Modern slavery is far from abolished

Despite international efforts to abolish slavery, it is well and truly alive in certain parts of the world. Global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic are not helping matters.

There are frequent anti-slavery protests but these do not always lead to change

Cheickna Diarra is from the village of Baramabougou in the region of Kayes in Mali, where what is known as "descent-based or hereditary slavery" is widespread.

Diarra was abused by people who saw themselves as his "masters" before he finally fled to the capital Bamako, where he now lives in a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs).

In 2019, he almost died after visiting a friend. "On my way home, about 20 young villagers barred my way without even asking where I was from, what I was doing there," he told DW. "They fell upon me and started hitting me with sticks until I fell down and lost consciousness."

He only survived because the cries of his relatives alerted the other villagers who came to his help.

"We stopped cultivating our fields in 2018," he explained. "Those claiming to be our masters banned us from going to the store and the fields, as well as from leaving the village."

He filed a complaint against unknown persons for maltreatment but to no avail. Many of the 130 others in his IDP camp have filed similar complaints in vain.

'Authorities always find a way out'

Temedt is an NGO that campaigns against slavery in Mali. Its vice-president Raichatou Walet Altanata told DW that progress is slow. "We have been denouncing the phenomenon since 2006. But none of our cases have gone to court on the grounds of slavery. The authorities always find a way out." She said that sometimes violence or crime is acknowledged but slavery, the real issue at stake, is never taken into account.

She pointed out that this goes against international conventions to abolish slavery that Mali has ratified, as well as the constitution, which also states that human dignity is sacred and inviolable.


Even those who manage to escape slavery are often doomed to a life of poverty

According to the human rights NGO Anti-Slavery International, descent-based slavery "can still be found across the Sahel belt of Africa, including Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and Sudan."

"People born into descent-based slavery face a lifetime of exploitation and are treated as property by their so-called 'masters.' They work without pay, herding animals, working in the fields or in their masters' homes. They can be inherited, sold or given away as gifts or wedding presents."

"Many other African societies also have a traditional hierarchy where people are known to be the descendants of slaves or slave-owners."

In 1981, Mauritania became one of the last countries in the world to ban slavery.

However, it has yet to be abolished in reality.

'Still a long way to go'

On December 2, 1949 the United Nations General Assembly approved the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The date later became known as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

The convention has lost none of its relevance today. "While much progress has been made in terms of understanding modern slavery and the driving forces behind it, we still have a very long way to go if we are going to end it for good," Anti-Slavery International CEO Jasmine O'Connor told DW. "Millions of people around the world are living in slavery and increasing pressures are making many more vulnerable to the tricks of traffickers."

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 40 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016 and one in four were children.

People have been protesting against child labor for over a century. Today, children make up a quarter of those in forced labor.

Although modern slavery is not defined legally, it is often used as an umbrella term for practices such as forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage, human trafficking and the forced recruitment of children in armed conflicts. Those who are most likely to be affected live in Africa, followed by the Asia-Pacific.

In 2016, 15.4 million people were in forced marriage and 24.9 million people were in forced labor, two thirds of whom were exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture. 4.8 million were in forced sexual exploitation and 4 million were in forced labor imposed by state authorities.

Women are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, which sometimes involves sexual exploitation

More courageous action needed

Anti-Slavery International has called for more courageous and effective action and laws, as well as investigations and preventative measures to put an end to slavery across the world. CEO Jasmine O'Connor welcomed the fact that the G7 states have acknowledged the matter as one of great concern and said that there had been some legal and political successes with regard to hereditary slavery in west Africa. However, she feared that new statistics on slavery would show that numbers have gone up in the past five years.

"The past year has been marked by COVID-19 pandemic and climate change and we have seen how these factors are pushing more and more people into unplanned migration and precarious work, placing them at high risk of exploitation."

Children are often exploited in the gold mining industry

This article was translated from German.

Shayne Looper: Did Christianity support the institution of slavery?

OF COURSE IT DID, SO DID ISLAM

Tue, September 26, 2023 

During the 19th century, slaveholders sometimes used Bible verses to defend their right to own slaves. In our time, atheists have used the same Bible verses to defend their claim that Christianity is a sham and its moral standards noxious. But both those who used Bible verses to defend slavery and those who use slavery to condemn Christianity overlook slavery’s historical context and misunderstand the reasons for the apostolic instructions.

Slavery is very old, older than the Bible itself. When the Bible was being written, people could not imagine a world without slaves. As we take electricity for granted, they took slavery for granted. Burning coal or firing up nuclear power plants may be a selfish and harmful way to produce energy — people in future generations may think it the epitome of foolishness and even arrogance — but few people would suggest that we do away with electricity. Likewise, it never occurred to people in antiquity to do away with slavery.

Ancient slavery differed from the slavery we know about, which marred America from the 17th century through the 19th century. When people claim that Christianity supports slavery, they have in mind the African slave trade in Europe and in the Americas, and that is at best misleading. It was, in fact, Christians who led the campaign to end slavery in Europe and America.

Ancient slavery differed from its modern counterpart. In antiquity, slaves often sold themselves into slavery, usually to pay off debts. They then saved their money (they frequently were paid) in order to buy their way back out. Some slaves were like family members: loved, honored and well-treated; others were treated poorly, neglected, and abused. Some slaves were better educated than their masters. They sometimes held positions of importance. Slaves were not only laborers; they were also accountants, lawyers, soldiers, teachers and administrators.

The slavery of the first century Mediterranean never oppressed a particular people group because of their ethnicity or the color of their skin. Slaves in Paul’s day were not kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery. Unlike their 18th-century American counterparts, few first-century slaves spent their entire lives in slavery. And unlike 18th century slaves, first-century slaves were often better off financially than the day laborers who were free.

In ancient Israel, slaves would serve no more than seven years, when the law required their release. A slave could choose to remain with his or her master if they liked the work and appreciated the security, but a master could not force anyone to remain in slavery.

When people fault the biblical writers for their failure to denounce slavery, they frequently ignore what the writers did say. For example, the apostles counsel Christian slaves to buy their freedom if they are able. They command masters to treat their slaves with justice and remind them that they also have a Master who is watching and will hold them responsible for their actions.

The Christian perspective on slavery was unique among the ancients. Greek and Roman moralists sometimes addressed slaves’ responsibility to their masters (and for that matter, wives to their husbands) but not of masters to their slaves (or husbands to their wives). It took someone with a radically different outlook to even think in that way — someone with a mind being reshaped and renewed by a connection to God.

When the Apostle Paul told slaves to obey their “earthly masters with respect and fear,” he used the same words he employed in a different context of all Christians. He wrote, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” where in the original language the prepositional phrases are identical. That he used the same expression to describe working out salvation and working second shift reveals the importance of work and work relationships, regardless of one’s status as slave or free.

Though Christians like the Apostles Paul and Peter accepted slavery as a societal institution, they also recognized the dangers inherent in it. They insisted that Christian masters treat their slaves justly, and offered counsel to slaves that would make their lives better. Though they did not denounce slavery as an institution, they did denounce injustice and oppression within the institution.

— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Did Christianity support the institution of slavery?

 

New commission set to tackle rising human slavery in Europe - and beyond

By Saskia O'Donoghue

Published on 07/10/2023 - 08:30

Headed up by former British prime minister Theresa May, the Global Commission for Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking seeks to eradicate the ever-increasing issue by 2030.

Modern slavery is "still the greatest human rights issue of our time”.

That’s according to former British prime minister Theresa May who has, this week, launched a new global commission to tackle modern slavery and human trafficking.

The aim of the Global Commission for Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking is to put pressure on governments to return the issue to the top of their political agendas as modern slavery sees an alarming increase worldwide.

It’s perhaps something you wouldn’t immediately associate with Europe but the prevalence here is rising too.

It’s thought that France alone has 135,000 of the 50 million global victims of modern slavery.

Since 2016, the Global Slavery Index and the United Nations estimate that some 10 million more people - up from 40 million - have been forced to work or marry, due to increasingly complex global challenges facing every walk of life.

"Modern slavery is hidden in plain sight and is deeply intertwined with life in every corner of the world. Each day, people are tricked, coerced, or forced into exploitative situations that they cannot refuse or leave. Each day, we buy the products or use the services they have been forced to make or offer without realising the hidden human cost."

 Global Slavery Index 

Definition of modern slavery

These vulnerabilities have been compounded further still by climate change, an increasingly digital way of life for millions, conflict - and COVID-19.

The pandemic exacerbated existing issues while creating new ones - from unequal access to healthcare and vaccines as well as increased economic insecurity across Europe.

The negative effects of climate change on agriculture and the food production industry have seen levels of poverty and food insecurity skyrocket and increased displacement for some.

The Index has found that this often desperate exile can lead to ever more exploitation and forced labour on the continent.

Conflict, too, plays a significant part.

The Commission says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the risk of modern slavery, thanks to mass displacement and forced migration both in-country and across the region.

They found that Russia, along with Turkmenistan, have taken the least action to combat modern slavery and trafficking in recent years.

At the other end of the scale are the UK, followed by the Netherlands and Portugal, who took the most initiative in tackling the issue.

While the findings show that Europe has taken the most action of any region worldwide to tackle forced labour that ends up in global supply chains, it’s not all good news.

The Commission expresses that across all countries, governments must address significant gaps, including expanding the provision of safe and regular migration pathways for the most vulnerable, as well tackling underlying discrimination of migrants and other marginalised groups.

They will be hoping that a number of European nations, which score particularly badly on the Index, will take heed of that advice.

In Russia and Ukraine, it’s estimated that 13 and 12.8 people per 1,000 are currently trapped in slavery.

In Macedonia it’s 12.6 while in Belarus the figure is 11.3 and Albania has 10.8 people per capita defined as slaves.

While the UK, the Netherlands and Portugal are all actively trying to combat the situation, only the Netherlands are in the top 5 countries with the least slavery.

The rich, central and northern European nations Switzerland and Norway (with just 0.5 people per 1,000 in slavery each) are followed closely by Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, which all have only 0.6 people enslaved per 1,000.

Chaired by Theresa May, the Commission also features prominent members including Grace Forrest, the founder of human rights organisation Walk Free. Nasreen Sheikh, an author and survivor of modern slavery and Sophie Otiende, the Chief Executive of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery.

Together, their aim is to firm up and support the implementation of every nation’s commitments to ending modern slavery and rooting out forced labour in global supply chains.

They hope to eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking by 2030.

It’s likely to be an uphill battle, though.

Theresa May during her tenure as prime minister, in 2019Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

“More people are living in modern slavery today than at any time in human history. These crimes exist in all of our societies, and respect neither borders nor jurisdictions. Yet compared to other abuses, our collective responsiveness has been disproportionately weak”, admits Theresa May.

Ahead of the UN’s recent Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) summit, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres observed that only 15% of the SDGs on forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking are on track – with many seemingly “going into reverse”.

At the summit in September at UN HQ in New York, Guterres called on governments and other stakeholders to “come to the table with concrete plans and proposals to accelerate progress”.

The Commission says it has three clear objectives: to provide high level political leadership, to mobilise the evidence and knowledge base and to promote and facilitate international collaborations and partnerships.

They’ll also embed those with lived experience in both the governance and work of the high-stakes project - and will present their initial report on changes to Guterres in the spring of 2025.

The Commission is currently supported by both the governments of the UK and Bahrain.

In the middle eastern nation, the vulnerability to modern slavery level is 40 out of 100. In the UK, that figure is a relatively low 14.

The Commission says there is an opportunity for other countries to become co-convenors and for further Commissioners to be appointed - and, for now, they are full of hope that eradication of modern slavery and human trafficking is in sight.

“There is no doubt that more than ever we need collective action to address the issue of modern slavery. When policy makers, industry leaders, and activists are guided by the voices of those closest to and most affected by the problem, there's real opportunity for change”, Sophie Otiende explains.

Investors urge UK firms to increase efforts on tackling slavery in supply chains

Rebecca Speare-Cole, PA sustainability reporter
Tue, 29 August 2023 



Investors are calling on UK-listed companies to increase efforts to tackle modern slavery, human trafficking and forced labour in their supply chains.

Sustainable investment firm CCLA, alongside a coalition of investors, has been engaging with companies as part of an initiative to combat modern slavery in their supply chain, strengthen public policy and develop better data.

The investors, which include Rathbones Group, Schroders and Church Commissioners for England, welcomed the steps taken by many UK businesses and the UK Government in recent years, including the passing of the Modern Slavery Act.


However, they said they are concerned that only a small number of firms have shared findings of modern slavery in their supply chains, making it difficult for investors to assess corporate actions on identifying and helping victims.

It comes as 86% of forced labour cases were found in the private sector, according to 2022 figures from the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and The International Organization for Migration.

In a report on the CCLA’s initiative released on Tuesday, the firm said it analysed the 2021 Modern Slavery Statements of FTSE 100 companies last year.

CCLA said it found the majority of the companies had published a modern slavery statement and average compliance with the Modern Slavery Act was 89%.

But it also said the number of firms publicly sharing that they had found, fixed or prevented modern slavery was much lower.

Only 20% reported action to find cases in their supply chain, 3% reported action to fix it and 18% reported action to prevent it, the CCLA said.

The coalition of investors working with CCLA are now calling on UK-listed companies to increase their efforts to identify human trafficking, forced labour, and modern slavery in their supply chain.

They are also urging firms to review, assess and disclose the effectiveness of their attempts to address the issues and to support the provision of remedy to victims of modern slavery within their supply chain.

The CCLA said it identified the hospitality and construction sectors for engagement in 2020 due to high risks of modern slavery and lower profile efforts to address them.

The work first saw “varied but positive results” in the hospitality sector after engagement with firms like Domino’s Pizza Group, Greggs, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), JD Wetherspoon, Marston’s and Tui group.

The coalition has now started engagement in the construction sector, including companies like Balfour Beatty, Bellway, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey Plc, The Berkeley Group Holdings and Vistry Group.

Dr Martin Buttle, better work lead at CCLA, said: “It is heartening to see that investors have been able to take a number of the businesses we have engaged with on a journey to address modern slavery.

“While it is a long journey and slower than we would like, we recognise that finding, fixing and preventing modern slavery is very involved but absolutely vital if we are to meet Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 calling for its eradication by 2030.”

The initiative are also calling for the Government to strengthen the supply chains provisions of the Modern Slavery Act as well as mandating financial institutions to report on investing and lending portfolios.

Dame Sara Thornton, former UK Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and CCLA consultant, said: “With 86% of the 27 million people in forced labour employed by the private sector, it is clear that businesses must take more action to identify and address slavery and trafficking in their operations and supply chains.

“Notably in the UK, we import an estimated $18 billion worth of goods that present a high slavery risk so we need our policymakers to step up legislation so that there is a level playing field and incentives for all companies to find, fix and prevent instances of modern slavery in their operations and global supply chains.”

Peter Hugh Smith, CCLA chief executive, said: “The investment industry can and should do more to address modern slavery.

“It is not right that investors profit from this crime and we need to do everything we can to engage with the companies we own so that they are active in addressing issues and providing remedy to those affected.”

 

It Is Slavery — Global Issues

 by Global Reports 247

 

 December 1, 2021

 

Teenage women harvest tomatoes on a farm within the state of Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. Credit score: Courtesy of Sinaloa Institute for Grownup Schooling

• by Baher Kamal (madrid)
• Wednesday, December 01, 2021
• Inter Press Service

MADRID, Dec 01 (IPS) – It doesn’t matter what it’s referred to as — it’s the abhorrent every day lifetime of a billion enslaved people.  The actual variety of “fashionable” slaves is understandably unknown. The Worldwide Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that greater than 40 million individuals worldwide are victims of contemporary slavery.

Though fashionable slavery is just not outlined in legislation, it’s used as an umbrella time period protecting practices comparable to pressured labour, debt bondage, pressured marriage, and human trafficking, it says.

However this determine of 40 million sounds very far-off from being correct. Why? For example, ILO cites pressured marriage as one of many key parts of contemporary slavery. Nevertheless, there are 800 million child-girls pressured to be married.

ILO additionally consists of baby pressured labour as one other key element of slavery. However the UN estimates that there are 160 million youngsters victims of kid pressured labour.

In actual fact, the exact same world organisation states that greater than 150 million youngsters are topic to baby labour, accounting for nearly one in ten youngsters around the globe.

Not to mention the variety of victims of smuggling and trafficking in human beings who’re exploited and recruited as child-soldiers in armed conflicts hitting a number of creating international locations.

One billion slaves

Consequently, solely these two figures mixed increase the variety of ‘fashionable slaves’ to almost one billion.

In keeping with the UN, slavery primarily refers to conditions of exploitation that an individual can not refuse or go away due to threats, violence, coercion, deception, and/or abuse of energy.

Marking the 2021 Worldwide Day for the Abolition of Slavery on 2 December, the world physique says that slavery is just not merely a historic relic.

Coincidently, the Worldwide Day for the Abolition of Slavery marks the date of the adoption, by the UN Common Meeting, of the United Nations Conference for the Suppression of the Visitors in Individuals and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others on 2 December 1949.

The main focus of this Day is on eradicating modern types of slavery, comparable to trafficking in individuals, sexual exploitation, the worst types of baby labour, pressured marriage, and the pressured recruitment of kids to be used in armed battle, the UN remarks.

Most important Types of Trendy Slavery

Slavery has developed and manifested itself in numerous methods all through historical past. Right this moment some conventional types of slavery nonetheless persist of their earlier varieties, whereas others have been remodeled into new ones, in response to the Worldwide Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

“The UN human rights our bodies have documented the persistence of previous types of slavery which can be embedded in conventional beliefs and customs. These types of slavery are the results of long-standing discrimination in opposition to essentially the most weak teams in societies, comparable to these thought to be being of low caste, tribal minorities and indigenous peoples.”

Compelled labour

Alongside conventional types of pressured labour, comparable to bonded labour and debt bondage there now exist extra modern types of pressured labour, comparable to migrant staff, who’ve been trafficked for financial exploitation of each type on the planet economic system: work in home servitude, the development trade, the meals and garment trade, the agricultural sector and in pressured prostitution.

Baby labour

Globally, one in ten youngsters works. Nearly all of the kid labour that happens right now is for financial exploitation. That goes in opposition to the Conference on the Rights of the Baby, which recognises “the suitable of the kid to be protected against financial exploitation and from performing any work that’s more likely to be hazardous or to intrude with the kid’s schooling, or to be dangerous to the kid’s well being or bodily, psychological, non secular, ethical or social improvement.”

All this along with youngsters pushed into begging by prison teams, simply for example.

Trafficking

In keeping with the Protocol to Forestall, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Individuals Particularly Ladies and Kids, trafficking in individuals means the recruitment, transportation, switch, harbouring or receipt of individuals, via the menace or use of drive or different types of coercion for the aim of exploitation.

Prostitution, servitude, removing of organs…

“Exploitation consists of prostitution of others or different types of sexual exploitation, pressured labour or providers, slavery or practices just like slavery, servitude or the removing of organs. The consent of the particular person trafficked for exploitation is irrelevant and if the trafficked particular person is a baby, it’s a crime even with out the usage of drive.”

And there may be an unquantified variety of victims of debt-slavery, which is extra extensively unfold in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In view of the above, there can be many extra slavery victims than the official estimates.

© Inter Press Service (2021) — All Rights ReservedUnique supply: Inter Press Service

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The Tight Connections Between Slavery and War

BY MONTI DATTA, ANGHARAD SMITH AND KEVIN BALE

AUGUST 24, 2022

Relief depicting slaves in chains in the Roman Empire, at Smyrna, 200 CE. Photograph Source: Jun – Flickr: Roman collared slaves – CC BY-SA 2.0

Some 40 million people are enslaved around the world today, though estimates vary. Modern slavery takes many different forms, including child soldiers, sex trafficking and forced labor, and no country is immune. From cases of family controlled sex trafficking in the United States to the enslavement of fishermen in Southeast Asia’s seafood industry and forced labor in the global electronics supply chain, enslavement knows no bounds.

As scholars of modern slavery, we seek to understand how and why human beings are still bought, owned and sold in the 21st century, in hopes of shaping policies to eradicate these crimes.

Many of the answers trace back to causes like poverty, corruption and inequality. But they also stem from something less discussed: war.

In 2016, the United Nations Security Council named modern slavery a serious concern in areas affected by armed conflict. But researchers still know little about the specifics of how slavery and war are intertwined.

We recently published research analyzing data on armed conflicts around the world to better understand this relationship.

What we found was staggering: The vast majority of armed conflict between 1989 and 2016 used some kind of slavery.

Coding conflict

We used data from an established database about war, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), to look at how much, and in what ways, armed conflict intersects with different forms of contemporary slavery.

Our project was inspired by two leading scholars of sexual violence, Dara Kay Cohen and Ragnhild Nordås. These political scientists used that database to produce their own pioneering database about how rape is used as a weapon of war.

The Uppsala database breaks each conflict into two sides. Side A represents a nation state, and Side B is typically one or more nonstate actors, such as rebel groups or insurgents.

Using that data, our research team examined instances of different forms of slavery, including sex trafficking and forced marriage, child soldiers, forced labor and general human trafficking. This analysis included information from 171 different armed conflicts. Because the use of slavery changes over time, we broke multiyear conflicts into separate “conflict-years” to study them one year at a time, for a total of 1,113 separate cases.

Coding each case to determine what forms of slavery were used, if any, was a challenge. We compared information from a variety of sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, scholarly accounts, journalists’ reporting and documents from governmental and intergovernmental organizations.

Alarming numbers

In our recently published analysis, we found that contemporary slavery is a regular feature of armed conflict. Among the 1,113 cases we analyzed, 87% contained child soldiers – meaning fighters age 15 and younger – 34% included sexual exploitation and forced marriage, about 24% included forced labor and almost 17% included human trafficking.

A global heat map of the frequency of these armed conflicts over time paints a sobering picture. Most conflicts involving enslavement take place in low-income countries, often referred to as the Global South.

About 12% of the conflicts involving some form of enslavement took place in India, where there are several conflicts between the government and nonstate actors. Teen militants are involved in conflicts such as the insurgency in Kashmir and the separatist movement in Assam. About 8% of cases took place in Myanmar, 5% in Ethiopia, 5% in the Philippines and about 3% in Afghanistan, Sudan, Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria and Iraq.

This evidence of enslavement predominately in the Global South may not be surprising, given how poverty and inequality can fuel instability and conflict. However, it helps us reflect upon how these countries’ historic, economic and geopolitical relationships to the Global North also fuel pressure and violence, a theme we hope slavery researchers can study in the future.

Strategic enslavement

Typically, when armed conflict involves slavery, it’s being used for tactical aims: building weapons, for example, or constructing roads and other infrastructure projects to fight a war. But sometimes, slavery is used strategically, as part of an overarching strategy. In the Holocaust, the Nazis used “strategic slavery” in what they called “extermination through labor.” Today, as in the past, strategic slavery is normally part of a larger strategy of genocide.

We found that “strategic enslavement” took place in about 17% of cases. In other words, enslavement was one of the primary objectives of about 17% of the conflicts we examined, and often served the goal of genocide. One example is the Islamic State’s enslavement of the Yazidi minority in the 2014 massacre in Sinjar, Iraq. In addition to killing Yazidis, the Islamic State sought to enslave and impregnate women for systematic ethnic cleansing, attempting to eliminate the ethnic identity of the Yazidi through forced rape.

The connections between slavery and conflict are vicious but still not well understood. Our next steps include coding historic cases of slavery and conflict going back to World War II, such as how Nazi Germany used forced labor and how Imperial Japan’s military used sexual enslavement. We have published a new data set, “Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict,” and hope other researchers will also use it to help better understand and prevent future violence.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Monti Datta is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond; Angharad Smith is Modern Slavery Programme Officer, United Nations University, and Kevin Bales is Prof. of Contemporary Slavery, Research Director – The Rights Lab, University of Nottingham

KKKONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERIKA

Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look to the 1850s.

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority — encouraged by lawmakers — used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority. It wasn’t long before the other side embraced force as a necessary response.


The destruction of the city of Lawrence, Kansas, and the massacre of its inhabitants by the Rebel guerrillas, August 21, 1863. Quantrill's Raid. | Wikimedia Commons


By JOSHUA ZEITZ
POLITICO USA
10/29/2022

Early Friday morning, an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, on the head with a hammer.

Details are still scant, but early indications suggest that the suspect, David Depape, is an avid purveyor of anti-Semitic, QAnon and MAGA conspiracy theories. Before the attack, the assailant reportedly shouted, “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?”

This is the United States of America in 2022. A country where political violence — including the threat of political violence — has become a feature, not a bug.

Armed men wearing tactical gear and face coverings outside ballot drop boxes in Arizona. Members of Congress threatening to bring guns onto the House floor — or actually trying to do it. Prominent Republican members of Congress, and their supporters on Fox News, stoking violence against their political opponents by accusing them of being pedophiles, terrorists and groomers — of conspiring with “globalists” (read: Jews) to “replace” white people with immigrants.

And of course, January 6, and subsequent efforts by Republicans and conservative media personalities to whitewash or even celebrate it.

Pundits like to take refuge in the saccharine refrain, “this is not who we are,” but historically, this is exactly who we are. Political violence is an endemic feature of American political history. It was foundational to the overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the maintenance of Jim Crow for decades after.

But today’s events bear uncanny resemblance to an earlier decade — the 1850s, when Southern Democrats, the conservatives of their day, unleashed a torrent of violence against their opponents. It was a decade when an angry and entrenched minority used force to thwart the will of a growing majority, often with the knowing support and even participation of prominent elected officials.

That’s the familiar part of the story. The less appreciated angle is how that growing majority eventually came to accept the proposition that force was a necessary part of politics.

The 1850s were a singularly violent era in American politics. Though politicians both North and South, Whig and Democrat, tried to contain sectional differences over slavery, Southern Democrats and their Northern sympathizers increasingly pushed the envelope, employing coercion and violence to protect and spread the institution of slavery.

It began with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which stripped accused runaways of their right to trial by jury and allowed individual cases to be bumped up from state courts to special federal courts. As an extra incentive to federal commissioners adjudicating such cases, it provided a $10 fee when a defendant was remanded to slavery but only $5 for a finding rendered against the slave owner. Most obnoxious to many Northerners, the law stipulated harsh fines and prison sentences for any citizen who refused to cooperate with or aid federal authorities in the capture of accused fugitives. Southern Democrats enforced the law with brute force, to the horror of Northerners, including many who did not identify as anti-slavery.

The next provocation was the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which effectively abrogated the Missouri Compromise and opened the western territories to slavery. It wasn’t enough that Democrats rammed through legislation allowing the citizens of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to institutionalize slavery if they voted to do so in what had long been considered free territory. They then employed coercion and violence to rig the territorial elections that followed.

Though anti-slavery residents far outnumbered pro-slavery residents in Kansas, heavily armed “Border ruffians,” led by Missouri’s Democratic senator David Atchison, stormed the Kansas territory by force, stuffing ballot boxes, assaulting and even killing Free State settlers, in a naked attempt to tilt the scales in favor of slavery. “You know how to protect your own interests,” Atchison cried. “Your rifles will free you from such neighbors. … You will go there, if necessary, with the bayonet and with blood.” He promised, “If we win, we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”

The violence made it into Congress. When backlash against the Kansas Nebraska Act upended the political balance, driving anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs into the new, anti-slavery Republican party, pro-slavery Democrats responded with rage. In 1856, Charles Sumner, a staunch anti-slavery Republican, delivered a speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas.” In response, a Democratic congressman from South Carolina beat him nearly to death on the Senate floor with a steel-tipped cane — not entirely dissimilar from the hammer-wielding conspiracy theorist who attempted to murder Paul Pelosi Friday.

“Bleeding Sumner,” as the outrage came to be known, was not a one-off. Pro-slavery congressmen began showing up armed on the House floor. They threatened their Northern colleagues with whippings and beatings. They talked openly of civil war and rebellion.

In some ways, none of this was new. Pro-slavery forces had long been violent and anti-democratic. When abolitionists in the 1830s began sending anti-slavery literature to Southern slaveholders, the pro-slavery forces tried to ban them from using the postal service. They destroyed the printing presses of abolitionist publishers and, in 1837, famously lynched Elijah P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist clergyman — after dumping his press in the river.

But the 1850s were different — not just in the intensification of pro-slavery violence, but in the reaction it elicited.

Southerners had long assumed that their Northern antagonists would buckle and fold. Anti-slavery men and women tended to draw their faith from evangelical Protestantism, which favored moral suasion over coercion. They were pacifists by nature. They seemed unlikely, when faced with threat and violence, to fight back.

That was probably true in 1850. But by mid-decade, something changed.

It probably began with the Fugitive Slave Act, which inspired resistance — increasingly, violent resistance — on the part of Northerners. When in 1852 President Franklin Pierce sent a battery of Army and Navy servicemen to seize Anthony Burns, a fugitive who had escaped to Boston, many former moderates found became angry, and radicalized. Amos Lawrence, a conservative businessman and politician, later attested, “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Armed anti-slavery mobs increasingly proved willing to engage in standoffs with federal officials. Outside Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Maryland slaveowner and his son, accompanied by armed marshals, showed up at a farmhouse and imperiously demanded the return of a Black man whom they claimed was their runaway slave. Local residents, Black and white alike, engaged in a gun fight with the “man stealers,” leaving one of them dead and two others wounded.

Something changed in the tenor of anti-slavery rhetoric as well. Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person and lay preacher, declared that he was a “peace man,” but white men who willingly acted as “bloodhounds,” hunting down human beings to return them to slavery, had “no right to live.” “I do believe that two or three dead slaveholders will make this law a dead letter.” In a speech entitled “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” Douglass conceded that perhaps it was not strategically smart, given the disbalance of power, but he affirmed that it “is in all cases, a crime to deprive a human being of life” and not a sin to kill those who would. “For a white man to defend his friend unto blood is praiseworthy,” Douglass wrote in 1854, “but for a Black man to do the same thing is crime. It was glorious for Patrick Henry to say, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ It was glorious for Americans to drench the soil, and crimson the sea with blood, to escape the payment of three-penny tax upon tea; but it is a crime to shoot down a monster in defense of the liberty of a Black man and to save him from bondage.”

His was a minority opinion in the mid-1850s, but it was catching steam.

A new generation of leaders welcomed an eye-for-an-eye approach to keeping the western territories free. Subsidized by a group of Massachusetts businessmen and religious abolitionists, the New England Emigrant Aid Company offered material assistance to Northern homesteaders willing to relocate to Kansas to populate the state with an anti-slavery majority. It also furnished them with rifles (known popularly as “Beecher’s Bibles,” an homage to Henry Ward Beecher, the prominent anti-slavery clergyman) and ammunition to help settlers stave off attacks by border ruffians who pillaged Free State property and rigged territorial elections. By 1857 the normalization of political violence advanced to far that when a prominent abolitionist urged the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to furnish material support for armed insurrections by enslaved people, even Wendell Phillips, a leading abolitionist and heretofore a pacifist, rose to agree. “I want to accustom Massachusetts to the idea of insurrection,” he said, “to the idea that every slave has the right to seize his freedom on the spot.”

It was this embrace of retributive justice and support for violent liberation that led figures like Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a Unitarian minister), Gerrit Smith (a wealthy reformer and founder of a nonsectarian church in upstate New York), Theodore Parker (also a Unitarian clergyman), and Frederick Douglass to furnish John Brown with funds for his failed attempt to organize an uprising of enslaved people. Brown, a religious zealot who came to believe that he was God’s instrument in the service of emancipation, was widely scorned as a fanatic when in 1859 he was hanged for murder, incitement of an enslaved people’s rebellion, and “treason” against the state of Virginia. Within a few short years, many Union soldiers would come to memorialize him in song as they marched through the South.

Members of Congress, too, tired of being under the Southern Democrats’ boot. When Galusha Grow, a Republican from Pennsylvania, wandered over to the Democratic side of the House floor in 1858, Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina snarled, “Go back to your side of the House, you Black Republican puppy.” Grow, a future House speaker, clocked Keitt with a right hook and sent him spinning.

In 1860 Rep. Owen Lovejoy, a Republican from Illinois and brother of the slain editor, rose to deliver a blistering anti-slavery harangue. In response, Rep. Roger Pryor of Virginia physically assaulted him, prompting Rep. John Potter of Wisconsin to intercede. Potter so thoroughly walloped Pryor that the Virginian felt compelled to challenge him to a duel — a common ploy, as Northerners tended to view dueling as barbaric, and normally declined. Potter astonished his Southern colleague by accepting the challenge and stipulating (as was the right of the challenged party) bowie knives as his weapon of choice. Pryor, recognizing that he’d likely be hacked to death, backed out, claiming that knives were beneath the dignity of a gentleman’s duel. (Potter might well have taken his cue from Benjamin Wade, a radical Republican senator from Ohio who, when challenged to a duel by a Southern colleague, stipulated squirrel riffles at 20 paces.)

Within a year, full-blown war had broken out.

Today, political violence is on the rise. It doesn’t always emanate from the right. Several years ago, a left-wing radical attempted to gun down several Republican congressmen and nearly succeeded in killing GOP Whip Steve Scalise. But in the main, the coercion and bellicosity reside on the right. We see it in the rise of far-right, white power militias like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who in some cases enjoy semiformal relationships with local Republican Party organizations and leaders. We see it in MAGA rallies, where former President Donald Trump regularly incites violence against journalists and political opponents, oftentimes with GOP officeholders and candidates standing silently beside him. We see it in the growing number of political ads in which Republican candidates brandish assault weapons and even shoot things up.

On some level, none of this is new. The United States has seen more than its share of political violence — from Redemption (the process by which white Southerners violently ended Reconstruction in the South) and Jim Crow, to presidential assassinations in 1865, 1881, 1901 and 1963. As recently as the early 1970s, bombings and sabotage were a common tool of far-left domestic terrorists. All told, between January 1969 and April 1970 there were over 5,000 terrorist bombings in the United States and 37,000 bomb threats, many emanating from the radical left, not including the attempted bombings of over two dozen high schools.

But here is the difference this time: In 1970, liberal members of the Senate didn’t march alongside members of the Weather Underground, pump their fists in the air and egg them on. They didn’t align themselves with violent extremists — court their votes, grant interviews to their underground newspapers, appear at their conferences. That’s the stuff of the 1850s, when mainstream Democrats turned away from democracy and openly embraced violence, vigilantism and treason to protect a world they saw at risk of disappearing.

The decision of so many American conservatives to embrace political violence, or the language and symbolism of political violence, is a troubling reality. We can’t have a functioning democracy if one side refuses to accept its norms and rules.

But history suggests we might have more to worry about.

Democratic violence in the 1850s ultimately led a majority of Republicans, who represented the political majority, to draw a line in the sand and enforce it by violence when necessary. If history is a guidepost, we are on the precipice of dangerous future in which politics devolves into a contest of force rather than ideas. That’s a future everyone should want to avoid.