What Is Modern-Day Slavery?
Modern-day slavery, also sometimes referred to as human trafficking, is a 21st-century problem. The uneven hand of globalization has left a vast number of impoverished, vulnerable, and easily exploited people; as a result the global market for slave labor is growing – from carpets hand-knotted by child slaves in India to women enslaved for sexual servitude around the world to men confined and forced to pick crops in Florida. The terms human trafficking and slavery are often used loosely and even interchangeably; indeed, there is no universally accepted definition of these terms. One common definition for slavery, also referred to as modern-day slavery, is “the condition of being held against one’s will for the purpose of economic exploitation.” The use of the term trafficking, or human trafficking, however is less consistent. Some experts refer to human trafficking as “the process of being transported against one’s will – through force, fraud, or coercion – for the purposes of economic
