Years ago, when I told a friend that I was researching American slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to write my historical novel, "The Wedding Gift," set in 19th century Alabama before the Civil War, she asked: "Why didn't slaves just run away?" I said that some did and of those, some succeeded, but that most did not flee because they would never again see their loved ones. The other chief reason for not escaping was the fear that, if caught, they would be beaten, maimed, raped, or sold, perhaps to the Western Territories or the Caribbean. As Belle, a character in "The Wedding Gift," tells her six-year old sister who wants her family to run away from the plantation: "Sarah, you need to know what happen to people who try to run. They hunt and bring them back. Then they beat them. Them that run away more than one time, they get a foot or toes cut off. The beatings always happen in front of all the slaves, even children like us."
In her book, "Slave Patrols, Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas," Sally E. Hadden argues that antebellum slave owners and their overseers had powerful allies in the form of militias and patrols for watching slaves, preventing them from escaping, and catching them when they fled. Slaves in American slave societies had curfew times, and bells rang in town warning them when it was time to return to their masters. Any slave caught in town after a certain hour in the evening without a pass specifically authorizing the slave to be there at that time could be whipped at a designated post in town by the patroller or militiaman, who would then return the slave to the master.
Today, there are at least 27 million slaves worldwide, more slaves than at any other time in history, more than during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, when 11 million Africans were kidnapped and taken to the New World. How do today's slave owners keep people enslaved? They use the same tools as their predecessors in antebellum America: violence and the threat of violence.
The United Nation's International Labor Organization and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which strive to free slaves and provide them with medical care and other services, have documented numerous cases where human traffickers and slave owners beat, maim, rape, and even kill slaves who try to escape. The International Justice Mission (IJM), an NGO that works with local officials in countries around the globe to free slaves, had this to say about a family in Chenai, India:
When IJM and local officials arrived at a rock quarry on the outskirts of a village early on an October morning, the laborers were already hard at work. The men's bare backs shone against the grueling sun and the women in threadbare saris bent over piles of rocks. A verdant field of rice paddies contrasted with the brown-clay sugarcane field in front of the rock quarry - a deep well where rocks were dredged up, piled and crushed into gravel.
This day would mark the beginning of new lives for these laborers, but it was not the beginning of their story. Like so many modern-day slaves, the forced laborers at the quarry first began working at the facility in exchange for a miniscule, one-time loan -- a loan the quarry owner never expected to be repaid, but rather, had designed specifically to entrap laborers in her facility.
TOP: Forced laborers leave the quarry for the last time, carrying their possessions with them.
BOTTOM: The freed slaves dismantle a flimsy lean-to they built for shelter.
Fifteen years ago, Gopinath borrowed $10 from the quarry's owner. He and his wife worked tirelessly, crushing boulders into bits of rock, but over the course of 15 years, rather than decreasing, their "debt" ballooned from $10 to $325.
The quarry owner began demanding that the families stay at her facility rather than in their nearby village so that they could begin their work earlier in the morning. The women and children -- including a two-month old infant -- slept under saris and tarps tied to three sticks, stuck into piles of sand or mud among the rocks they crushed by day. The owner refused to allow them to pursue work elsewhere, even if they told her it was to help pay back the advance she claimed they owed her.
Not only were they prohibited from working elsewhere, they were not free to go out for any reason, for any amount of time. When one of the laborers snuck out of the facility to see his grieving grandfather in the wake of his grandmother's death, the owner arrived at his village the very same day, found him at his grandfather's home and beat him. When neighbors asked why this woman was beating him, she answered: 'He is my laborer. I can do anything to him; I have the right to do anything to him. How can you ask me?' She immediately forced the man back to the quarry.
But everything changed for the laborers held in the quarry on October 6, 2009. After uncovering the slavery at the quarry through an investigation, IJM and local officials rescued the three families there. Underneath the late morning sun, the government officials acted quickly, gathering the workers together and asking them preliminary questions to determine if they were living as forced laborers. Gopinath's small sons, naked and with matted hair, clung to their mother with wide eyes.