The many forms of exploitation
(Read article summary)Across the world, women, children, and men are forced or pressured into jobs that keep them in modern-day servitude. Some involve sexual exploitation. Millions more are central to the goods and services the developed world enjoys.
Millions of people worldwide are trapped in what amounts to modern-day slavery.
Shackles and whips are seldom used, but individuals desperate for money are lured into jobs in which they work for meager wages, live under the threat of violence, are subject to sexual abuse, and constantly fear arrest or deportation.
Of all the ways that workers are exploited, the most poignant stories tend to be those of women caught up in sex trafficking. A recent report by the Britain-based Anti-Slavery International group, for instance, notes that many women leave impoverished homes “with dreams in their eyes, fear and excitement in their minds at what awaits,” but too often are duped into a life of prostitution, where they are intimidated, abused, and blackmailed. A woman who manages to break free might still be charged with prostitution or illegal immigration. If she returns home, she faces shame. In some cultures, she faces death.
Stephanie Hanes’s Monitor cover story examines this difficult subject. She makes clear that forced prostitution must be combatted for the crime that it is. But because of the age-old human fascination with sex, it is all too easy to focus on that problem and overlook the many other ways that women, children, and men – as many as 27 million, by some estimates – are exploited in global industries built on cheap, often forced, labor. Everything from the produce we eat to the mineral components in our cellphones, from the clothes we wear to the unskilled workers cleaning our buildings, may be part of this system.
Forced prostitution is one of many forms of exploitation. And even it is nuanced. Sometimes the force is overt. Sometimes it is psychological. And sometimes prostitution is a choice.
