Catherine Reilly meets Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves, an activist working tirelessly to highlight the problem of modern-day slavery around the worldEver since he picked up an Anti-Slavery International pamphlet in London in the early 1990s, Kevin Bales has focused his professional life on combating the contemporary slave trade.
The American human rights activist says many people think slavery is a thing of the past, but that this is an optimistic, dangerous, assumption blown out of the water by the estimated 27 million people worldwide trapped in slavery today.
Based in Washington DC, Bales is founder of Free the Slaves, an organisation which raises awareness about modern-day slavery around the world, in addition to lobbying governments and industries on the need to address the problem. Bales is recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on the issue, and is author of the Pulitzer-nominated book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Econ-omy.
Part of Bales’ strategy is in highlighting the fact that, in global financial terms, the output of those trapped in slavery is just a drop in the ocean – to put it simply, the powers-that-be aren’t going to spark economic crises by clamping down on the reprehensible practice.
Bales says the productive output of those trapped in slavery amounts to around US$3.2m – “what Americans spend on crisps and pretzels every year… If slavery was ended, no economy would collapse. It’s not a great vested interest.”
Could this argument be widened to advocate rich governments paying off those coordinating the slave trade with ‘goodbye money’? “No absolutely not,” says Bales, “that’s paying criminals to get your television back if they steal it, or something like that. No, what I am interested in is rich governments supporting the work that brings slavery to an end. That’s about the work of liberation and it’s also about paying for those things which we know reduce slavery.
“For example, education – we know if we raise the education level of any population the amount of slavery in that population falls. We know that if you reduce the amount of corruption, slavery falls. We know that if you increase economic opportunity and jobs, slavery falls. That’s what governments already should be doing, so do them a little better and slavery will fall.”
Some of the industries in which slave labour is known or highly suspected include the production of cocoa, cotton, steel, oriental rugs, diamonds and silk (in addition to the sex ‘industry’). Bales and Free the Slaves, along with a number of other human rights organisations, have been particularly active in working with the cocoa industry in addressing the problem. Free the Slaves is not a supporter of boycotts, opting instead for more long-standing solutions.
Bales is optimistic about the cocoa industry’s actions so far. “The wonderful thing that’s occurred is that we worked out what amounts to a treaty; it’s like an international treaty, it’s called the Cocoa Protocol – and it’s an agreement that the chocolate and cocoa industry have signed onto,” he says, in reference to the Harkin Engel/Cocoa Protocol singed in 2001, which came after media investigations and the threat of US government action against the cocoa industry.
“All the companies of North America and Western Europe have signed this agreement in which they say they will work together to bankroll, but not control, three things: research into the exact extent of child labour and slave labour in cocoa production; a charitable NGO-type organisation that will work to eradicate slavery and child labour, which they have funded; and an inspection and certification system that will be applied to cocoa labour practices.
“And these things have been carried through,” he continues, “so the International Cocoa Initiative has now received about $15m worth of funding from the chocolate industry, money that would never have been spent on anti-slavery work otherwise. And the certification process, while not completed, is now being field tested.”
Indeed, the delay in the certification process has led to the filing of a lawsuit in 2005 by the International Labor Rights Fund and Global Exchange on behalf of children who were trafficked from Mali into the Ivory Coast and apparently forced to work 12- to 14-hour days. The children allegedly received no pay, little food or sleep and were beaten.
An uphill struggle awaits, something that Bales acknowledges. “Talk is cheap,” he says. “I’ve seen politicians say strong things [about combating slavery] and then write a very small cheque.” Raising awareness can also be difficult. “We live in a world where most people think slavery no longer exists,” he notes. “That’s an obstacle.”
Nevertheless, the work of Free the Slaves continues. Bales says slavery is all about violence, control and profit – a cycle which must be broken. There are more slaves today than ever before, and yet the figure is the lowest proportion in the global population in history.
Free the Slaves works with partner organisations in Ghana, India, Nepal and Haiti, and Bales says that across the continents the story of how someone was forced into slavery is generally similar: “It’s about luring the hungry with this question – want a job? In different continents people have told me ‘he looked like a crook but my kids are hungry, the hut needs a roof’, so they just got in that truck and took a risk.”
According to Free the Slaves, the vast majority of the world’s enslaved people are in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal), but the Western world is also affected.
The organisation adds: “There is slavery in the United States, mostly due to human trafficking for domestic work, migrant farm labour, or work in the sex industry. Migrant workers are tricked into working for little or no pay as means of repayment for debts from their transport into the US, similar to debt bondage in South Asia. Domestic workers and women in the sex industry are trafficked into the US with promises of jobs and education and then held as slaves. The US government estimates that 14,500–17,500 people are trafficked into the US each year.”
As to the level of enforced labour in Ireland, Bales says: “ It’s hard to determine. There’s a number of cases that I’ve been able to follow but no one is really very clear if it’s the tip of an iceberg, or whether that’s it.”
The anti-prostitution group Ruhama has so far encountered over 200 women who have been victims of trafficking into the Republic of Ireland.
In addition, a number of human rights campaigners have criticised the scheme of the Criminal Justice (Traffick-ing in Persons and Sexual Offences) Bill 2006 because it doesn’t protect the needs of victims, in terms of provision for temporary residence in the country, for example.
Bales comments: “Its fine with [the Irish Government] to start with a law enforcement position, but they really do need to take the needs of victims into account, because you will never be able to effectively enforce the law unless you are able to rely on the victims to testify – and to do that you must be able to support them very well.”
Kevin Bales spoke last week at a conference on the European Slave Trade, organised by the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin and Ireland En Route
