More people are enslaved around the world than ever before, panelists said Thursday night in a lecture at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square.
More than 100 community members attended the panel and discussion titled Modern Day Slavery, which was sponsored by Primary Source, a nonprofit educational resource organization based in Watertown.
Panelists included scholar Zoe Trodd, former slave Francis Bok, co-founder of anti-slavery organization Polaris Project Katherine Chon and internationally known journalist Benjamin Skinner.
Each lecturer spoke on the difficulties and importance of defining what slavery is. Trodd gave estimates on the magnitude of slavery in the world.
“Twenty-seven million slaves are in the world today,” Trodd said. “They are enslaved in a variety of types of slavery: chattel slavery, debt bondage slavery and contract slavery.”
The price of a slave in current economic terms is approximately $40, making slaves today the cheapest they have ever been in history, Trodd said.
Bok told the audience stories of his personal experiences with slavery. He was enslaved as a young boy in 1986 after his mother asked him to go to a local market and sell eggs and peanuts.
“I was just a little boy and I was happy and I used to play games,” Bok said. But that night he did not return to his village in southern Sudan. While at the market, a group of Arab militiamen surrounded him and took him to northern Sudan. He said his captors were from the same group who conducting the genocide in Darfur.
“I am happy to have my life back, to live my dreams, but my heart is always in my village, in those places where slavery still exists. There are 27 million people, and more people are still held in bondage. While we actually say it is horrible, we don’t take action,” Bok said.
“Slavery does not happen just to young women or children, it’s an equal opportunity exploitation,” said Chon, who addressed how gender relates to the slave trade.
The final speaker, Skinner, spoke about his challenges of telling stories and raising awareness through various personal anecdotes.
“Some 225,000 children are domestics in Haiti . . . typically coming from desperately poor families,” Skinner said, recalling his most recenet visit to earthquake-stricken Haiti. “[They] wind up with richer families in the cities and they are forced to work. They are treated in almost every instance violently and they cannot walk away.”
Skinner also discussed the increase in sex-entertainment slavery around the stadiums being built for the South African World Cup and said he also saved one girl from a prison-like brothel.
Development and Outreach at Primary Source Director Jennifer Routhier said the variety of panelists helped keep the discussion balanced.
“We wanted a scholar who is a historian to frame it, a victim of slavery to talk about his experience, an activist and expert in sex-trafficking who could speak to the gender aspects of the issue and a journalist who is trying to raise awareness and follow the stories of slavery,” she said.
During the question-and-answer session at the end of the presentations, many audience members spoke of ways that people could get involved with fighting human slavery.
Eric Goodwin, a master’s student at the Harvard University Extension School and a member of the Human Trafficking Student Association at Harvard, said he is trying to motivate students and faculty to get involved in the subject.
“We have 42 laws across the U.S. but we still need more,” Goodwin said. “We need a lot better laws. We put the cart before the horse. Usually the laws follow the social movement, but now we need a social movement and we need academics at the beginning of that social movement.”
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