Sometimes sex slaves like these women are not considered slaves but indentured laborers because the girls are made to work off their “debt” incurred by transportation and housing costs. But this is merely what the girls and their families are told. The psychological effects of establishing rules and procedures for leaving the brothel and implying that it was the girls’ own choice (and fault) that they are in their predicament are advantageous to the slaver who is indeed applying the threat of physical force to compel involuntary but highly profitable labor. This is slavery concealed, but slavery nonetheless.

Redemption

The international responses to Sudan’s situation, probably the best publicized of any slave trade in the world, represent virtually every major perspective on the issue. Some humanitarians, frustrated with governments’ inability to address the problem in any direct way, have made trips to Africa to buy slaves and free them from bondage. This process of redemption is perhaps best exemplified by two initiatives.

One began in 1998 when Barbara Vogel, a fifth-grade teacher, read an article about Sudanese slavery to her class. When the children responded with a desire to help, she organized their sympathies into the STOP (Slavery That Oppresses People) Campaign, a nationwide movement that raised awareness in elementary and grade schools with the aim of gathering funds to redeem slaves in the Sudan. In two years, STOP’s efforts impressed Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo enough for him to declare, “This fifth grade class from Colorado has done more for the people of Sudan than the entire United States government.”

The second example, the story of Harvard University student Jay Williams, follows similar lines. As a freshman, Williams heard about global slavery from a speaker at a gospel music concert. He immediately began to address the issue through an internship with the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG). His efforts culminated in a trip to Sudan before his sophomore year in which Williams and the AASG purchased the freedom of over 4,400 slaves. In the summer of 2001, Williams did it again, traveling to Sudan with members of the AASG and liberating almost 7,000 slaves in a week and a half. Many of these slaves had been physically brutalized; about 80 percent of the women reported sexual abuse. John Eibner, a Christian Solidarity leader who himself helped redeem thousands of slaves, summarizes the attitude of these and other redemption efforts when he proclaims, “We can all combat evil.”

Yet US government officials and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have warned against redemption as a means to combat slavery. According to them, to purchase slaves, even to free them, is still to contribute to the profitability of the slave trade by raising the demand for slaves. Redemption therefore helps sustain the slave market and encourages the enslavement of more innocent people. Further, massive redemption operations like the ones described above would probably have a significant impact on the price of slaves, making it harder or impossible for relatively poor Sudanese to afford to free their own people. Redemption advocates sometimes claim that the market price for slaves has not changed as a result of their operations and that, if the price did increase, they would be willing to cease their operations. Usually, though, people involved in the redemption movement respond to criticism by invoking the ineffable and constant suffering of slaves as grounds for a moral imperative to address the problem. Cooler heads, and economists, are not so easily persuaded.

Redemption efforts are frequently compared with the operations of the Underground Railroad that combated slavery in the United States. This comparison is faulty in important and revealing ways. Abolitionists in the United States came to support radical action to permanently end slavery in their nation. They were willing to risk war to eradicate slavery through legal, not financial, measures. The Underground Railroad did not buy slaves. It helped them escape. It resisted involvement in the sale of humanity.

These direct measures are not available to antislavery organizations in the United States today. There is not enough popular outrage to justify a major war of liberation half the world away, and there is no international law with any coercive power to hear their appeals. Faced with the choice between funding redemption campaigns and watching their governments apply international economic and political pressure on the slave-fostering nations, a process that might take decades to bear fruit, it is easy to understand why humanitarians are drawn to the faster, and in many ways surer, form of aid.

Solving the Problem

Of course, redemption efforts, whether carried out in Sudanese auctions or in Thai brothels, in Pakistani textile factories or in Brazilian coal mines, can never hope to address slavery’s underlying causes. These include poverty in the developing world, the corruption and inhumanity of national governments, and the lack of enforceable global legislation when it comes to the protection of basic human rights. Concerted international efforts by government agencies are required. To the extent that antislavery activists draw attention to the existence of global slavery, their work makes it more likely that nations will work to end this hideous practice. But they must make it clear to the public that writing checks and making brief tours through slave lands constitute a treatment at best, and not a solution.

Unlike other massive human-rights violations that take place in the contemporary world, slavery is necessarily involved in some kind of economic activity. In an ever more globalized world, economic productivity becomes entangled in financial systems that stretch beyond the borders of any one nation. Whether it is through foreign direct investment (FDI), which has been cited as providing the economic incentive for the slave raids of Sudan, or international trade, like the sale of Thai prostitutes to US and European brothels, slave labor involves people from all regions of the world. Neither the causes nor the effects of slave labor are limited to the slaves and masters themselves.

In one way, this view makes the existence of mass slavery even more morally troubling, since it becomes impossible for nations geographically distant from the main site of slave activity to completely absolve themselves of responsibility. But it is also encouraging because it means that slavery, unlike potentially localized atrocities like genocide and famine, is vulnerable to ethical decisions made by people who can become aware of their indirect involvement in the slave trade. As a company executive or political leader or even as a common consumer, members of the developed world can make market choices that make slavery unprofitable.