When most people consider the idea of slavery, horrible images of the transatlantic slave trade are conjured. Slavery is an idea which most believe to be extinct lasting from the 1400’s to the 1800’s, only alive in history books. Africans were forced onto cramped boats, in terribly unhealthy conditions while making the trip from Africa to America. During this “Middle Passage” of a triangular trade route between Europe, Africa and America, many Africans lost their lives. Those who survived were compelled to provide free labor on plantations in America. Everybody has learned of these atrocities through schooling, and is led to believe that the occurrences of slavery are over. These are incorrect assumptions. According to Ricco Siasoco in 2001, “…there are currently over 200 million people in bondage.” (1) This seems to be quite a staggering number, especially since the figures for the transatlantic trade are significantly smaller: “Studies based on these numerous shipping and government documents, including Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute's database of 27,500 slave voyages, compiled in 1993-1997, have supported an estimate of about 11 to 12 million slave exports and 9 to 10 million slave imports into the Americas.” The current numbers support a rise nearly twenty-fold, yet most are completely unaware of the situation. All of that makes one wonder as to how oblivious to the world around them Americans truly are.

When trafficking humans, where is all of this free labor utilized? Unfortunately, the answer is nearly everywhere. The United States State Department has, for the past few years compiled, a report named the “Trafficking in Persons Report” to explain where many nations identified as being “a country of origin, transit or destination for a significant number of victims of severe forms of trafficking.” (3) “Severe forms of trafficking” was defined as “(a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or (b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” (2) As one may conclude, this is a serious problem, which most affects women and children. As has occurred in the dark ages, those with strength and might overpower a helpless or unstable area, pillaging as they go. When this little village of nearly helpless individuals has sufficiently been plundered, the inhabitants who survive are abducted into slavery, sold to whoever desires free labor. This is not the only way for traffickers to recruit slaves, however. “Slave traders prey on the vulnerable. Their targets are often children and young women, and their ploys are creative and ruthless, designed to trick, coerce, and win the confidence of potential victims. Very often these ruses involve promises of marriage, employment, educational opportunities, or a better life.” (Trafficking, 18) The slave traders are somewhat an adult version of a schoolyard bully, picking on those who are smaller and weaker for his own gain. Yet, with the slave traders, there are much more dire consequences of his actions.

We now arrive at an issue which receives quite a bit of press recently: reparations. Slave reparations the idea that “African Americans [should] be compensated by the federal government for the four hundred years their ancestors spent as slaves.” (Soto 1) This may sound like a good idea to some, to compensate everybody in a race for sins committed over four hundred years ending in the late 1800’s, but it logically makes no sense. No African Americans who are currently alive even experienced slavery, nor have they experienced any ill effects from such. Any problems which may be attributed to previous slave conditions, such as poverty or a lack of education, can usually be tracked to more recent events; everybody knows it is possible to escape from poverty with enough effort. Beyond all of this, to give reparations to the masses ignores the fact that Africans continue to sell each other into slavery.

Works Cited

Siasoco, Ricco Villanueva. “Modern Slavery.” Infoplease. 18 APR 2001. 28 JUN 2004. .

Soto, Virginia. “Slavery Reparations.” About.com. 30 JUN 2004. ._

United States Department of State. “Trafficking in Persons Report.” Washington: GPO. 2004.