SLAVERY CONTINUES IN THE MODERN WORLD: Some Facts.

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Slavery continues to exist in the modern world. For instance:

More than 100 different products were included on the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2009 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor (PDF), including coffee and tea, cotton, gold and diamonds, fireworks, clothing and shoes, various foodstuffs, soap, soccer balls, surgical instruments, pornography—even Christmas decorations.

Some 20.9 million people around the world are victims of sex trafficking and other types of forced labor, according to the Estimate of Forced Labour report (PDF) released in 2012 by the International Labour Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations. The comparable number in the ILO’s 2005 report was 12.3 million. (Other estimates put the number of forced labor victims as high as 27 million.)

In effect, the ILO’s estimate means that about three out of every 1,000 people inhabiting the planet are victims of modern slavery.

The ILO report estimates 18.7 million of the world’s forced-labor victims are exploited in the private economy. Some 55 percent of those people are women and girls, including 98 percent of the victims of sexual exploitation and 40 percent of those enslaved by other forms of forced labor in the private economy.

Some 4.5 million people, or 22 percent of all enslaved workers, are victims of forced sexual exploitation, according to the ILO report. Another 14.2 million, or 68 percent, are victims of forced-labor exploitation in such economic activities as agriculture, construction, domestic work and manufacturing. The remaining 2.2 million, or 10 percent, are victims of state-imposed forms of forced labor.

No region of the world is free from slavery.

The ILO report estimates that there are some 11.7 million victims of sexual exploitation, labor exploitation or state-imposed forced labor in China, India and the rest of Asia (excluding Japan). There are another 3.7 million in Africa; 600,000 in the Mideast; 1.8 million in Central and South America; 1.6 million in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; and 1.5 million in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Western Europe.

[www.abajournal.com/magazine/"Slavery Continues to Haunt the Modern World"; U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (200); Trafficking in Person Report (U.S. State Dept., 2012); ABA Task Force on Human Trafficking (2012); "Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children", United Nations (2005)]