Slavery in disguise: Poverty as the new shackles

Slavery, there is, or should I say there are, reasons why it was abolished in the first place. It literally reduces humans to animals amongst other reasons, it places humans especially people that literally can't speak for themselves in positions where ideally no human should ever be, exploited at but guess what? The bourgeoisies will stop at nothing to keep the practice alive, sometimes hiding under the umbrella of cultures or traditions, when in reality, the endpoint has always been exploitation. What a world!

Slavery

On papers, Nations have outlawed the buying and selling of human beings and the use of human beings in anyway that strips them of their dignity and freedom , but guess what? Slavery is still going on in various formats.

Sometimes around October last year, one of my female friends shared with me a funny experience she had with an online hooker... Looking back at that story, it looks funny but it really wasn't funny at all because what if my friend was not knowledgeable enough? What if she was in dire need of eradicating poverty from her home? She would just had become another form of slavery in 21st century!!! That's crazy.

Someone she didn't know messaged her via Facebook, she responded, and the person asked if she wanted to travel outside the country that he had job offers coming from different companies and all she had to do was to get to Lagos and that's all.. all her travelling expenses will be taken care of .
He further added, "won't you love to be the source of financial freedom in your home?"

And he sent the transportation fare that will get my friend to Lagos from Enugu immediately just to convince her she was needed and will be taken care of.
I think that's a tempting offer for anyone not just her.

But guess what? Behind the promises lay the actual job..
It was just a modern way of human trafficking for sexual exploitation.

My friend told me that what happens is that they take you to some countries I would rather not mention and then hand you over to some madam that you will be working under and the activities begin... Now the issues is that you're left with no option because you can't even go back to your country, not because you're physically restrained, but because without money, how do you even return home?

Now I ask myself, how many young women have fallen victim of this luring with false promises of jobs abroad or better lives, only to be trapped in degrading conditions?

Should we also talk about child labour? This is recently gaining waves again because lots of companies and factory owners don't want to use the required expertise for their works and will rather find untrained personnel and children from poor and wretched homes, teach them the basics within two to three weeks and employ them to be paying them peanuts whereas exposing them unimaginable dangers.

In as much as I'll easily say we should eradicate every form of slavery, deep down, I certainly know it's very difficult and this is because slavery in every form is deeply rooted in POVERTY. So the real question is , Can we eradicate poverty?
Because if we can't eradicate that, people will always be vulnerable to exploitation.

Also, to make significant progress in ending slavery, it's high time we take the legislation seriously and empower impartial unions who will look for every loopholes and close them, form international networks who will operate across borders and have global responses to stop the illegal trafficking.

In summary, while completely eradicating human slavery may be impossible especially due to poverty as the root cause ,there are still things we can do to limit it and to achieve them, all hands must be on deck, globally and internationally.
The fight is a battle for all

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Thanks for reading and have a nice day ahead 👍