On any given day, there are at least 40 million nonwhite slaves around the world—the vast majority enslaved by other nonwhites, a new report by the United Nations’s International Labor Organization (ILO), and the Walk Free Foundation, an international NGO working to end modern slavery, has found. The largest number of offenders and victims are concentrated in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—and the tiny numbers of victims and perpetrators in Europe and North America are largely ascribable to Third World immigrant behavior.
The report, titled “Global estimates of modern slavery: forced labour and forced marriage,” said that an estimated 40.3 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016.
This means that on “any given day in 2016, there were likely to be more than 40 million men, women, and children who were being forced to work against their will under threat or who were living in a forced marriage that they had not agreed to,” the report said.
Of these 40.3 million victims, “24.9 million people were in forced labour. That is, they were being forced to work under threat or coercion as domestic workers, on construction sites, in clandestine factories, on farms and fishing boats, in other sectors, and in the sex industry.”
These victims are “forced to work by private individuals and groups or by state authorities. In many cases, the products they made and the services they provided ended up in seemingly legitimate commercial channels.
Another “15.4 million people were living in a forced marriage to which they had not consented. That is, they were en-during a situation that involved having lost their sexual autonomy and often involved providing labour under the guise of ‘marriage,’” the report continued.
Women and girls are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, accounting for 28.7 million, or 71 per cent of the overall total. More precisely, women and girls represent 99 per cent of victims of forced labor in the commercial sex industry and 58 per cent in other sectors, 40 per cent of victims of forced labor imposed by state authorities, and 84 per cent of victims of forced marriages.
One in four victims of modern slavery were children. Some 37 per cent (5.7 million) of those forced to marry were children. Children represented 18 per cent of those subjected to forced labor exploitation and 7 per cent of people forced to work by state authorities. Children who were in commercial sexual exploitation (where the victim is a child, there is no requirement of force) represented 21 per cent of total victims in this category of abuse. The report added that modern slavery was most prevalent in Africa (7.6 per 1,000 people), followed by Asia and the Pacific (6.1 per 1,000) then Europe and Central Asia (3.9 per 1,000).
For forced labor specifically, the prevalence is highest in Asia and the Pacific, where four out of every 1,000 people were victims, followed by Europe and Central Asia (3.6 per 1,000), Africa (2.8 per 1,000), the Arab States (2.2 per 1,000) and the Americas (1.3 per 1,000).
While noting limits of the data in key regions, particularly the Arab States, the data suggests prevalence of forced marriage is highest in Africa (4.8 per 1,000), followed by Asia and the Pacific (2.0 per 1,000).
An October 2016 report revealed that the modern slave trade in London was largely Nigerian in origin.