Survivors of Slavery

Modern-Day Slave Narratives

Laura Murphy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231535755
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Slavery is not a crime confined to the far reaches of history. It is an injustice that continues to entrap twenty-seven million people across the globe. Laura Murphy offers close to forty survivor narratives from Cambodia, Ghana, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States, detailing the horrors of a system that forces people to work without pay and against their will, under the threat of violence, with little or no means of escape. Representing a variety of circumstances in diverse contexts, these survivors are the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, and Olaudah Equianos of our time, testifying to the widespread existence of a human rights tragedy and the urgent need to address it.

Through storytelling and firsthand testimony, this anthology shapes a twenty-first-century narrative that many believe died with the end of slavery in the Americas. Organized around such issues as the need for work, the punishment of defiance, and the move toward activism, the collection isolates the causes, mechanisms, and responses to slavery that allow the phenomenon to endure. Enhancing scholarship in women's studies, sociology, criminology, law, social work, and literary studies, the text establishes a common trajectory of vulnerability, enslavement, captivity, escape, and recovery, creating an invaluable resource for activists, scholars, legislators, and service providers.

The Allure of Work

IN OCTOBER 2009, AMERICANS LAMENTED the steep rise in the unemployment rate following the mortgage crisis and the subsequent economic recession. The unemployment rate that month hit a peak at 10.2 percent, the highest it had been since 1982.¹ In 1933, as a result of the Great Depression almost one in four Americans was out of work,² but that staggering statistic did nothing to ease the pain of those twenty-first-century Americans who were without work. Just as it did nothing for the additional 4 million Americans who were not being counted in the unemployment statistics because they had been unemployed for so long that they no longer received unemployment benefits.

In response to this nearly unavoidable unemployment—and it no doubt was unavoidable, for if we consider that at least one in six Americans was unemployed or underemployed, then even the wealthiest American must have known someone who was affected by the recession—Americans were forced to find work or sustenance by any means necessary. Some of those who had the means moved to areas with higher employment potential, and many immigrants returned to their countries of origin, where they thought perhaps there might be more work. Some people started new business ventures or went back to school in hopes that a fresh start would dramatically change their lives. Some relied on the five years of social services benefits that our government provides to those citizens who are struggling to make ends meet. Some of them surely turned to selling their bodies because it was the only thing they undoubtedly owned. Some may have opted for and remained in jobs that were exploitative or abusive. Others may very well have resorted to criminal activities in their desperation to feed themselves and their families.

These were the difficulties that citizens of the United States faced in the recession. Imagine if you lived in Togo, however, where the average per capita income is less than a dollar a day, and very few young men have a job or hope of getting one. On workdays, crowds of adult men gather informally in the streets and markets, listless and unsure of what to do next. In nearby Liberia, 85 percent of working-age adults are unemployed. In Asia, Nepalis face 46 percent unemployment, and Turkmen 60 percent.³

What do able-bodied, hard-working people do when there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around? As with Americans facing the economic downturn, a number of options might help a person avoid the bind of unemployment. Most people would admit that they would do anything to pay for their children’s education, to maintain their family’s health, to put food on the table. But what happens when there just isn’t enough work for everyone to be able to afford to do those basic tasks?

In so many of the cases of modern-day slavery that we encounter, the only lure a trafficker needs to convince someone to walk into enslavement is the simple offer of a job. In the narratives collected in this chapter, the writers found themselves unemployed or needing medical care or wanting to help a family member or simply hoping that they could provide a better life for themselves or their families. When introduced to the possibility of a job that could genuinely change their lives or be the key to their survival, these narrators were willing (as many people would be in their situations) to take a risk, sign an unusual contract, believe a smooth-talker, take burdensome loans, or entrust their children to distant family members.

Quang Thi Vo left her native Vietnam for a factory job in the United States, where she hoped she would be able to work to support her child and extended family back home. Instead, she was taken to American Samoa by a fraudulent employment agency, and when she got there, she was abused mentally, physically, and sexually. She was held captive by the company and was unpaid for her work. Her story reveals how a desire for better opportunities in other countries can lead working adults to accept even the most suspicious of work contracts, and the debts they accrue trying to get there can keep them bound to their traffickers long after they manage to emancipate themselves.

It is easy for most young people to imagine that they could never be caught in the trap of slavery, but the stories collected in this chapter might convince them otherwise. Katya was a college student in Ukraine when a legitimate summer job in the United States lured her away from her family and into a life of slavery. Katya had learned about trafficking and had been vigilant to ensure her own safety. She’d done her homework and had found a safe opportunity to study English and wait tables. Nonetheless, people she knew from her hometown convinced her that the program was moved to Detroit, where they forced her to work in a dance club and give them all of her pay. She knew how to protect herself from the fraudulent work agencies that are all too common in eastern Europe, but she hadn’t been prepared to protect herself against familiar faces from back home. For O, an abusive father made any job outside her home seem positive until she found that the abuse continued there as well. Like so many other people in her situation, she sought a job that would help her leave behind the painful existence of her youth. These decisions to seek a better life unfortunately made Katya and O easy prey for men who pretended to be their saviors.

Rambho Kumar, a child from India who worked at a carpet factory, shows us how even children are vulnerable to the temptation of a job if that job will mean that they can help their family out of poverty and illness. Kumar’s family thought that he would be educated during the day and work in the evenings when he moved to the city. Like many impoverished families all around the world, Kumar’s parents were willing to allow him to leave home on the guarantee that he would be educated and learn a trade, but Kumar was never allowed to go to school. Instead, he spent every waking hour working on a dangerous loom to produce carpets. Even when he was injured, he was forced to continue working. The allure of a job and a future career was enough to convince his family that he should take a chance. For Kumar, that gamble led to slavery.

When we remind ourselves that the most essential aspect of slavery is the work, then we begin to understand better how it is that people can be tempted by an offer that eventually leads them into bondage. Work is the candy that traffickers use to tempt adults and children into captivity. Of course, no one suspects that they won’t be paid or that they won’t be allowed to leave their place of employment. The allure of work alone is often enough to entice a person in need to let his or her guard down and take a chance.

One complicated aspect of forced labor is that it can go unnoticed. It is often difficult to tell the difference between forced labor and a regular job. Katya worked in a strip club, where some relatively nice guys visited without realizing they were watching slaves dance until the girls told them so. Quang Thi Vo and Rambho worked in factories, which produce the clothes we wear and the rugs we walk on, but consumers rarely ever inquire about the working conditions of the people who make the goods they buy. O was just one among so many young girls who have turned to selling sex—no one ever looked carefully enough to see that she was being forced to work on the street. Our naive ignorance of the fact of forced labor often makes enslavement difficult to detect.

In the late nineteenth century, when the slave trade was abolished on the west coast of Africa, people distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate trades—between, say, the trade in palm oil or cocoa and the trade in people. Still today, selling a person is clearly seen as illegitimate, but how can we detect the difference between legitimate free labor and illegitimate slave labor? How can a person spot a slave when a slave often looks simply like a person who is working? There are too many stories collected here—and far too many that couldn’t be collected here—for us to allow the work of slaves to remain in the shadows.

Work is a central component of human life, something we all rely on to support ourselves in so many ways. Even those of us who are lucky enough to love our jobs tend to go to work primarily because we want to be able to provide certain things for ourselves and our families—shelter, food, and clothes are immediate necessities, but we also work to gain money for our hobbies, to be able to travel to visit family, and no doubt for luxury goods. Nevertheless, choosing our work is a form of human agency that some of us often take for granted. Work is not only essential to us financially; in most cultures, it is considered crucial to our well-being, to our sense of ourselves, and to our participation in our communities.

Slavery is forced labor. When a person is forced to work against his or her will and without pay—as all slaves are—traffickers and slave owners excise agency and desire from work. Slavery is a perversion of work. It converts something constructive of identity, social value, and community participation into something that is destructive of those very same processes. It takes a simple human desire to be employed and makes people vulnerable to other people’s predatory and self-serving desires.

In her testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee (during which she used the pseudonym “Vi”), Quang Thi Vo describes the advantage of being able to choose her own employer after her escape. She writes, “Here I am free to choose where to work. If dissatisfied with one workplace, I can always go to another one.” The notion that one has the capacity to choose one’s own job is essential to most notions of freedom. Even in the most exploitative of situations, most people are free to walk away from their jobs if they feel abused or are unpaid. The people in this book were unable to walk away from their work when they realized it was not what they had chosen. Their employers robbed them of this simple freedom.

Illustrating how important work is to people’s sense of self, many of the contributors to this book chose work as a way of taking control of their lives after slavery despite all of the pain associated with labor. The choice to work defines their notion of freedom. Katya currently works full-time and wants to go back to school. We will later meet Given Kachepa, who is thrilled to have a legal work permit in the United States after a fraudulent minister forced him to work here as a choir boy. He is now pursuing a degree in dentistry. All of the contributors to chapter 8 have turned their work into a way of preventing slavery. Work—legitimate work, paid work, chosen work—is a dream for so many people regardless of their particular circumstances. The desire for a life defined by good work, not defined by the perversion of it, fuels these narratives and the lives of people who were made to suffer as a result of forced labor.

QUANG THI VO

Origin: Vietnam	Trafficked in/to: American Samoa
Form of enslavement: Forced factory labor	Current status: Free
Source: “Vi,” testimony at the Implementation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act Hearing Before the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives, November 29, 2001, 107th Cong., 1st sess., 1 Cong. Rec., Serial No. 107-63, 156–60 [2001].
Context: Quang Thi Vo worked for the Daewoosa company, which was using American Samoa as a site for the production of clothing to be sold to majo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Allure of Work
• 2. Slaves in the Family
• 3. Case Study: Interviews from a Brothel
• 4. Painful Defiance and Contested Freedom
• 5. Community Response and Resistance
• 6. Case Study: Mining Unity
• 7. The Voice and the Silence of Slavery
• 8. Becoming an Activist
• 9. Case Study: Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking, Survivor Advisory Caucus
• Epilogue: Twenty-First-Century Abolitionists—What You Can Do to End Slavery
• Appendix A: Antislavery Organizations
• Appendix B: Signs of Enslavement
• Appendix C: Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing
• Notes
• Index