Sunday, May 8, 2011

videos

roots scene 
3:28-6:15

modern slavery
beginning-3:06

slave brutality


In Africa slave were traded for weapons and other things, so the tribes of Africa would catch people from other tribes and sell them to slave traders.  This would tear the African people from their families and cause emotional damage.


Then they were put into cages with hardly any food or water for as long as it took for a ship to get there.  Then they were loaded onto ships and crammed very tightly onto the bottom of the ships.  Many people died from disease or malnutrition during the journey.
 The ones who survived the journey went through painful examinations to be placed at a pay grade and then auctioned off to the highest bidder.  When they got to the farm they chained together in the field to prevent escape.
They were wiped if they did not do the right thing or they did not work up to standard.  Some slaves were even killed.  The brutality these people faced was horrific.

Slavery Politics

Besides social changes and the visible difference in Africa’s demographics, the political effects of slavery were devastating to Africa during the 17th and 18th centuries. With the increasing desire for slaves and firearms, trade for the two between the Africans became overwhelmingly popular. Conversely, the rise violence among the African states was directly correlated with the trade.

The demand for slaves drove African states to go to war with each other in order to avoid becoming enslaved themselves. This weakened the stability of political structures throughout Africa and caused fractionalization. These wars led to a form of imperialism. In a particular case, the Kingdom of Dahomey, modern day Republic of Benin, was able to use the trade to easily obtain firearms, which allowed them to absorb surrounding kingdoms along with their slaves. This form of imperailization, while not typically common throughout the African states, however, was enough to alter its politics and societies. 


While politically, the slave trade was damaging to Africa, economically the trade contributed greatly to new societies, especially in the Americas. Slave labor cultivated and extracted many of the crops and minerals that made their way around the global trade networks during the early modern era. This allowed the new economies to grow at an exponential rate; without the slave trade the colonies in the America’s would have not been as successful.  

         

history of slavery


Slaves are people who work for no pay for a master or mistress that then In turn provides food shelter and clothing.  Slavery has been around since the Greek and Roman times.  In these society slavery was not based on ethnic race as much but more origin of the people.  When Sparta would conquer an area the people from that region would stay on there land but work for no money under the control of a Spartan master.  In Athens the slaves were used as miners, soldiers, and the police force but mainly they were personal assistance to the    people of Athens.

The Romans were the first to use slaves as people think of them today.  The ones who worked in the mine were wiped and beaten, and the ones that worked on farms were chained together.  Many slaves, often prisoners of war, also were forced fight in the arena against lions and other exotic creatures.


After the fall of Rome, during the medieval period, the act of owning slaves declined, there were some slaves still left around the Mediterranean, but not to many.  The slaves that were left were mainly helpers around the house, office, or they were soldiers.  Not many worked on farms or in mines.



Slavery did not rise back up again until the cotton and tobacco were found in the Americas.  When this happened, boatloads of African people were taken from their homeland, brought to America to work under conditions that were closely related to the roman way of owning slaves.

Slavery did not stop until the civil war in America and it is still prevalent today in many parts of the world.

The Modern Slavery

        The slavery has been happening for thousands of years. In ancient Rome there were more slaves than people who were not enslaved. Most people think that slavery was abolished in 19th century and that we don’t have any slavery anymore. Other people think that it is only in other countries, but not in US. There is slavery in every country and more than 27 million people of any nationality are enslaved nowadays and it is more people than in previous century. The scariest thing is that the government and police are involved in it.

     Major Forms of Human Trafficking include:

Forced Labor - when employers exploit workers.
Sex Trafficking- when an adult is deceived, forced or coerced into prostitution.
Bonded Labor- also referred to as “debt bondage,” workers around the world become victims of debt bondage when traffickers or recruiters unlawfully exploit an initial debt the worker assumed as part of the terms of employment.
Involuntary Domestic Servitude it is a unique form of forced labor of domestic workers, whose workplace is informal and not often shared with other workers. Service providers and investigators find many cases of untreated illnesses and widespread sexual abuse in domestic servitude.
Forced Child Labor - forced labor of a child include situations where the child is in the custody of a non-family member who forces the child to perform work that financially benefits someone outside the child’s family and does not allow the child to leave.
Child Soldiers - it involves an unlawful use or recruitment of children – through fraud, coercion or force – as combatants or for labor or sexual exploitation by armed forces. Perpetrators may be rebel groups, paramilitary organizations or government forces.
Child Sex Traffickingaround two million children are used for prostitution in the global commercial sex trade nowadays.

        Facts:
-statistically 32 billion dollars a year is generated from human trafficking and it is a second most profitable business after the drug business. 

-2 children per minute are trafficked for sexual exploitation. 

-an estimated 2 million children are trafficked annually. 
-over 100,000 U.S. children are forcefully engaged in prostitution or pornography each year. 
-around 80 percent of human trafficking victims are women and girls.

-around 50 percent of human trafficking victims are minors.
-the average lifespan of a child forced into prostitution is 7 years.  

-$90 is the average cost of a human slave around the world.

        There is the fact that Kenya is trafficking people till this day. Countries which formally banned slavery most recently include Saudi Arabia, The Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Countries where children can still easily be bought and sold, although slavery is illegal are Vietnam, India, Kenya, the Sudan, and countless other countries. 

        You can find an actual interview with a former sex slave that was rescued from sexual bondage in an Eastern European brothel in the following website: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3071966/ “. . . Natasha estimates she was forced to sleep with more than 1,000 men during her nine months in Velesta. Besides the Albanians and Macedonians, there were men from “France, Germany, and the United States,” Natasha said, referring to soldiers from the NATO peacekeeping mission in Macedonia and nearby Kosovo . . .”

        The results of slavery include long-lasting physical and psychological trauma, disease (including AIDS/HIV), drug addiction, malnutrition, social ostracism, unwanted pregnancy and possible death.

    
         Politically independent organizations are based in the U.S. that are doing significant work to rescue slaves, educate vulnerable communities and prevent victimization, also help victims of slavery to live freely and recover.
         One of the registered public charities that works toward the abolition of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of children in the United States and Southeast Asia is Love146. This organization came up with their name after a child the organization workers found in in 2002 in a Southeast Asian brothel. Her name had been replaced with a number, like all the children in the brothel, but president and co-founder Rob Morris said, “There was still a fight left in her eyes.”
        Love146 uses a unique model of after-care. The “safe home” was built where children can recover after they have endured periods of exploitation and sexual slavery. The children are treated with cooked meals, loving home and intense psychological therapy.
       
        It is possible to end slavery in 25 years and everyone has a role to play – international organizations, business, government, consumers and YOU.

Slavery Resistance and Revolts

Slaves never accepted their status, they resisted what they were being put through in many ways. A few of the ways were simple like working slowly for their masters but diligently in their own gardens (if owned). Other forms of resisting also consisted of sabotaging plantation equipment and work routines This did not always work out for slaves once their masters caught on to what was going on. They would see their business losing money. They would in return take out their anger by beating, and torturing the slaves
 For those slaves that could not take the way they were living, running away was an option of resisting. Slaves that ran away were known as Maroons most of these maroons had gained military experience in Africa. These Maroons organized escaped slaves into military forces. These communities flourished in slaveholding regions of the western hemisphere. Some still exist, such as Suriname.
Resistance to slavery was not always on such a small scale. The most dramatic form of resistance came in the form of revolts. Slaves usually outnumbered slave owners and supervisors on plantations.  
 Although slave revolts did free the slaves of their owners, they usually never brought an end to slavery itself. Military forces would always put an end to the revolts before they got to big. However slavery was abolished in the colony of Saint-Domingue due to a revolt. The slaves declared independence from France and renamed the land Haiti. The Haitian Revolution inspired slaves throughout the western hemisphere, while also frightening slave owners at seeing what slaves were capable of.