Today we attended a very powerful guest speaker Matt Friedman who has worked for the UN and is now part of an organisation called the Mekong Club. These people are deceived and tricked into things that are a complete violation of basic human rights, often binding them through unreasonable contracts and threats. Something that he said that was really interesting was that it is not human trafficking, as this refers to the movement of people but not what happens to them once they reach a destination. Instead, it is called modern slavery. I knew that this violation of article 4 was very serious, but I didn’t know how bad it actually was and even in very developed countries. It was shocking to see how many slaves there are estimated in the world and that there are probably a lot more than we don’t know about, but what was even more shocking is the number of slaves that were helped, 0.2% ONLY. I think that as a human race this is simply not good enough. I think that a big part of this is awareness of the issue. Something that will stay with me is the story of one of the victims that were interviewed, she said that she wasn’t mad at the traffickers but at the ‘good’ people who didn’t rescue her.
This issue is complex as 60% of the 76% of slaves that are not in forced prostitution (24% are in forced prostitution) work in the supply chains making consumer products. A question I have now is why are we not doing more? According to his presentation, 150 billion USD is generated due to modern day slavery, however, it would take less money to stop this.
I liked how you gave all the stats that were shown in the presentation and wrote about them. You gave good opinions that were about the issue and stayed in a central point, not straying too far from the topic. The bolded words didn’t really help but it was a nice touch that makes the article look better.