In this article is this statement:
This seems counter to the sentiment in this article.
Is it outrageous hyperbole or a factual reckoning?
Well, there ARE a lot more people around these days…
It might be fact, for simple reasons: back during the bad old days of trans-Atlantic slave trade the main type of slave that was sought was a laborer - often farm workers. For the most part, they wanted men, big strong guys to do heavy, heavy manual labor. Sure, they took some women, they were useful for making into whores and housekeepers and breeding more slaves (basically, rape, household drudgery, and more rape) but healthy men were the main ticket item.
Now we have machinery for the worst of the back-breaking labor. So yeah, I could see more trafficking in women (raping whores still being as popular as ever) than men right now, and given the greater overall population, sure, it’s conceivable that more women are being trafficked these days than back in the day, possibly enough to outnumber the annual toll of the old trans-Atlantic trade. Keep in mind, too, that the fatality rate while transporting slaves these days is pretty darn low, back in the days of sailing ships the death toll was appalling. Are they counting the number loaded in Africa or the number that actually survived to reach the New World?
The statement, as written, means this:
Total of All Slaves in a Peak Year of trans-Atlantic slave trade X 10 < Total of girls in 2010 trafficed (sold) into brothel prostitution.
I’d like to see the actual numbers.
If the sentiment is that there are more women working in brothels worldwide than there were 10x the number of slaves sold yearly in the peak of trans-Atlantic slave trade, then OK, but that’s not speaking to the horrors of the point that the NYT article is trying to make, so it’s not relevant.
Thing is, slavers generally don’t report ‘sales figures’ to any reputable source.
Then the numbers were pulled out of the author’s nether regions?
That seems like a bit of a misnomer to me regardless. The internal slave trade was always huge, even after the international slave trade was outlawed. From a quick googling I find that historians generally estimate that 11-14 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic in the period beginning with the 16th Century and ending at the close of the 18th, early 19th. That ignores the vast majority of the slaves in the latter half of that period that were born in the Americans and the Caribbean who were held in bondage their entire lives.
Well, based on those numbers I guess I’ll have to side on the factual reckoning, with a SWAG that less than 10,000 crossed at the ‘peak year’ of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it’s not so hard to believe that there are less than a 100,000 girls sold into brothels in 2010.
Thanks!
Double post (sorry for my impatience)
Read that article this AM, and I was a little puzzled, too.
Here’s a quasi analysis, but I don’t know how reputable it is:
"Each year an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold, or forced across the world’s borders [2003 U.S. State Department estimate]. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as 5, who fall victim to the sex trade.
http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/trafficking.html
So yeah the 10x figure seems to be roughly correct.
Erm, the fact that it matches another estimate doesn’t make it “correct”. State Department figures themselves have been revised downward on a number of occasions, when methodological problems were discovered and claims on which the estimates were based could not be substantiated. Their current estimate of worldwide victims may well be 800,000 but who’s to say that won’t be revised downward too after further analysis.
Also, “trafficking” and “slavery” are not the same thing. The definition of trafficking is far, far broader than that and can take into account much lesser forms of exploitation. It even sometimes includes people who don’t feel they’re being exploited at all because they knew what they were getting into. Defining them all as “slaves” minimizes the horror of what slavery actually is.