Friday, October 18, 2013

India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria on slavery's list of shame, says report

Wang Bangyin breaks down as he hugs his rescued son at a welfare center for children in China's Guizhou province in 2009. The boy was among 60 children rescued by police from human traffickers. Nearly 3 million people in China are victims of forms of modern slavery, including forced marriage, sexual exploitation and forms of forced labor such as domestic servitude, forced begging and forced marriage.
More than 14 million people in India, like this child laborer in Mumbai, live in conditions of slavery, according to the Global Slavery Index. "While this involves the exploitation of some foreign nationals," reads the report, "by far the largest proportion of this problem is the exploitation of Indian citizens within India itself, particularly through debt bondage and bonded labor."
A group of Pakistani bonded laborers including women and children sit with their belongings after their release in a village Kahpro, some 280 kilometers east of Karachi. The country, with large populations of displaced people and weak rule of law, has an estimated 2.2 million slaves.
Dozens of slave children ride in the back of a police vehicle after they were apprehended at Seme Border, Nigeria. Much slavery in Nigeria and neighboring Benin involves the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation, domestic work or forced labor.
Myanmar construction workers carry baskets of stone during the construction of a road in Naypyidaw in 2006. Despite the UN's labor agency lifting restrictions against Myanmar this year over its failures to act on complaints of forced labor, around 380,000 people remain enslaved in the country, according to the Global Slavery Index.
Moyna sits outside her home in the town of Kalora, Bangladesh. As a 14-year-old, she found herself working in an Indian brothel after being tricked into believing she had taken a job in a steel factory.
Tourist destinations that are popular for the adult sex trade, such as Thailand's Pattaya, are said to be centers for child sex trafficking. Thai women are also trafficked as sex slaves to many other countries.
Modern slavery in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo reflects centuries-old patterns of enslavement, often based on colonial conflicts and injustice exacerbated by contemporary armed conflict, the researchers behind the index say.
Some 650,000 people live in conditions of slavery in Ethiopia, according to the Global Slavery Index
The countries of the former Soviet Union, such as Kazakhstan, where this sex worker is pictured outside a brothel, have been a source of trafficked women. In Russia, researchers estimate more than 500,000 people exist in conditions of modern day slavery, its large economy drawing vulnerable workers from former Soviet Republics and Eastern Europe.

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