One of the significant changes in society happened in 1833 in Britain and in 1865 in the USA. Slavery has been eradicated!
Or not?
Unfortunately, slavery happens around us, but we are not noticing it. It happens in European cities. It happens in all cities, all nations. O yes, it is “illegal” – but it happens. Governments close one eye when it comes to slavery.
Jeff Fountain writes: Today, right under our noses, slavery continues right here in the heart of Amsterdam. The story is repeated in cities across Europe and the world. While condemned by international law, UN and EU declarations, a global slave trade abuses 25 million women, children and men – more than ever before in history – earning an annual €150 billion for global networks of traffickers and pimps. Most of the trade involves the sexual exploitation of women and girls, while forced labour in other fields includes many children.
Following the annual European Parliament Prayer Breakfast in Brussels (2019), there was a panel discussion on modern-day slavery in which Amsterdam came under particular scrutiny. Alongside several experts including John Richmond, the American Ambassador for Trafficking in Persons, Englishwoman Jane Lasonder told her story of having been beaten and abused by a step-father and of being forced into the world of prostitution. Jane asked how it was possible to legalise the daily rape of women who are forced against their wills to engage in sex with more than twenty men a day. They use anaesthetics to drug themselves, hate men deeply yet often not daring to quit their job. What sort of liberalism defends the freedom of men to exploit vulnerable women? What’s wrong with a society, she asked, which condoned as ‘broad-minded’ the daily parade of tourists and even school-children past the windows where scantily-clad women displayed themselves – trying to make the daily quota of clients their pimps demanded?
Slavery didn’t become wrong in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, says John Richmond, the American Ambassador for Trafficking in Persons Richmond. It was wrong the whole time. Only over the last 220 years nation after nation begins one by one, to acknowledge the horrors of slavery and pass laws to curtail the slave trade and emancipate those affected by it.
But how come slavery is globally still one of the most lucrative sources of income – despite all our “powerful resolution” in the “high halls” of our society.
Some 200 hundred years ago that change, Richmond added, started with a small dedicated band of believers. It can happen again – through people like “William Wilberforce” and “The Clapham Sect”.
But it may cost you your life, as well as the ridicule and hatred of people. For Wilberforce it did.
(Adapted article by Jeff Fountain)
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