Page 2: Defining Slavery to Include Human Trafficking

On this page, the main endeavor of this blog, to redefine human trafficking as slavery, is outlined in broad terms. This section builds upon the "Popular Misconceptions" page and gives a general introduction to the last two pages, "Slave Labor" and "Sex Trafficking" which provide specific examples of modern human trafficking and reinforce the connection between those practices and what is commonly known as slavery.

To accomplish this endeavor, this page will define slavery in great detail. Later, these definitions will be compared to the modern practices of human trafficking, revealing that these two practices have much in common.

Defining Slavery:

Traditional slavery has 3 Key Features:

Distasteful Social Need:

Text to Come

Commodification of People:

Slavery commodities people, but what does this mean? Commodification means the reduction of a person to a saleable, usable object, a commodity. To clarify, a commodity would be something with a relatively stable monetary value and acceptable usage, like gasoline. When we buy gasoline, we don’t worry about whether it wants to be in the car or whether it would rather be doing something else, we just burn it. We treat many commercial goods this way, computers, vehicles, and even, for the most part, animals. Did that cow want to be a hamburger? Though some do demand the fair treatment of livestock or choose not to partake of animal flesh in protest, the vast majority of us simply don’t ask. What all commodities have in common is this: we seldom, if ever, wonder whether commodities want to do what we are essentially making them do. Since the difference between a hamburger and a human being is so obvious, we just use commodities as instruments of our will.

In their Article “Property and the Definition of Slavery,” Jean Allain and Robin Hickey clarify the distinction that I am trying to make, the distinction between people and commodities. They specify that the key feature of slavery is “that a person is being controlled as if she were a thing possessed” (936). The words to note here are “thing” and “possessed.” A thing is not a person, but a tank of gas or a computer could easily be defined as a “thing.” Similarly, a person could not be seen to be “possessed,” but a thing, like a car, certainly could. 

The difference between one person and another, however, is not so obvious, so slavers must resort to particular details to commodify people, to reduce them to objects whose wants slavers don’t have to consider. In the minds of slavers, these details mark certain groups of people as less than human. In the Americas, skin color is the most frequently utilized detail, though certainly not the only one. Gender, ethnicity, cultural identity, and even language use have all been employed for this purpose. For example, article “Am I not a Man…” notes that the pseudoscience of phrenology, the measurement and analysis of the shapes of people’s heads, was used in the 1800s to justify the enslavement of African Americans on the grounds that they were mentally inferior. The article tells of a 19^th century scholar of anatomy named Frederick Tidemann whose “detailed attack on the presumed intellectual and moral inferiority of Africans employed many of the measurements used by phrenologists” (Hamilton 177). The key words here are “intellectual and moral inferiority.” To slavers, these terms, or words like them, mean “less than human” or “ok to treat like a cow or a car.” That is, to buy sell, and use as an instrument of one’s will without consideration for its feelings.  

Dependence on Masters:

In order to commodify people, slavers traditionally break social bonds, isolating potential slaves and creating dependence on slave masters for basic necessities such as food, shelter, safety, and emotional security. The most commonly known example of this practice occurs in the massive forced migration that took place in American slavery in which millions of people were isolated twice over. Initially potential slaves were ripped from their homes, families, and their native soil. Second, those people were sold at market, again separated from even those who they may have befriended on the weeks-long voyage from Africa. Alone, friendless, unable to speak the language, the isolation of these people sows the seeds of slavery, creating dependence on slave masters for all basic human necessities.    

In their article in International law Quarterly Jean Allain and Robin Hickey make statements in their can be seen to corroborate the claims made in the previous paragraph. In their article, they make a valiant attempt to separate the practice of slavery form the practice of forced labor. Forced labor, they claim, could be as simple as someone being forced to work for a short period of time, a few days, under a threat of violence (937). What differentiates forced labor from slavery, however, is the degree to which slaves are dependent on their captors. Allain and Hickey point out a recent case in Sierra Leone in which “…individuals were captured, tied together, and brought the mines ‘where they were forced to work at gunpoint’…In such situations the control exercised was tantamount to possession as the individuals were at the completely at the mercy of their captors” (938). The phrase “completely” highlights hearkens back to the example of American slavery, suggesting the same level of dependence on a slave master for even the most basic human needs: clothing and safety. 

Allain, Jean, and Robin Hickey. “Property and the Definition of Slavery.” International Law Quarterly. 61 (2012): 915-38 Academic Search Complete, Web. 12 March 2014.

Hamilton, Cynthia, S. “’Am I not a man and a Brother?’ Phrenology and Anti-Slavery.” Slavery and Abolition 29.2. (2008): 173-87. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 March 2014.