Alas, Slavery Lives

ALMOST 128 YEARS AFTER ABOLITION, Americans are still struggling with the costly political and social legacy of slavery. In huge swaths of Africa, Asia and Latin America, however, governments haven't even got that far. In a shocking study to be released March 23, the Geneva-based International Labor Organization reports that tens of millions of people around the globe, including children as young as six, are working in bondage -- in dangerous and degrading conditions that often involve 18-hour workdays, beatings and sexual abuse. Many are the victims of opportunistic slave raiders, sometimes called "child catchers" and "cats," who roam impoverished or war-ravaged regions kidnapping, buying or luring helpless prospects into servitude.

In Sudan, says the ILO, peasants trapped by civil war are selling their young sons to traveling merchants for as little as $70; in Haiti more than 100,000 children, sold or given away by poor families, toil as domestic servants, usually eating and sleeping apart from the privileged people they serve; and in Pakistan as many as 20 million people, 7.5 million of them children, are working as bonded laborers in factories, on farms and on construction projects, unable to pay off employer advances. The ILO warns that slavery-like practices also exist in countries as varied as Mauritania, India, Thailand, Peru, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.