Human Trafficking Is Not A Choice

“Human trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, and the transport of people within countries for sexual exploitation, forced labor, and/or organ donating.” (Gale) “Slavery is the condition in which one or more persons is owned as property by another and is under the owner’s control.” (American Heritage Dictionary) Trafficked people who are often regarded as disposable, are often used for these various reasons. Although, many believe slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery still exists in 2017. In order to understand that human trafficking is a form of slavery, one needs to examine what it is, the effects, and the solutions.

In discussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the term “Middle Passage” often arises. The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of Africans were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic Slave trade. The journey was one of the most horrific aspects of the morally deplorable system of slavery. Death was a constant threat as diseases, starvation, asphyxiation and severe depression rampantly claimed the lives of African and the ship’s crew. Throughout this essay you will understand the tragic journey of the slaves and what hardships they had to go through.

Footnote: Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, eds, Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 68.

After reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, it is clear to see the true horrors behind the entirety of slavery. It is one thing to learn about it from a textbook or to sit through a lecture, but it is a completely different experience to get an account of how grossly inhumane, frightening, and appalling slavery really was from someone who experienced the terrors first-hand. Reading this narrative provided extremely descriptive details of how slaves truly were treated. Douglass recounted the time where he had often:

Through the course of history, whenever people hear the word “slaves”, they imagine a long period of hate,torture, ignorance, and cruelty. The term slaves mostly refers to the group of people that today are know as Africans. During these harsh times some slaves kept the detailed memories of their daily suffering and later told them to help create their narratives. In the Classic Slave Narratives the hardships of four slaves who today we remember as Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Gustavus Vassa, and last but not least Harriet Jacobs, are descriptively told. Experiences varied based on where the slave was located or their gender. Slaves would be treated as objects, rather than human beings, they were someone’s possession. In The Classic Slave

In American history, every event and person plays a part in the future. For example, rich plantation owners helped America advance their economy. However, that would not have been at all possible without the help of their slaves. The time and institution of slavery is a time of historical remembrance. It played a primary role during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The treatment, labor conditions, and personal stories of these slaves’ treatment and labor conditions are all widely discussed around the world to this day.

People have ample knowledge when it comes to Transatlantic slavery because it was a long-lasting institution built upon the idea of trading humans in the form of stolen goods through negotiation (Berry Lecture 4). Although textbooks and classroom lectures thoroughly cover the topic of transporting slaves through what would become the Middle Passage, these perspectives fail to report what it felt like to experience the journey firsthand. People’s understanding of the psychological and physical torture negroes were coerced into is limited because slaves were either illiterate or their opinions were invalid. As a result, rare records such as images and texts obtained directly from the slave trade unveil unique

During the time of the slave trade, the injustices and cruelties that slavery presented were unimaginable. Enslavement of individuals meant separation from their families, destruction of their homes, and potential death. The Middle Passage, a slave voyage to the Americas, was particularly traumatic and shocking for many individuals. On the voyage, the Africans faced dangers to disease, brutal treatment, little food and sanitation, and beatings. In his account of the Middle Passage on pages 450-451, Olaudah Equiano’s description contradicts previous understandings of the slave trade not being so bad, and shows ways in which the Africans resisted the process through their actions on board; it also addresses how the Africans’ experiences on the

Kevin Bales' Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy explores the fact that slavery still exists in many different forms throughout the world. Most people believe that slavery ended with the abolition of the slave trade, however slavery just managed to evolve. In Bales’ preface to the 2012 edition, Bales mentions that he regrets using the terms ‘new slavery’ and ‘old slavery.’ Old slavery is typically regarded as legal ownership where slaves were long-term investments. Slaves were almost always ethnically different from their owners. Today, ownership of human beings is illegal in every country. New slavery is fueled by greed and money. Slaves are not owned legally, but are controlled by violence. These types of slaves are disposed

When thinking of slavery, it is common for a person to think of stereotypical slavery: African Americans working in harsh conditions without pay or choice. However, since the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, this type of slavery has decreased significantly. Today, we use the term ‘human trafficking’ to describe modern slavery. Grant Oster states that, by definition, “human trafficking is the act or gathering, moving, receiving, or keeping of human beings by threat,

“Slavery occurs when one person controls another person, using violence or the threat of violence to maintain that control, exploits them economically, pays them nothing and they cannot walk away.” In 1865, slavery was abolished here in the United States. It states in the thirteenth amendment that, “neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Even though it states that slavery is illegal in the thirteenth amendment, human trafficking is equivalent to modern slavery and it still exist today in the United States. Human trafficking happens when someone owes money, is kidnapped,

“ If you think slavery ended in the United States in 1865 … Think again.” This is saying that slavery hasn’t really ended because human trafficking is still happening. As U.N crime fighting office stated, 2.4 million people across the world are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves. Human trafficking continues and numbers are growing larger , 42 percent of the recruiters are Women. Recruiters seek any gender and any age so human trafficking victims are growing everyday. Human trafficking is and social injustice because it is incompatible to the principles of freedom and dignity. The abuse of human beings dehumanizes the individuals who are trafficked, and

Human Trafficking has been around for as long as one can remember, but in the 1980’s it became a serious problem. There are five different branches; debt bondage or bonded labor, forced labor or labor exploitation, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and sex trafficking. While each one has its own characteristics, they have one thing in common. That thing is slavery. Many researchers believe trafficking became a huge issue when an estimated 9.5 million people from Africa were taken to work in the colonies in North and South America. In, Human

“Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.” (Edmund Burke) Human trafficking is modern era slavery. It is an inhumane act against innocent people. The world is full of traffickers, it is a large industry. The victims of sexual exploitation are 98% women and children, and there are many case stories of victims and their past experiences.

Human trafficking is a trivial part of legalized prostitution. It has become one of the most dangerous critical problems of today’s society. Human trafficking is basically another form of modern day slavery where females getting forced to do things against their will and trying to escape brings very bad consequences. When it comes to slavery, we tend to imagine the pictures from ancient Rome, Egypt and Greece that we learned in 7th grade in ancient history class, as well as modern-day America and various other countries where human slavery is prospering. It is very known fact that slavery has been around for centuries in many different forms. Human trafficking can be seen as a modern form of slavery that not all people are aware of. Human trafficking