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- <text id=93TT1229>
- <title>
- Mar. 22, 1993: Alas, Slavery Lives
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Mar. 22, 1993 Can Animals Think
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 26
- SOCIETY
- Alas, Slavery Lives
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>A new report details a world still plagued by human bondage
- </p>
- <p> Almost 128 years after abolition, Americans are still
- struggling with the costly political and social legacy of
- slavery. In huge swaths of Africa, Asia and Latin America,
- however, governments haven't even got that far. In a shocking
- study to be released March 23, the Geneva-based International
- Labor Organization reports that tens of millions of people
- around the globe, including children as young as six, are
- working in bondage--in dangerous and degrading conditions that
- often involve 18-hour workdays, beatings and sexual abuse. Many
- are the victims of opportunistic slave raiders, sometimes called
- "child catchers" and "cats," who roam impoverished or
- war-ravaged regions kidnapping, buying or luring helpless
- prospects into servitude.
- </p>
- <p> In Sudan, says the ILO, peasants trapped by civil war are
- selling their young sons to traveling merchants for as little
- as $70; in Haiti more than 100,000 children, sold or given away
- by poor families, toil as domestic servants, usually eating and
- sleeping apart from the privileged people they serve; and in
- Pakistan as many as 20 million people, 7.5 million of them
- children, are working as bonded laborers in factories, on farms
- and on construction projects, unable to pay off employer
- advances. The ILO warns that slavery-like practices also exist
- in countries as varied as Mauritania, India, Thailand, Peru,
- Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-