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Some people may still think that slavery is some evil
thing that happened long, long ago to Africans and ended with the
onset of civilization. How wrong they would be. It still goes on
today in a modern form of sex-slavery. In South East Asia, it is a
thriving business. In the Philippines brothels are filled with young
women and minors in a system of exploitation and suffering that
causes untold suffering and human degradation and is a blight on the
name and dignity of the nation.
The kidnapping, torture and the
extraction of forced labor from captured human beings was a revered
and protected institution of the European nations considered then
the center of so-called civilization.
It was such an important trade,
every shipment of human beings was carefully recorded, all that had
been bought and were resold. Some many times over. It began around
1620 and continued for 350 years.
Thirteen million persons, men,
women and children were captured and shipped out of Africa. They
were forced to lie flat on shelves one above the other in long rows
running the length of the ship for efficient and maximum load
capacity.
Hundreds in each ship were
chained like this for months, many died from sickness, diseases and
the fetid conditions. Almost 2 million are unaccounted for. Some
ships’ captains threw the sick overboard alive. They could claim
insurance for slaves lost over board, but not if they died from
sickness.
The sales’ records show 11
million were traded and most European nations were part of it and
justified it by perverting the Gospel message to suite their
economic goals. Britain came to be the center of the trade and
controlled most of it from Liverpool. They wanted slaves in Brazil,
the Caribbean, and North America to produce, sugar, coffee, cotton,
cocoa, work in mines and do domestic labor. The biggest trader in
slaves was Portugal, 4.6 million, followed by Britain, 2.5 million;
Spain, 1.6 million; France, 1.2 million; British North America and
the US 300,000.
The unfortunate slaves were badly
treated, deprived of every human right, to be free, to marry and
have a family, to live with family members, to be educated, to own
anything. They were declared to be property things, not people and
could be bought and sold. Racism was born when the Europeans had to
justify slavery despite the Gospel mandate that the captives were to
be freed, the poor to inherit the earth and those hungry for justice
to have their fill.
The slaves got nothing out of it,
the Christian churches owned slaves and invested in the trade and
the plantations where they were forced to work until they died. The
slaving nations justified it by saying the slaves were of an
inferior race, less than human and with incredible arrogance, the
slave masters considered themselves appointed by God to be superior
and rulers of the world. This frame of mind has never gone away.
The story of this shocking
reality is found in Danny Smith’s excellent book Slavery Now and
Then published in the UK by Kingsway. It has contributions by
well-known and inspiring writers.
For my part, I wrote on the
modern slavery that I know from working for 37 years in the
Philippines.
The trading and trafficking of
women and children into the sex trade is the most vile aspect of
modern slavery.
Millions of sex bars throughout
the world traffic and trade young girls, women and children. They
are sold for sexual abuse and exploitation and have no control or
power over their lives. Many are forced, threatened, beaten and
starved until they become docile and submissive to the will of their
master or pimps. One child we rescued was forced to take ten sex
tourists a day.
Although there are effective and
strong laws in the Philippines it still prospers and thrives. It
could be wiped quickly if there was the political will to do so.
There is none in the Philippines. Many of the politicians, the moral
leaders, the police, the courts and prosecutors have turned away and
allowed this slavery to grow uncontested, unquestioned and they let
the traffickers and child abusers walk free.
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