Slavery today: where it still exists, and its history

What we are talking about

Slavery did not disappear with the nineteenth-century abolitions; it changed form. International law today recognises several: slavery in the strict sense (exercising over a person the attributes of ownership), servitude, forced labour, debt bondage, servile marriage — a woman "given" without the right to refuse, inherited on her husband's death, or sold — and human trafficking, the trade that feeds everything else. The International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the IOM estimated in 2022 that 49.6 million people were in modern slavery on any given day of 2021: 27.6 million in forced labour (including 6.3 million in forced commercial sexual exploitation, four fifths of them women and girls) and 22 million in a forced marriage. A quarter of the victims are children. That is ten million more than in 2016.

This page sits in the Consent section because that is what it is about: slavery is the total negation of consent — over the body, work, marriage, movement. It describes facts without detailing the violence; the pages on forced marriage and on impunity for rape complete it.

The Yazidis and ISIS: organised sexual slavery

On 3 August 2014 the Islamic State attacked Sinjar, in northern Iraq, home of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority the group regarded as "devil-worshippers". Men and pubescent boys were executed by the thousand; women and children — around 6,400 people according to the organisation Yazda — were taken away, sorted by age and "value", registered, then sold as slaves (sabaya) to fighters in Mosul, Tal Afar and Raqqa, at markets or through price lists circulated on messaging apps; girls of nine appeared on them. ISIS made no secret of it: its magazine Dabiq and a pamphlet from its "fatwa department" (October 2014) justified the enslavement of "infidels" and set out rules for sale and "ownership". The women were resold several times, raped, forcibly converted, separated from their children; those who fled were punished.

Ten years on, some 3,500 people have been freed or ransomed; more than 2,600 remain missing, doubtless including women still held in Syria, Turkey or the camps. The United Nations (Commission of Inquiry on Syria, 2016) called the facts genocide, and a UN investigative team (UNITAD) gathered the evidence. Justice has begun to be done, mostly in Europe: in November 2021 the Frankfurt court handed down the world's first genocide conviction of an ISIS member, Taha al-Jumailly, jailed for life for letting a five-year-old Yazidi girl he had bought with her mother die of thirst; his wife, Jennifer W., was convicted in Munich; other trials took place in the Netherlands, Sweden and France. Iraq adopted a Yazidi Survivors Law in 2021 (compensation, land, care). Nadia Murad, abducted at 21 and escaped after three months, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 with Denis Mukwege; her organisation, Nadia's Initiative, together with Yazda, the Free Yezidi Foundation and Air Bridge Iraq, continues to search for the missing and care for survivors, many of whom were taken in by Germany (1,100 women in Baden-Württemberg from 2015), France, Canada and Australia.

Boko Haram and the other captivities

In Nigeria, Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok on 14 April 2014, forcibly married to fighters, converted, used as domestic servants and as mothers; about a hundred never came back, and thousands of other women and girls suffered the same fate in the north-east of the country and neighbouring Cameroon with far less attention. Al-Shabaab in Somalia, armed groups in Sudan (in Darfur, the abductions and sexual slavery of the 2000s resumed with the 2023 war; the Rapid Support Forces have been accused of running "markets" of women), the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and Congo, the Sahel groups: wherever the state collapses, the abduction of women as booty reappears.

Hereditary slavery: Mauritania, Niger, Mali

Mauritania was the last country in the world to abolish slavery, in 1981 — with no penalty attached. It took until 2007 to make it a crime and 2015 to declare it a crime against humanity and create special courts. Yet part of the Haratin, descendants of black slaves of Arab-Berber masters, remain in total dependence: unpaid herders and domestic servants, women available to the master, children who "belong" to the family, without papers. The Global Slavery Index estimates 149,000 people in modern slavery in the country (32 per 1,000 inhabitants, one of the highest rates in the world); activists such as Biram Dah Abeid (IRA-Mauritania) and the association SOS Esclaves have been jailed repeatedly, and convictions of masters can be counted on one hand.

In Niger, the practice of wahaya — the "fifth wife", a girl of slave descent sold as a concubine and servant to a man who already has his four legal wives — was condemned in 2008 by the ECOWAS Court of Justice in the case of Hadijatou Mani, sold at twelve: the state was held responsible for failing to protect her. In Mali, the descendants of slaves (Bellah, Rimaibe) still suffer exclusion and, in the Kayes region, deadly violence (2018–21) when they refuse their status; the country still has no law criminalising slavery by descent. Chad, Sudan and Senegal know milder forms of the same hierarchy.

Libya, the Gulf, North Korea, Asia: the other faces

• Libya. In November 2017 CNN broadcast footage of an auction of sub-Saharan migrants near Tripoli, "400 dinars" for a man. Migrants stranded on the road to Europe are locked in official centres or militia warehouses, tortured for ransom, sold for forced labour; women are systematically sexually exploited. The UN speaks of crimes against humanity; the European Union continues to fund the coastguards who bring people back to those centres.
• The Gulf states. The kafala system ties the foreign worker to an employer who holds her passport and residence right; for the millions of domestic workers from the Philippines, Ethiopia, Kenya or Bangladesh this often means confinement, unpaid wages, violence. Qatar reformed in 2020 under World Cup pressure; Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Lebanon (outside the Gulf, same system) far less.
• North Korea. The highest rate in the world: one inhabitant in ten (2.7 million) in state forced labour — camps, mobilisations, workers sent abroad whose wages are confiscated; women who flee to China are sold as wives or exploited in online "chat" rooms.
• China. The forced labour of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang minorities (camps, transfers to factories) was documented by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2022; the United States has banned imports linked to the region since 2021.
• South Asia. Debt bondage — an advance of a few hundred dollars that is never repaid — chains millions of families to brick kilns, rice fields and workshops in India, Pakistan and Nepal, despite laws banning it since the 1970s; India alone counts 11 million people in modern slavery according to the 2023 Global Slavery Index.
• Servile marriage. The 22 million forced marriages include situations where the woman is bought (the wahaya, brides sold in China for lack of women, "marriages" of little girls against a debt in the Sahel and Afghanistan): the 1956 Supplementary Convention names them expressly among the practices similar to slavery.

And at home: trafficking

Human trafficking is the form of slavery present in Western countries. The UK's National Referral Mechanism received a record 19,000 potential victims in 2024, more than a quarter of them British nationals — often children exploited by drug gangs ("county lines") — alongside Albanians, Vietnamese and Eritreans; forced labour (car washes, farms, nail bars), sexual exploitation and criminal exploitation are the main forms. Eurostat records around 10,000 registered victims a year in the EU, far below reality; the United States identifies more than 10,000 through the Polaris hotline alone. Nigerian networks (with the juju oath that binds young women through fear), Romanian, Chinese and Latin American ones dominate sexual exploitation. The UK's Modern Slavery Act (2015) carries life imprisonment; the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000) and its T visa protect victims who cooperate; Canada's Criminal Code s. 279.01 and Australia's Modern Slavery Act (2018) complete the picture. The page Prostitution describes how to recognise a victim and whom to alert.

A little history: two thousand years of slavery, two centuries of abolition

Slavery has existed in almost every society. In Athens one inhabitant in three was a slave; Rome counted them in millions, taken in war, bought or born of slave mothers — and the Latin servus gave "serf", the intermediate status of the Christian Middle Ages, while "slave" comes from Slav, the East European captives sold in the ninth century. The Muslim world organised for thirteen centuries the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades — 12 to 17 million people deported from Africa to the Maghreb, the Middle East and India by most estimates — with a domestic, military and sexual slavery (the harem) that died out only in the twentieth century: Saudi Arabia in 1962, Oman in 1970.

The Atlantic trade is the best documented: between 1500 and 1866, 12.5 million Africans were embarked for the Americas and 10.7 million arrived alive (Slave Voyages database), for the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of Brazil (40%), the Caribbean and the British colonies. The abolitions followed one another over a century: Denmark banned the trade in 1792; Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833 (compensating the owners, not the slaves, with a loan repaid until 2015); France abolished in 1794 under pressure from the Saint-Domingue revolt (Haiti, 1804), restored it in 1802 and abolished it for good in 1848; the United States ended slavery after the Civil War with the Thirteenth Amendment, 1865; Cuba in 1886; Brazil, last in the Americas, in 1888. The 1926 Slavery Convention committed states to suppress slavery "in all its forms", the 1948 Universal Declaration prohibits it (article 4), the 1956 Supplementary Convention added debt bondage and servile marriage. Mauritania closed the list in 1981.

Since then the law has changed register: slavery and trafficking are crimes against humanity (Rome Statute, 1998, article 7), the Palermo Protocol (2000) defines trafficking for 180 states, and 2 December is the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. The paradox of our time fits in one sentence: never has slavery been illegal everywhere — and never have so many people been its victims in absolute numbers.

Recognise, help, act

• Signs of an exploited person: she does not hold her own papers, cannot speak alone, works without visible hours or wages, lives at her workplace, bears marks of violence, has a "debt" to repay, is watched by a third party who speaks for her.
• Do not intervene yourself; note places, dates, number plates; call the helpline or the police, the labour inspectorate for labour exploitation, the platform for online adverts.
• Organisations: Anti-Slavery International (London, the oldest human-rights organisation, 1839), Unseen, Hope for Justice, the Salvation Army and Kalayaan (UK); Polaris, Free the Slaves, International Justice Mission (US); Walk Free (Australia); Yazda and Nadia's Initiative (Yazidis); SOS Esclaves (Mauritania), Timidria (Niger).