The Subhuman Conditions That Slaves And Child Laborers Face In India Are Worse Than You Imagined

Source: IMPACT The Huff Post


During the largest firsthand investigation into slavery and child labor, a group of Harvard researchers documented more than 3,000 cases of forced labor in India’s handmade carpet sector.


Continue here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/30/child-labor-india-carpets_n_4696226.html


ALSO see CNN video

Was your carpet made by a slave?

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/31/was-your-carpet-made-by-a-slave/

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Shrimp exports to West tied to bonded labor

Shrimp exports to West tied to bonded labor:
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In the third chapter of my new book on bonded labour, I explore the shrimp industry of Bangladesh. Chingri (shrimp) harvesting provides a highly illustrative case study of the very powerful ways in which environmental change can directly contribute to human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labor exploitation, especially in the far reaches of the developing world.
To research the shrimp industry of Bangladesh requires a journey to the cyclone-wracked southwestern reaches of the country.
Here, one finds four stages to Bangladesh’s shrimp industry supply chain: 1 shrimp fry (baby shrimp) collection, shrimp farming, the distribution to processors, and shrimp processing. Each one of these stages is tainted by some form of severe labor exploitation.

Bangladesh’s shrimp industry is relatively new, and the recent shift from traditional agriculture to shrimp aquaculture in southwestern Bangladesh is primarily a result of climate change.
Beginning in the 1990s, farmers began to notice more and more saline shrimp in their irrigation channels, primarily due to rising sea levels.
Bangladesh is within close proximity of several multi-billion-dollar shrimp exporting nations such as Thailand, India, and Vietnam, so landowners quickly did the math and realized that low-intensity saline shrimp would generate far more profit than rice or potatoes ever would.
They rapidly transformed the area from freshwater agriculture to saline aquaculture. Now there are more than 170,000 hectares of saline shrimp farms (ghers) along the southwestern coast of Bangladesh (and more than 400,000 hectares of freshwater ghers further north). Nothing else can grow here, and no animals can graze.
“Our children have no vegetables to eat, no fresh water, and no milk,” a shrimp farmer named Aziz told me. “It is terrible here, but we have no choice. We are lucky to have this gher; otherwise what would we do?”
Aziz was a former agricultural bonded laborer who managed to transition to bonded labor for shrimp farming.
Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forcibly displaced by the shrimp farms, because shrimp harvesting requires vastly fewer people than agricultural crops. Many of these peasants were trafficked to India and Southeast Asia for labor exploitation.
Those that remain eke out a destitute existence of bondage.
Children are also heavily exploited by the shrimp sector of Bangladesh. Thousands of children wade into the muddy, parasite-infested rivers near the Sundarban mangrove forests to catch baby shrimp in small blue nets.
As one of these children named Mohammed explained: “None of us are in school. I wish I could be in school, but I must do this work or else we cannot earn enough money…This entire area is for shrimp farming, so there is no other work for us.”
Once caught, the baby shrimp spend three to four months growing into full-grown shrimp in farms like Aziz’s, after which they are distributed to processors who de-scale, de-vein, and/or behead them before freezing them for export.
Almost all shrimp exports from Bangladesh are bound for the U.S., the EU, and Japan. This processor stage is rumored to be replete with forced labor, but I had little success in accessing the plants as I was angrily turned away at gunpoint from all of them except one.
By my calculation, roughly one out of every 57 shrimp consumed around the world are tainted by forced labor, bonded labor, or child labor from Bangladesh alone.
As the average U.S. citizen consumes approximately two kilograms of shrimp per year, this means that each American eats roughly one to three pieces of tainted shrimp each year, just from Bangladesh.
While a low cost of production in countries like Bangladesh has helped shrimp become the top seafood commodity in the world, it is vital to remember that as with so many other commodities sourced from the developing world, this same low cost of production is a direct function of immeasurable human exploitation and environmental harm.
Read more about bonded labor in Asia.

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Bonded labor stretches from third to first world

Bonded labor stretches from third to first world:
Editor's Note: Anti-trafficking expert Siddharth Kara is the author of “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia,” providing the first comprehensive overview of bonded labor in South Asia.
In September 2010, I met a young girl named Nirmala in the remote western Terai region of Nepal.  Nirmala is one of the thousands of internally trafficked domestic slaves in Nepal, called kamlari, who belong to the outcast Tharu ethnic group.
Agents recruit Tharu girls as young as eight to work as servants in upper-caste homes.  Aside from room and board, the children receive little to no payment for up to 10 years of work.  Kamlari girls often suffer extreme abuse and maltreatment.
“I did all the work,” Nirmala explained, “cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, washing dishes.  I woke each morning at 5 a.m. and went to sleep at 10 p.m. I slept on the floor…I did this work seven days a week. Sometimes the wife would beat me. The husband in the home would rape me.  I did not want to be in that home.”

Nirmala’s situation is representative of a typical South Asian debt bondage arrangement: food and shelter as credit in exchange for slave-like labor exploitation.
The upper classes of Nepal see this arrangement as completely justified because the alternative for a low-caste girl such as Nirmala would be worse: destitution in her village or trafficking to India for forced prostitution.
My new book, “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” provides the first comprehensive overview of the unconscionable system of bonded labor in South Asia.
In a series of articles for the CNN Freedom Project, I will describe the system in more detail and outline how we can best tackle this brutish mode of servile labor exploitation.
The issue of bonded labor may receive marginal attention globally, but bonded labor is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today.
There were approximately 18 to 20.5 million bonded laborers in the world at the end of 2011, almost 90% of whom were in South Asia.
This means that approximately half of the slaves in the world are bonded laborers in South Asia.
More importantly, the products made by bonded laborers touch almost every aspect of the global economy, including frozen shrimp and fish, tea, coffee, rice, wheat, diamonds, cubic zirconia, glassware, hand-woven carpets, limestone, salt, cigarettes, apparel, fireworks, sporting goods, and many more products.
Virtually everyone’s life, everywhere in the world, is touched by bonded labor in South Asia.
Bonded labor basically involves the exploitative interlinking of labor and credit agreements between parties.
On one side, a party possessing an abundance of capital and power provides credit, food, or tenancy to the other party, who, because he lacks almost any assets or capital, pledges his labor to work off the loan.
Given the vast power imbalances between the parties, the laborer is often severely exploited.  Bonded labor occurs when the exploitation descends to the level of slave-like abuse.
The borrower is often forced to work at pathetic wage levels to repay the debt. Exorbitant interest rates are charged (up to 20 percent per month), and money lent for future needs is added to the debt.
Sometimes these debts last a few years, and sometimes they are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt.
Centuries ago, debt bondage existed across the world from the American South to Medieval Europe to Tokugawa Japan. Social revolution and transition to market economies largely dissolved the system throughout the world, except for South Asia.
There, the system persists due to a highly pernicious cocktail of forces, including immense poverty, acute caste and gender discrimination, social apathy, corruption, and a global economy that scours the globe for the lowest cost of production possible.
The desperation of the bonded laborers I met across South Asia is acute.
Anguish to be rid of these debts leads to desperate measures, including the sale of kidneys, the sale of children to human traffickers, or suicide.
For the sake of the millions of outcast and destitute debt bondage slaves in South Asia like Nirmala, the need to eradicate this feudal system of slave-like exploitation could not be greater.

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Research is important first step in understanding human trafficking in S'pore - Channel NewsAsia

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1192558/1/.html

SOURCE: Channel NewsAsia

By Saifulbahri Ismail | Posted: 01 April 2012 2154 hrs

	Photos 1 of 1 The authorities recently launched a National Plan of Action against Trafficking in Persons to combat the issue in a more strategic way

SINGAPORE: Research is an imperative step in understanding the extent of human trafficking in Singapore, said migrant welfare groups and non-governmental organisations.

They said studies on the nature and scale of the problem need to be done first.

The authorities recently launched a National Plan of Action against Trafficking in Persons to combat the issue in a more strategic way.

Forty-three reports of sex trafficking were received by the Police, while 67 cases of labour trafficking were detected by the Manpower Ministry last year.

However, these statistics alone may not be enough to fully understand the human trafficking situation.

Observers said more research is needed.

Siddharth Kara, who is a fellow at Carr Centre Programme on Human Trafficking & Modern Slavery, said: "What's going on with human trafficking, who's being trafficked, in what numbers, for what purpose, by whom, etc. This broad base baseline research will be a very good foundational piece to have."

Mr Kara added that sector-based research is also useful.

"Look at the construction sector, the domestic work sector, the maritime sector and understand who's being trafficked into these sectors, by whom, for what purpose, under what modes and means so that you can design your response and your interventions specifically based on knowledge generated by research."

The Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME) set up its Trafficking Resource Centre at the end of last year.

HOME believes it should be actively involved in the research work as it has day-to-day contact with the migrant community.

Libby Clarke, who is a consultant on Anti Human Trafficking at HOME, said: "This is one which is building upon the services which HOME has long provided to victims of both sex and labour exploitation. And to ensure that we are tailoring those services very specifically to the needs of victims of trafficking, we are also equipping ourselves with the information we need in order to accurately identify those individuals."

For the first time, 16 NGOs met on March 28 to discuss the issue of Trafficking in Persons. One of the objectives of the meeting was to set out a map of who's doing what in the area of research.

In addition, the NGOs explored ways in which they could collaborate better and ensure synergies are being maximised.

As part of the National Plan of Action, the Inter-Agency taskforce on Trafficking in Persons is also conducting research, with relevant third parties.

HOME started a 24-hour hotline in November last year to provide assistance to victims of trafficking in persons. They've been receiving between 10 and 20 calls each day. 10 per cent of the calls relate to the issue of sex exploitation.

Further investigations will then be carried out after each hotline call is received. This is done to find out exactly the whole ordeal of what the caller has gone through.

Ms Clarke said this process is important in order to establish the nature of the exploitation and whether they are a victim of trafficking.

The Inter-Agency taskforce is also studying the feasibility of setting up a toll-free hotline so that authorities are alerted to possible trafficking cases.

Ms Clarke said: "We are in discussions with the taskforce as to who is best placed to provide this service moving forward. The feedback that we receive from the users of our hotline shows they far prefer to make a call to an NGO than to a government official.

"They need a line which they can access which doesn't take them to an official who they perhaps fear because they are concerned about what would happen to them as a result."

The taskforce expects to complete the joint research by 2015.

- CNA/fa

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Corban Addison: The Human Face Of Modern Slavery

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/corban-addison/modern-slavery_b_1214371.html

Corban Addison

Author, Corporate Lawyer

01/26/2012 6:40 am

Reality check: There are more slaves in the world today than were taken from Africa in the four centuries of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade--over 27 million. Of those, two million are children exploited in the commercial sex trade.

Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, with annual profits exceeding that of ExxonMobil ($32 billion from sex trafficking alone). The average girl forced into prostitution is 13. Many are younger than that.

As a father, I am haunted by this thought. Even as I type, kids are being sold for sex in cities across the East--Tel Aviv, Dubai, Mumbai, Bangkok, Tokyo and Phnom Penh. In 12 hours, the same will be true in the West--Amsterdam, Rio, Toronto, Atlanta, Dallas and Portland. In the underworld, a girl is a money tree. Unlike a kilo of cocaine or a cache of AK-47s, a girl can be sold a dozen times a night for years. Siddharth Kara at Harvard estimates that a stable of four girls in a Western European apartment brothel can net a pimp an annual income of $300,000.

We in the West have a hard time believing that this is really happening, that the forcible exploitation of humans for profit is not only alive and well in the 21st century but worse than ever before. We are taught in history class that slavery ended after the Civil War. This is partially true: our ancestors defeated one incarnation of the monster. But the instinct of people to buy and sell other people for economic gain did not die with the 13th Amendment. It went underground and metastasized, waiting for conditions to ripen again. Then in the 1990s, slavery exploded into new life, fueled by globalization, the post-Cold-War economic vacuum, the Internet, and rising demand for cheap commercial sex and labor.

Four years ago, I was an attorney working in commercial litigation. If you had asked me how well I understood human trafficking, I would have told you about Svay Pak, Cambodia and the Western sex tourists who traveled there to abuse children. I would have told you about the heroic team of investigators, lawyers and social workers from the International Justice Mission working in the red light areas of India to rescue children from pimps and traffickers. But if you had asked me how well I understood the trade in the United States, I would have had little to say. Sensitive as I was to justice issues, I knew almost nothing about slavery in my own country.

The first stage of my awakening occurred in the spring of 2008. Interestingly, it was art that made trafficking personal, a film that brought it home in my heart. I started talking about it with my wife, scratching the surface of the world I thought I knew, and learning how profoundly I was in the dark. My wife's response to trafficking was even more visceral than my own. The truth about forced prostitution (bluntly put, the serial rape of women and children for profit) touched her deeply. Not long afterward, that touch triggered an epiphany. The concept for A Walk Across the Sun was hers before it was mine.

In the beginning, I struggled with the idea. I had a mountain of student debt and a law practice to grow. I knew that to write a novel on global human trafficking I would need the help of people in places of influence and danger; I would need time to research and write; and I would need resources to travel. In the end, however, I could neither ignore the idea's attractiveness nor deny its moral imperative. I was not in a position to rescue girls from brothels, but I could tell a story that would bring trafficking alive for readers just as a film brought it alive for me. I could lend my voice to the rising chorus of abolitionists saying: "Not in my generation."

When I said "yes" I dived deep, immersing myself in the literature on trafficking, learning the stories of slaves, traffickers, and customers, studying the international legal landscape, interviewing activists and officials in the U.S. and Europe, and traveling to India to see the reality of trafficking on the ground. In Mumbai, I met investigators working the streets of the red light areas to collect tips about captive children. I met attorneys laboring within the justice system to prosecute pimps and brothel owners. I met social workers with the most difficult job of all--putting rescued girls on a path toward healing and reintegration.

I knew, however, that I could not take my readers inside the sex trade unless I had gone there myself. Thus, one humid night a few days before I returned to the West, I met a man outside Mumbai Central Station, only a few blocks from Kamathipura, the city's largest red light area. The man was a friend of a friend and had offered to take me on an undercover "brothel tour." We took a taxi to M.R. Road where we met a malik--a brothel owner--known to my guide. After some negotiation, the man led us up two flights of steps to a room outfitted with couches and a mirror. The malik locked the door, closed the blinds and brought out about eight girls. All of them were young, and all of them were scared. I did not need a psychologist to tell me that they were not free to leave.

It has been almost three years since that night, but I can still picture the faces of those girls, still remember the revulsion I felt shaking the brothel owner's hand after I declined to make a purchase. I am haunted by the truth of slavery because I have seen it with my own eyes. I wrote A Walk Across the Sun to bring that truth alive for people like me, people who might prefer to believe that slavery is dead, or at least confined to dark alleys in the developing world. Human trafficking spans the globe, and so does my story--sweeping the reader from Mumbai to Paris to New York and Atlanta and revealing the many dimensions of the trade. The story is honest; it is hard-hitting, and based on the best research available. But--and this is critical--it is neither overwhelming nor grim.A Walk Across the Sun is a story of hope.

Hope, you say? How can you be hopeful after all you have seen? The answer is written in the pages of our history. However powerful and pervasive it may be, slavery is no more inevitable now than it was in the 1850s. But we cannot expect to counter a $32-billion-a-year industry without a massive society-wide effort. To vanquish this incarnation of the monster, we must pool our talents and resources, petition our elected officials to turn the millions in our war chest into billions, and commit ourselves to the cause of freedom for as long as it takes to win. It may take a generation, but it can be done. The only question is whether we have the courage to say "yes."

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Listen - Human trafficking, modern-day slavery | Michigan Radio

Listen - Human trafficking, modern-day slavery | Michigan Radio

By Jennifer White and Mercedes Mejia

Enlarge image

UM Law School's Human Trafficking Clinic.

• Listen
  0:39 / 4:47

Human trafficking is a growing crime in Michigan, and the U.S.

At its most basic level, even identifying victims of this crime can be difficult.

In the first of our three part series we’ll look at the challenge of providing assistance to victims.

Michigan Radio’s Jennifer White spoke with Elizabeth Campbell, Staff Attorney at the University of Michigan Law School’s Human Trafficking Clinic.

Campbell says there are mostly two categories of human trafficking.

“It’s individuals who are forced to work either in the sex trade or work in a variety of other labor trades: restaurants, the service industry, farms. Basically anything where people can be employed, you can become a victim of human trafficking,” she says.

Being a border state Michigan is vulnerable to human trafficking, but not alone.

“Human trafficking is about people taking advantage of other peoples’ vulnerability, and you can do that anywhere.”

Campbell and her students at the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan's Law School work to provide legal representation to victims of human trafficking. Her students assist victims by providing them with immigration relief, or expunging their records of convictions that may have occurred as a result of their trafficking situation.

About 80 percent of the clinic’s clients are victims of labor trafficking. Often they're foreign nationals who are offered an opportunity to work in the U.S., to have a better life, and to be able to send money back to their families. However, upon arrival they’re somehow put into a sort of debt bondage, Campbell says. They’re told that they owe a large sum of money to the trafficker who brought them into the U.S. And they’re told where to work and where to live.

Victims can also be U.S. citizens. Campbell says these victims often don't have much of a sense of home or community, and that their vulnerability is taking advantage of by traffickers, particularly in the sex trade.

Identifying a person in trouble can be difficult because of isolation, but it doesn't stop there. Campbell and her students at the Human Trafficking Clinic are working to raise awareness about this crime.

“We often think of that rescue moment as being the key. Unfortunately it’s so not that simple and the needs of these victims after the fact are so great,” Campbell says.

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How to End Sex Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery - Forbes

Rahim Kanani, Contributor

Writer, Advocate, Strategist, & Entrepreneur for Global Social Change

+ Follow on Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rahimkanani/2012/01/08/how-to-end-sex-trafficking-and-modern-day-slavery-with-siddharth-kara/

In a recent interview with Siddharth Kara, fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world’s foremost experts on human trafficking and modern day slavery, we discussed the evolution of his effort, the current landscape of these issues, challenges and opportunities to making progress, and much more.

Kara is also the author of the award-winning book, “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery,” the first of three books he is writing on the subjects of human trafficking and contemporary slavery. “Sex Trafficking” was named co-winner of the prestigious 2010 Frederick Douglass Award at Yale University for the best non-fiction book on slavery. The Award is generally regarded as the top prize in the field of slavery scholarship, and Kara’s is the first book on modern slavery to receive the award.

Kara currently advises the United Nations, the U.S. Government, and several other governments on antislavery research, policy and law. In addition to several nonprofit board positions, Kara serves on the committee founded by Kirk Douglas that is lobbying the US Congress to provide an official apology for pre-bellum slavery. In 2009, he was selected as a Fellow for the acclaimed TED India conference. Kara has also written an award winning feature film screenplay on human trafficking set for production in 2011. Kara’s ongoing research into slavery around the world has been covered regularly by CNN.

Rahim Kanani: How would you describe your first encounter with modern day slavery?

Siddharth Kara: I first came across child labourers and bonded labourers in various sectors, such as agriculture and brickmaking, when I was a child in India.  These early encounters made an impression on me, but it was probably my encounters in a refugee camp in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s that catalyzed my efforts in this area as an adult.  As an undergraduate, I spent one summer volunteering in a Bosnian refugee camp near the Slovenian-Croatian border and heard numerous tales of genocide and sex trafficking.  A few years later I decided I needed to understand how and why these crimes were occurring, so I set aside my corporate career and commenced what has now become more than eleven years of almost entirely self-funded research into all forms of contemporary servitude around the world.

Rahim Kanani: As you survey the landscape of these issues, what does slavery and human trafficking look like today?

Siddharth Kara: Slavery today functions for the same purpose it has throughout history: to maximize profit my minimizing or eliminating the cost of labor.  Having said this, there are several key differences with modern slavery that make it in many ways more expansive and pernicious than ever before.  First, slaves today can be exploited in dozens of industries that are intricately woven into the global economy, as opposed to just agriculture and domestic servitude as centuries ago.  The costs of acquiring a slave and/or the time of transporting him or her from the point of acquisition to the point of exploitation are miniscule today as compared to Old World slavery.  These and other dynamics make slaves more accessible, expendable, exploitable and profitable than every before.  Whereas the average slave two centuries ago could generate a 15% to 20% annual return on investment for his or her exploiters, that same “ROI” today is several hundred percent per year (over 900% per year for sex trafficking).  This is perhaps the primary reason why there is such demand among exploiters today to acquire more slaves through the practice of human trafficking, or what we used to call “slave trading.”

Rahim Kanani: What are some of the biggest challenges to ending trafficking and other forms of contemporary slavery?

Siddharth Kara: A lack of detailed understanding of how and why slave-like exploitation functions in various sectors of the global economy is a primary barrier to a more effective response.  Much effort in the field of combating modern slavery has focused more on anecdote and sensationalism than on actual analysis of the problem.  A paucity of resources deployed to understanding and combating slavery is another primary barrier.  The US government spends 350 times more money each year to combat drug trafficking than slavery.  This does not mean that we will end slavery by simply throwing money at the problem, but it gives a sense of the anemic level of resources that have been allocated towards this issue.  And by the way, the US government spends more money to combat slavery than most any other government in the world, so that gives you a real sense of how big the gap is globally.  Another primary challenge has to do with the inability of activists in the field to catalyze a more unified grassroots movement to combat the issue.  The antislavery movement remains highly fragmented, and as a result, its ability to mobilize social opinion and lawmakers on the issue has been hampered.

Rahim Kanani: Have we made any progress in the last decade and if so, what’s changed?

Siddharth Kara: Without question we have made progress.  The primary area of progress relates to a massive increase in awareness of the issue.  When I started my research in 2000, very few people knew about human trafficking and contemporary slavery.  Since that time, there have been many films and TV shows about the issue, many new organizations created to combat slavery, many new laws passed around the world to do the same, and an overall increase in general knowledge of the issue.  However, not all awareness is good awareness, and at times the awareness raised has been sensational, inaccurate, and more focused on personal or organizational gain.  Another area of improvement has to do with the engagement of the commercial sector on the issue.  More and more companies in several industries have become aware of human trafficking and have taken modest steps to understand and combat the issue.  This is a good sign that, if continued, promises to be very beneficial to the field.  Finally, charitable foundations and governments have been providing more funding to research and combat human trafficking, and while the gap between supply and demand of resources remains very wide, at least it has closed somewhat in the last decade.

Rahim Kanani: As one of the world’s foremost experts on modern day slavery and human trafficking, what are some of the leadership lessons you have learned over the years?

Siddharth Kara: The main task that I have taken upon myself has been to continue providing the best analysis I can of various aspects of contemporary human servitude.  I believe that my work has helped shift the needle away from the anecdotal and towards the scholarly, which has been an important shift in the field as we try to move beyond general awareness and towards actual detailed analysis and understanding of how to combat these crimes more effectively.  In particular, recognizing that sex trafficking is different from labor trafficking is different from debt bondage is different from organ trafficking, and analyzing how these sectors functions as businesses in the context of the global economy has provided interesting insights into the kinds of policies, laws, and tactics that can be more effective at combating each type of slave-like exploitation more effectively.

Rahim Kanani: With respect to influence and pressure, what have you learned about the world of advocacy?

Siddharth Kara: In a crowded global human rights agenda, the primary lesson for antislavery advocacy has been to base that advocacy on sound research and analysis.  Anecdote is not sufficient to secure adequate resources and move high-level policy.  Many governments that I have met with have expressed a keen interest to do more about the issue and have regretted that lack of reliable knowledge and analysis on which they can base persuasive arguments that certain laws needs to be passed or certain resources need to be allocated, especially during challenging economic times.

Rahim Kanani: If you could point to a few organizations that are truly making a difference and moving the needle on this issue, who would you point to as great case studies of impact?

Siddharth Kara: Some of the most exemplary organizations that operate with integrity and are making a genuine and unique impact on human trafficking and modern slavery include Apne Aap International (New Delhi), the American Himalayan Foundation, Humanity United, HopeNow International (Copenhagen), Maiti Nepal (Kathmandu), Bandhua Mukti Morcha (New Delhi), the New Life Center (Chiang Rai, Thailand), Nomi Network, the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, La Strada, The Cuff Road Project (Singapore), Girls Power Initiative (Nigeria), and a handful of other local organizations in several countries from Mexico to Malaysia that are doing tremendous work.

Rahim Kanani: Lastly, and looking ahead, what is the way forward, and how can ordinary people contribute to this cause?

Siddharth Kara: The first thing ordinary people can do is to inform themselves of the issue by reading as many books that focus on some level of actual analysis as possible (admittedly, there are not many).  it is also important for ordinary citizens to understand that many products they purchase everyday may be tainted by slavery or child labor somewhere in their supply chains on the far side of the world.  These products could be frozen shrimp and fish, rice, tea, coffee, electronic devices, apparel, salt, matches, cigarettes, sporting goods, and numerous other products.  Catalyzing a consumer awareness campaign around tainted goods and demanding that companies do more to certify that their supply chains are untainted by slave-like labor exploitation are important steps individuals can take today.

Rahim Kanani is a writer, interviewer, advocate, strategist and entrepreneur for global social change. His articles, opinions, and interviews with global leaders can be found at www.rahimkanani.com. In addition, you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.