Men, women and children, entire families in fact, carry burdensome bricks, often as many as 18 at a time, in 130 degree heat.
A worker blends in with the bricks at a Nepalese kiln. Workers mechanically stack 18 bricks at a time, each weighing four pounds, and carry them to nearby trucks for 18 hours a day without any payment or compensation.
These gold miners have just come out of the shaft, their pants soaked from their own sweat. Most had spent all their money coming from the north hoping to strike it rich in legal mines. But legal operations require certifications. When they can't get a job, the men take high-interest loans or join groups of slaves in mines abandoned by legitimate operations.
Two hundred feet underground, a man labors in an illegal gold mine. He and others enslaved like him are underground for as long as 72 hours at a time.
Many of those enslaved had children with them while panning for gold, wading in waters poisoned by mercury that is used in the extraction process.
For this photo, I was escorted by women who had previously been enslaved themselves. They brought me down a narrow set of stairs leading to a green fluorescent-lit basement. This wasn't a brothel as such; it was a "cabin restaurants," as they are known in the trade -- venues for forced prostitution. Each has a small private room where slaves, some as young as seven, entertain and serve the clients, encouraging them to buy alcohol and food. These cubicles are small, dark, and dingy, each identified with a number painted on the wall, and partitioned by plywood and a curtain. The workers here often endure sexual abuse at the hands of the customers. Standing in the near darkness, I realized there was only one way out -- the stairs where I came in: no back doors, no windows large enough to climb through, no escape at all.
Child workers usually work from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. on cold, windy nights to reel in nets weighing as much as 1,000 pounds when they are full of fish. Skeletal tree limbs submerged in Lake Volta frequently entangle the fishing nets, and and slave masters will throw weary, frightened children into the water to free the trapped lines, sometimes drowning them. I didn't meet one child who didn't know another who had drowned.
Fhanaian NGOs estimate that between 4,000 and 10,000 trafficked children are enslaved on Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world. At first glance this image appears to be a family fishing in the lake, two older brothers and some kids. I was alarmed to learn that they were actually enslaved, working in plain sight. These children have been lost to their parents and are forced to work endless hours in boats on the lake, though they're unable to swim.
There are triumphs, too. Meet Kofi, a young boy who was rescued from slavery in a fishing village. I met Khofi at a shelter where Free the Slaves rehabilitate victims of slavery. He was bathing at the well, pouring big buckets of water over his head. Thanks to the efforts of organizations like Free the Slaves, today Kofi has been reunited with his parents, who were provided tools to make a living and to keep their children safe from human traffickers.
In the Himalayas I found children hauling stone for miles down steep mountain terrain to trucks waiting at the road below. These huge sheets of slate were heavier than the children themselves. The kids hoisted them with their heads using handmade harnesses made from sticks, rope, and torn cloth.
Uttar Pradesh, India: Slaveholders burned down these people's villages after they declared their freedom. Many of the neighbors wanted to give up, they were so frightened -- but the woman in the center encouraged them to persevere. Abolitionists helped them get a quarry lease of their own. Now they do the same backbreaking work, but they at least get paid for it, and they do it in freedom.
In India I visited a village where whole families were enslaved in the silk industry. This is a family portrait. The father (hands in black) and his sons (hands in red and blue) are held captive in a "silk dyeing house." The dye they work with is toxic. It's common for entire families to be enslaved for generations. My translator told me their story. "We have no freedom," they said. "But we hope, some day, we will be able to leave this house and make dyes in a place where we actually get paid for it."
There are 27 million human slaves in the world today, more than double the slaves in the whole transAtlantic slave trade. Lisa Kristine here documents slavery from Nepal to Ghana, from the Himalayas to India. As she says, there are dark corners in this world, and she exposes them through her images.
Read MoreIn Ghana, children are often enslaved, maltreated and many mothers struggle to see their children as more than a financial burden. While there are no statistics on the actual number of children trafficked, estimates are in the thousands. What is known is that 25% of Ghanaian children ages 5-14 years are involved in child labor. Child labor and human trafficking are both against the law in Ghana, however, laws are not enforced.
City of Refuge fights against child slavery by educating small villages about the harms of keeping children out of school and depriving them of a childhood. The organization is founded on the belief that if they can empower single mothers educationally and economically then they will no longer be vulnerable to selling their children as slaves.
Can you tell me a bit about City of Refuge and the work they do?
City of Refuge workers enter villages and open discussions with the chiefs in a respectful manner and work to free children who are in dangerous and/or miserable conditions and separated from their families. On a daily basis, City of Refuge provides home, happiness, and sanctuary to many rescued children. Furthermore, City of Refuge runs the only public school in the city, Doryumu. The organization works at the root of the problem, beginning with single mothers. Many children end up in slavery because mothers simply have absolutely no means of supporting themselves, much less their young children. Selling them, as hard as it may be to believe, truly seems like the only option for many women. Thus, City of Refuge works with single mothers to find alternative solutions to make ends meet, and have started two local businesses to be run by single mothers to increase opportunities for mothers and in turn, reduce the number of children sold into horrific situations.
How were you involved with the organization?
I worked in the small school where the children living with the City of Refuge family were educated and spent my evenings at the home playing with children and helping them with their homework. I also spent time shadowing the founders and through this I learned much about the process.
What do you know about child slavery in Ghana?
Children are targeted as slaves for fishermen for several reasons. First, children are easy to acquire as so many parents are impoverished and feel financially helpless. Second, children’s small hands are ideal for making and untangling fishing nets. When the nets get trapped in trees in the lake, children are sent in the water to untangle them. Unfortunately, this means many of the child slaves are incredibly susceptible to water-borne disease and illness and sadly, some do not know how to swim and may drown in the water. Children who are enslaved receive no form of education or care and spend up to eighteen hours a day working on the lake. They are often fed no more than one meal a day, which frequently consists of just gari, a food made from cassava, soaked in the lake water.
Any advice for travelers going to Ghana?
This is probably true for every country, but just approach everything with an open mind, try new things, immerse yourself in the culture as much as possible.
How can readers help the victims of Child Slavery in Ghana?
Check out City of Refuge for more information.
Other organizations doing good work include Youth Generation Against Poverty (YGAP), an organization that inspires volunteers through creative fundraising opportunities. They have created several projects partnered with City of Refuge.
Elizabeth Tulsky
Elizabeth studied social work at NYU and has experience working with trauma, grief, family issues, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and general life transitions. She hopes to use her work to create culturally responsive, affirming and inclusive healing spaces while promoting the use of person-centered, strengths-based, trauma-informed, anti-racist and social-justice frameworks.
Indian workers. Photo by Sujeeth Potla on Unsplash
The silk industry in India is not to be underestimated; it employs hundreds of thousands of workers and is worth over $3.6 billion annually. However, as with many booming industries, a dark side lingers in the background. In southwest India lies Karnataka state, a hub for many of the nation’s age-old industries including silk production. Although justly paid workers exist, a sizable portion remain stuck in a taxing system known as “bonded labor.”
Although not explicitly mentioned in the phrase, “bonded labor” is actually a form of modern-day slavery. Bonded labor is when someone is forced to work off an imposed debt, where their captivity is known as “debt bondage.” In this system, the victims are often promised employment or an opportunity they cannot afford to refuse, and are then forcefully kept as workers. Their pay is usually minuscule compared to the debt amassed, and as a result, the employers are able to continually pile on debt over time. The dynamic transitions from employer-employee to that of a master and a slave.
Additionally, the work is often arduous and the masters are even more unrelentingly brutal; abuse is commonplace in the system. As a result, many families attempt to escape, only to find that the support system for a successful departure is at best a bare-bones operation if not entirely absent. Many authorities who are meant to help these victims escape partner instead with the perpetrators; corruption bleeds away most hope of an escape.
However, one way out does exist. Victims are able to apply for a certificate of release, which would trigger an investigation to either approve or deny the request. Frequently these attempts fall through, often due to failure on the part of the authorities.
Although the use of bonded labor remains widespread, it is most extensively used in South and Southeast Asia. Oftentimes debt laborers work off family debts, held hostage due to a loan taken by their parents or grandparents.
Bonded labor has been illegal in India since the Bonded Labor System Act of 1976, but this law failed to provide substantial change. It is estimated that over 8 million bonded laborers still exist in India, with experts fearing this statistic to be a gross underestimation. Rarely are those found guilty of violating the Bonded Labor System Act forced to serve out their punishment.
Many human rights groups have pooled their efforts to research the extent of the system’s damage. What was found revealed grotesque physical, emotional and verbal abuse of children forced into bonded labor in the silk industry. Children of all ages, even as little as 5, were found to work 12-hour days nearly every day of the week; they do not attend school. Their work included placing their hands in boiling water and breathing in lung-blackening fumes; the children are not provided health care either, and often succumb to injuries.
Human rights groups have stated that the Indian government is fully aware of this ongoing crime, yet fails to act on the victims’ behalf. It seems that corruption, combined with the consequences of the restrictive caste system, has left little hope for the estimated 350,000 children held in the silk industry’s bonded labor system.
In the early 1990s, human rights groups sparked global outrage about the situation of India’s children, causing the government to act. The Indian Supreme Court passed additional laws in 1996 to protect children in harmful workspaces, yet the government has failed to bring about any meaningful change. India’s National Human Rights Commission was brought in to spearhead proceedings, but very few perpetrators ever faced justice.
The impact of the system is devastating as it enslaves whole families and sometimes even future generations. Until justice is truly served, victims of bonded labor will continue to be denied freedom.
To learn how Free the Slaves, an organization dedicated to sustainable freedom, helps victims, click here.
To read about Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest anti-slavery organization, click here.
Ella Nguyen
Ella is an undergraduate student at Vassar College pursuing a degree in Hispanic Studies. She wants to assist in the field of immigration law and hopes to utilize Spanish in her future projects. In her free time she enjoys cooking, writing poetry, and learning about cosmetics.
Children in a Nepalese village which has committed to ending child labor, a prominent form of modern slavery. The Advocacy Project. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
More than 40 million people are victims of modern slavery today, roughly 1 in every 200 hundred people alive today. From sex trafficking to forced labor slavery abounds. Some classify the forced labor in the US for-profit prison system as slavery.
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