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Slavery.

Slavery.

Written by: Popular Culture and Religion.
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 Slavery.
Slavery is a socioeconomic institution in which individuals are treated as property, deprived of personal liberty, and compelled to provide unpaid labor or services to owners under coercion, often involving violence or the threat thereof, with the legal right to buy, sell, inherit, or punish the enslaved. This practice, rooted in the exercise of power over war captives, debtors, or conquered peoples, has manifested across diverse forms—from chattel systems denying all autonomy to debt bondage retaining nominal freedoms—but consistently entails the owner's absolute control over the slave's body, labor, and reproduction.
Historically, slavery underpinned economies and societies in nearly every major civilization, from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt through classical Greece and Rome—where slaves comprised 20-30% of urban populations and drove mining, agriculture, and domestic work—to medieval Islamic empires, sub-Saharan African kingdoms, Indian caste systems, and Ottoman domains. In Africa, internal enslavement of war prisoners and criminals predated external trades, with slaves integrated into households, farms, or as status symbols in societies like those of the Ashanti and Dahomey, often fueling exports to Arab and later European markets. In terms of the scale, empirical data reveal the transatlantic trade's shipment of about 12 million Africans to the Americas from 1500 to 1866, alongside roughly 6 million via trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean routes to the Islamic world over centuries, highlighting slavery's global, multi-directional causality rather than confinement to any single region or ideology. These trades, sustained by African elites capturing and selling rivals alongside foreign demand, generated vast wealth but entrenched cycles of violence, depopulation, and underdevelopment in source areas.
Abolition emerged unevenly from the late 18th century, propelled by Enlightenment critiques of absolutism, evangelical moralism, and industrial shifts reducing reliance on coerced labor, culminating in legal bans by Western powers—Britain in 1833, the U.S. in 1865—though enforcement lagged and modern variants like forced labor and trafficking persist, affecting an estimated 50 million people today amid uneven global progress. Controversies endure over slavery's legacies, including economic disparities traceable to trade intensities and debates on reparative justice, yet causal analysis underscores its roots in universal human incentives for domination and resource extraction, not unique cultural pathologies.Copyright Popular Culture and Religion.
Episodes
  • 22 - Child slavery.

    22 - Child slavery.
    May 16 2026
    Child slavery.
    Trafficking.
    Trafficking of children includes recruiting, harboring, obtaining, and transporting children by use of force or fraud for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts, such as commercial sexual exploitation (including prostitution) or involuntary labor, i.e., enslavement. Some see human trafficking as the modern form of slavery. Human trafficking is the trade of human beings and their use by criminals to make money. The majority of trafficking victims are adults, predominantly made up of women forced into prostitution, but children make up many victims forced into prostitution.
    In Ukraine, a survey conducted by the non-governmental organization (NGO) La Strada-Ukraine in 2001–2003, based on a sample of 106 women being trafficked out of Ukraine found that 3% were under 18, and the US State Department reported in 2004 that incidents of minors being trafficked was increasing. In Thailand, NGOs have estimated that up to a third of prostitutes are children under 18, many trafficked from outside Thailand.
    The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography estimates that about one million children in Asia alone are victims of the sex trade.
    Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Save the Children, World Vision and the British Red Cross have called for an immediate halt to adoptions of Haitian children not approved before the earthquake, warning that child traffickers could exploit the lack of regulation. An Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman said that child enslavement and trafficking was "an existing problem and could easily emerge as a serious issue over the coming weeks and months".

    Child soldiers.
    The United Nations defines child soldier as "A child associated with an armed force or armed group refers to any person below 18 years of age who is, or who has been, recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys, and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, spies or for sexual purposes." In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in current conflicts. In 2012, this estimation rose to be around 300,000 in only twenty countries. Around 40% of child soldiers are believed to be girls, that have been taken and used as sex slaves and 'wives'.
    According to United Nations, children associated with armed forces and groups can be used in various roles, including combat, support functions, and even acts of terror such as suicide bombings, with reports of children as young as 8 or 9 being involved in armed conflict.
    During the 2026 Iran war, Rahim Nadali, an IRGC official in Tehran, announced the launch of the initiative "For Iran" which recruits 12 year olds into the Basij militia for them to assist in manning "operational patrols" and checkpoints, as well as providing logistical support and performing other duties. This move contradicts Iran's commitment to abstain from the use of children in military activities under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, Nadali justified to move stating "Given that the age of those coming forward has dropped and they are asking to take part, we lowered the minimum age to 12". According to Al-Arabiya, from the beginning of the war, Tehran residents reported of untrained teenagers and youths armed with Uzi sub-machine guns and Kalshnikov rifles, stopping vehicles, shouting orders, and firing warning shots into the air.

    Forced labor.
    More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labor, often sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty such as in restaveks in Haiti. Globally, in 2016, 25 million were in forced labor, with 16 million of them subjected to forced labor exploitation in sectors such as domestic work, construction, and agriculture, with children particularly vulnerable. When it comes to children, 152 million children are engaged in child labor, many of whom work in hazardous conditions.


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    5 mins
  • 21 - Child slavery.

    21 - Child slavery.
    May 16 2026
    Child slavery. The enslavement of children can be traced back through history. Despite the fact that slavery has been abolished, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked to this day, particularly in developing countries. Like other forms of modern slavery, child slavery is also often linked to poverty, as some impoverished families "sell" their children to their captors because they cannot adequately take care of them and do not see any other option. History. Child slavery refers to the slavery of children below the age of majority. Many children have been sold into slavery in the past for their family to repay debts or crimes or earn some money if the family were short of cash. In the Roman Empire, the children of a slave woman normally became the property of her owner. This was also the case in Korea around 1000 AD. Since slavery among the Maya and indigenous people of North America could be inherited, the children of the Indians could be born slaves. In the Islamic world. In the entire Islamic world, the institution of slavery was regulated by the slavery regulations prescribed by religious sharia law. These also described sexual relationships with slaves and consequently child slavery. By Islamic law, slaves could be acquired through direct capture in warfare as kafir from Dar al-harb; via a middle man trade network (essentially foreign slave merchants); or by being born in to slavery, which meant both of their parents, or their only known parent, was a slave. A Muslim man was allowed by law to have sexual intercourse with his own female slave in accordance with the principle of concubinage in Islam (without it being defined as extramarital sex or zina). The child of a slave was born a slave, unless the male slave owner acknowledged the child of his female slave as his, in which case the child would be born free. If a master chose to acknowledge his child with his slave, then the slave mother herself would become an umm al-walad and free when her enslaver died, though she continued to be a slave during his lifetime unless he chose to manumit her. Traditionally, royal dynasties in the Muslim world customarily used slave concubines for procreation, and the children of royal concubines were routinely acknowledged. However, this was not necessarily the case with a common slave master and his female slave. The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since Islamic Law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his personal sex slave, prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who returned his ownership of her after 1–2 days on the pretext of discontent after having had intercourse with her, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world. Children were also subjected to sexual exploitation. Islamic law was based on the life of Muhammed. The marriage between Muhammed and Aisha, which was reportedly consummated when the bride was nine, and marriage and sexual intercourse was customarily allowed with girls from the age of nine. In his contemporary report A Report on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Zanzibar, Pemba, and the Mainland of the British Protectorates of East Africa from 1895, Donald MacKenzie noted, in regard to slavery in Zanzibar, that sexual slavery did not, in fact, result in many children, which necessitated the need for constant slave import: "It is a curious fact that Slaves have but very few children, owing, it is said, to the manner in which very young girls are treated by the Arabs and others ; hence the necessity for the continued importation of raw Slaves to supply the demand. I was much struck with the evidence of non-increase amongst the Slaves as regards children. Taking the death-rate at 30 per mille, upwards of 7,000 Slaves would have to be imported annually to supply this deficiency in labour". In the United States. Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about a woman a slave owner bought to breed children to sell. The expectations of children who were either bought or born into slavery varied. Scholars noted, "age and physical capacity, as well as the degree of dependence, set the terms of children's integration into households". The duties that child slaves were responsible for performing are disputed among scholars. A few representations of the lives that slave children led portrayed them as, "virtually divorced from the plantation economy until they were old enough to be employed as field hands, thereby emphasizing the carefree nature of childhood for a part of the slave population that was temporarily spared forced labor". This view also stated that if children were asked to perform any duties at all, it was to perform light household chores, such as being "organized into 'trash gangs' and made to collect refuse about the estate". Opposing scholars argued that slave children had their youth stolen from them, and were forced to start performing ...
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    10 mins
  • 20 - Countermeasures.

    20 - Countermeasures.
    May 16 2026
    Countermeasures. In 2009, the International Organization for Migration launched the Buy Responsibly awareness raising campaign against trafficking. The United Nations Organization also takes an active part in the anti-trafficking effort, particularly through the Sustainable Development Goal 5. In early 2016, the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the United Nations held an interactive discussion entitled "Responding to Current Challenges in Trafficking in Human Beings". Anti-trafficking awareness and fundraising campaigns constitute a significant portion of anti-trafficking initiatives. The 24 Hour Race is one such initiative that focuses on increasing awareness among high school students in Asia. The Blue Campaign is another anti-trafficking initiative that works with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to combat human trafficking and bring freedom to exploited victims. However, critical commentators have pointed out that initiatives such as these aimed at "raising awareness" do little, if anything, to actually reduce instances of trafficking. The 3P Anti-trafficking Policy Index measured the effectiveness of government policies to fight human trafficking based on an evaluation of policy requirements prescribed by the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000). In 2014, for the first time in history major leaders of many religions, Buddhist, Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim, met to sign a shared commitment against modern-day slavery; the declaration they signed calls for the elimination of slavery and human trafficking by 2020. The signatories were: Pope Francis, Mātā Amṛtānandamayī (also known as Amma), Bhikkhuni Thich Nu Chân Không (representing Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh), Datuk K Sri Dhammaratana, Chief High Priest of Malaysia, Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Rabbi David Rosen, Abbas Abdalla Abbas Soliman, Undersecretary of State of Al Azhar Alsharif (representing Mohamed Ahmed El-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar), Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi al-Modarresi, Sheikh Naziyah Razzaq Jaafar, Special advisor of Grand Ayatollah (representing Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Basheer Hussain al Najafi), Sheikh Omar Abboud, Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Metropolitan Emmanuel of France (representing Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew). The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has further assisted many non-governmental organizations in their fight against human trafficking. The 2006 armed conflict in Lebanon, which saw 300,000 domestic workers from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and the Philippines jobless and targets of traffickers, led to an emergency information campaign with NGO Caritas Migrant to raise human-trafficking awareness. Additionally, an April 2006 report, Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns, helped to identify 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries for human trafficking. To date, it is the second most frequently downloaded UNODC report. Continuing into 2007, UNODC supported initiatives like the Community Vigilance project along the border between India and Nepal, as well as provided subsidy for NGO trafficking prevention campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. UNODC efforts to motivate action launched the Blue Heart Campaign Against Human Trafficking on 6 March 2009, which Mexico launched its own national version of in April 2010. The campaign encourages people to show solidarity with human trafficking victims by wearing the blue heart, similar to how wearing the red ribbon promotes transnational HIV/AIDS awareness. On 4 November 2010, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in Persons to provide humanitarian, legal and financial aid to victims of human trafficking with the aim of increasing the number of those rescued and supported, and broadening the extent of assistance they receive. In 2013, the United Nations designated July 30 as the World Day against Trafficking in Persons. There are a number of international treaties concerning human trafficking: - Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, entered into force in 1957. - Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. - Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. - Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. - ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29). - ILO Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105). - ILO Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138). - ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182). - Inter-American Convention on International Traffic in Minors.In countermeasures victims began using the sign language help sign. Wikipedia: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated...
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    6 mins
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