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Modern-day slavery: an explainer

Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty

   About 150 years after most countries banned slavery – Brazil was the last to abolish its participation in the transatlantic slave trade, in 1888 – millions of men, women and children are still enslaved. Contemporary slavery takes many forms, from women forced into prostitution, to child slavery in agriculture supply chains or whole families working for nothing to pay off generational debts. Slavery thrives on every continent and in almost every country. Forced labour, people trafficking, debt bondage and child marriage are all forms of modern-day slavery that affect the world’s most vulnerable people.

  Slavery is prohibited under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude: slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

  Definitions of modern-day slavery are mainly taken from the 1956 UN supplementary convention, which says: “debt bondage, serfdom, forced marriage and the delivery of a child for the exploitation of that child are all slavery-like practices and require criminalisation and abolishment”. The 1930 Forced Labour Convention defines forced labour as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily”. As contemporary systems of slavery have evolved, new definitions, including trafficking and distinguishing child slavery from child labour, have developed. 

  Due to its illegality, data on modern-day slavery is difficult to collate. The UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that about 21 million people are in forced labour at any point in time. The ILO says this estimate includes trafficking and other forms of modern slavery. The only exceptions are trafficking for organ removal, forced marriage and adoption, unless the last two practices result in forced labour. The ILO calculates that 90% of the 21 million are exploited by individuals or companies, while 10% are forced to work by the state, rebel military groups, or in prisons under conditions that violate ILO standards. Sexual exploitation accounts for 22% of slaves.

    Remember the good old days, when you could have a heated-yet-enjoyable debate with your friends about things that didn’t matter that much — times when you could be a true fan of the Manchester United soccer team when you didn’t come from the city of Manchester?

    How things have changed.

    Now disagreements feel deadly serious. Like when your colleague pronounces that wearing a face mask in public is a threat to his liberty. Or when you see that one of your friends has just tweeted that, actually, all lives matter. Before you know it, you’re feeling angry and forming harsh new judgments about your colleagues and friends. Let’s take a collective pause and breathe: there are some ways we can all try to have more civil disagreements in this febrile age of culture wars.

1. ‘Coupling’ and ‘decoupling’

    The first is to consider how inclined people are to ‘couple’ or ‘decouple’ topics involving wider political and social factors. Swedish data analyst John Nerst has used the terms to describe the contrasting ways in which people approach contentious issues. Those of us more inclined to ‘couple’ see them as inextricably related to a broader matrix of factors, whereas those more predisposed to ‘decouple’ prefer to consider an issue in isolation. To take a crude example, a decoupler might consider in isolation the question of whether a vaccine provides a degree of immunity to a virus; a coupler, by contrast, would immediately see the issue as inextricably entangled in a mesh of factors, such as pharmaceutical industry power and parental choice.

2.____________________

    Most of us are deeply committed to our beliefs, especially concerning moral and social issues, such that when we’re presented with facts that contradict our beliefs, we often choose to dismiss those facts, rather than update our beliefs.

    A study at Arizona State University, U.S., analysed more than 100,000 comments on a forum where users post their views on an issue and invite others to persuade them to change their mind. The researchers found that regardless of the kind of topic, people were more likely to change their mind when confronted with more evidence-based arguments. “Our work may suggest that while attitude change is hard-won, providing facts, statistics and citations for one’s arguments can convince people to change their minds,” they concluded.

3. Just be nicer?

    Finally, it’s easier said than done, but let’s all try to be more respectful of and attentive to each other’s positions. We should do this not just for virtuous reasons, but because the more we create that kind of a climate, the more open-minded and intellectually flexible we will all be inclined to be. And then hopefully, collectively, we can start having more constructive disagreements — even in our present very difficult times.