USE THE DOWNLOAD LINK OR CLICK HERE FOR ACCESS TO THE FULL RESOURCE

It is now commonly, and increasingly, held that contemporary trafficking in persons and all forms of forced labor constitute modern forms of slavery. This view was given official support in Secretary  of State Hillary Clinton’s introduction to the State Department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report  where she began: “we have seen unprecedented forward movement around the world in the fight to  end human trafficking, a form of modern‐day slavery.” Clinton was here echoing similar claims by  numerous experts and policy advocates, including the authors of her department’s authoritative TIP  report.  My objective in this paper is to address the serious problem of defining slavery in the modern  world that currently bedevils most writings on the subject. I will argue, first, that standard arguments  making the claim that all trafficking in persons and, even more broadly, all forms of forced labor,  constitute forms of slavery are problematic because they embrace too many of the world’s  migrants—internal and external‐‐and too promiscuously conflate slavery with forms of exploitation  not considered slavery in most non‐western societies or in any historically informed and  conceptually rigorous use of the term. At the same time, I will argue that the worst forms of child  labor and domestic servitude as well as international and domestic sexual trafficking, all easily satisfy  a polythetic2 definition of slavery in their close family resemblance to the institution as it has existed  throughout history. I will proceed by first reprising and bringing up to date my own definition of  slavery, developed in my work Slavery and Social Death and extended in later writings. I will then  closely examine the definition offered by the most prominent and widely cited author on the subject  of contemporary slavery, Kevin Bales. I single out Dr. Bales, not simply because of his influence, but  because he has explicitly contrasted his definition with my own and has argued that while my  definition might have properly described what he calls “the old” slavery it is no longer adequate for  our understanding of contemporary slavery. In contesting this view, I hope to show that, to the  contrary, the definition of slavery developed in Slavery and Social Death3 and refined in later works,  is of far greater relevance to our understanding of slavery in the world today, especially its fastest  growing form: the trafficking of women and girls for commercial sexual purposes.    The remainder of the paper explores the gendered nature of slavery in both traditional and  modern times. I begin by demonstrating this  through  an  examination  of  statistical  and anthropological data on traditional societies. I show that slavery has always been a highly gendered  relation of domination and examine the complex interplay of economic and socio‐cultural factors in such  societies.  I  then  attempt  to  show  the  gendered  nature  of  slavery  in  the  major  contemporary  forms of the institution, focusing  on the sexual domination and exploitation of women.

Read full article here.