster the supply of slaves, while endowing other countries with the wealth and power to fuel demand.

Countries and regions are typically categorized as “source” (meaning people are trafficked from the area) or “destination” (trafficked to) areas.  More often than not, countries are both source and destination areas.  The U.S. is a destination country for the sexual and labor exploitation of trafficked people from all over the world.  But the South Side of Chicago, for instance, is also a source area for sex trafficking to other parts of the country.  Some areas are also classified as “transit” points between sources and destinations.  Frequently, an area serves as all three (eg. India’s state of Bihar provides a huge impoverished population base as a source for trafficking, while also serving as a destination and a transit point for people being trafficked from Northeast India and Nepal to other parts of India).

Something is rotten in the state of the world.  Something, in the words of Arundhati Roy, “almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain.”  And slavery, like any expression of exploitation, provides ample evidence of this.

In the last years, there has been a shift in both global and individual consciousness about the use and abuse of the world’s “disposable people.”  People are increasingly asking questions about the inner workings of a system that is largely predicated on the consumption and commodification of human beings — a system that exhibits symptoms of its pathology in issues like human trafficking.  An open and intentional investigation into just one of these symptoms allows us to unearth harmful tendencies that affect our world, from the slaves to the slaveholders.  It is when we make the connections, identify the driving forces, confront accountability, and respond with empowerment for action together that real transformation becomes possible.