First & Last Name
Professor Kelly Martin
English 2327
8 August 2007  this essay was written when page-length requirements were shorter
Revealing the Faces and Abuses in Slavery

A preconceived notion about slavery in America today, is the idea that slavery does not exist with the addition of the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution in 1865 or the abolition of slavery. However, this supposition is not quite accurate. Slavery today is alive and thriving. Today, slavery is not quite the same slavery that African-American’s like Frederick Douglass endured. The basic concepts of slavery in Frederick Douglass’s time as a slave still exist; however, today it is more complex involving a variety of faces and abuses on a global scale. Slavery today is most likely to be called human trafficking. “Trafficking in persons is a modern-day form of slavery, a new type of global slave trade” (United…Trafficking 3). According to Free the Slaves organization, “there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world today. This is more than twice the number of people taken from Africa during the entire Trans-Atlantic slave trade” (“Slavery” 1).
The new faces of slavery involve but are not limited to child forced labor, child soldiers, child commercial sex and child sex tourism. In addition to the new faces of slavery are, “…commercial sex acts…involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery” and is now part of the gamut of slavery today. (United…Distinctions, par. 9). The kinds of slavery that Douglass heard about and/or experienced seemed to be the only kind of slavery known to the people of America at that time. In Douglass’s time, places of slavery were in working the fields, masters having sex with slaves and domestic chores. A few, but not all, of the types of slavery can be found in today’s slavery, however, most are not found in the old slavery as Douglass knew them. Some of the modern-day places of slavery are in; “Sweatshops, domestic work, restaurant work, agricultural labor, prostitution and sex entertainment, they may be found anywhere in the U.S. doing almost anything profitable to their handlers” (United…Distinctions, par. 14). Slavery today “…can affect people of any age, sex, or race on every continent and in most countries” (Herzfeld 1).
When the seminal autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was printed, distributed, and read around the world, many lives were touched with guilt and shame of this inhumane cruelty to African-Americans who were bought as personal servants and laborers in plantations. This inhumane cruelty can be seen in WM. Lloyd Garrison’s preface of the Narrative describing the evil in slavery in this following passage, “O, how accursed is that system, which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine image, reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with four-footed beasts and exalts the dealer in human flesh above all that is called God!” (Douglass 2036). Even though America has come away from slavery as Douglass and Garrison knew it, slavery still persists and continues.  It is illegal anywhere yet the practice of slavery is everywhere; and the injustices committed to slaves are excruciating and needing attention.
 Slavery today is illegal internationally; however, slavery in Douglass’s time was legal and widely excepted in America. Even though slavery is illegal today, often times it is not enforced to eradicate its escalating problems. In the next two passages from the “Narrative,” Douglass accounts for a time when an overseer murdered a slave in America and illustrates the point that slavery was an acceptable practice in America; “His horrid crime was not even submitted to judicial investigation,…slaves…of course could neither institute a suite, nor testify against him…” and in this passage, “…killing a slave, or any colored person…is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community” (Douglass 2050). Douglass gives several other examples in this chapter of murders that occurred but the murderess was not brought to their own punishment.  
In chattel slavery of Douglass’s time, it was very expensive to purchase a slave and yielded only few profits for their slave-holders. These slaves were considered investments and held for generations due to a shortage of supply of potential slaves and the enormous costs attached with transporting a slave from one place of a continent to another. Since slavery today is operating on a global scale, the supply of slaves is superfluous and unlimited. “An average slave in the American south in 1850 cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s money. Unlike today when slaves are cheap and can be bought for as low as $90…” (Bales 29). According to Free the Slaves organization, the new slavery may be differentiated from the slavery of the past through its two prime characteristics: “slaves today are cheap and they are disposable” (1).
 Today, anybody of any color or ethnicity around the world can be a potential slave resulting in slaves today being cheaper than the slaves of Douglass’s era. Slave-holders or handlers disregard color and/or ethnic background so long as they are profiting from the slaves they are controlling. Since slaves today are cheap, they are no longer a big investment. However, since slaves themselves are not a big investment, “the sick, the injured, the elderly and the unprofitable are dumped and quickly replaced by other desperate people” (“Slavery” 1). Being an investment in Douglass’s time meant that slaves were more expensive to replace. To protect this investment, meant keeping the slaves for a long-term affiliation. All slaves of any time period are treated horribly and with minimal provisions, however, slaves today can often times be treated worse than in the times of Douglass’s slavery because the slave-owners have little investment in their slaves. 
In most slave narratives and discourses about slavery that emerged during the early 17th to 19th century, abuses in slavery are characterized by vivid images of whipping, chains, sexual abuses between master and slave, and auctions of slaves to other slave-owners. Frederick Douglass in the Narrative illustrates with constraint how slave-holders impose their power and control over slaves through physical debasement such as whipping, raping the woman and brutal punishment when committing even the slightest of mistakes. These slightest mistakes Douglass describes in his Narrative as, “A mere look, work or motion,--a mistake, accident, or want of power,--are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time” (Douglass 2075). 
Although whipping is used today in slavery, whipping is not the prime procedure used in forcing a slave into submission now days. We can extrapolate from the Narrative that whipping was the prime procedure used in forcing a slave into complete submission to their slave-owners. One of Douglass’s whippings he received from a slave-owner for an accident that Douglass had no control over exemplifies the fact to his own whippings he had to endure as a slave, “…he rushed at me with the fierceness of a tiger, tore off my clothes, and lashed me till he had worn out his switches, cutting me so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time after. This whipping was the first of a number just like it, and for similar offences” (Douglass 2066). Whipping signified and reinforced the quandary of a slave’s environment. Vince Brewton examines this point in the next passage, “To be a slave, the whipping makes clear, means that one cannot hinder physical insult or violation…the slave body may be violated with impunity, the somatic limits in which selfhood gains a footing disrespected at will” (Brewton 707). 
It appears to me that sexual abuse among woman and children today is on a much grander scale than in Douglass’s time period. According to the Trafficking in Persons Report of June 2007, “approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors” (10). Women and girls are particularly affected by global sexual slavery. Some countries have a “ritual servitude” where the parents give their girls over “to a shrine in order to atone for a family transgression” (Herzfeld 1). A girl that was given over to a shrine is given an account of in her own words in the following passage, “When I was 11, the priest made his first attempt to sleep with me. I refused and was beaten mercilessly. The other girls in the shrine told me it was going to keep happening and if I refused I would be beaten to death and the next time he tried I gave in” (Herzfeld 2). Since the population today is greater and globalization has increased, the possibilities of the sex slave operation helps bring about some of the main causes of why women and children are being sexually enslaved today than in Douglass’s time.  
In the Narrative of Douglass, it appears to me slaves knew more often than not that they were slaves and knew where they were going to be taken as a result of being a slave. Becoming a slave was not hidden from them by their possible slave-owners. On the other hand, today a slave is deceived and promised that they will get a better job and place to live where ever they are going and being taken to. Lancet illustrates to this point in the following passage, “Many of the victims, seeking to escape lives of grinding poverty, are lured away by recruiters who offer them the hope of good jobs…it is promised, will help the workers find housing and jobs…” (Slavery today, par. 2).   
Like Douglass who valued and found freedom in education, freeing slaves today would mean also that efforts be carried out to help free and make slaves first realize the value in obtaining knowledge and then pursuing that knowledge. As in the time of Douglass, slaves were and are being deprived from enjoying the privileges of a free citizen like getting an education, for instance. When he realized he was deprived of one of the basic privileges that he should have been able to enjoy, Douglass struggled to become literate and not ignorant. Literacy became Douglass’s whole pursuit after Mr. Auld said to his wife that “…a nigger should know nothing…if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him…” (Douglass 2054). From then on Douglass “…understood the pathway from slavery to freedom…I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read” (Douglass 2054). 
People who find themselves in a slave situation should be like Douglass, when Douglass realized the importance of an education could give him leverage to dig out of the pit of slavery. By gaining knowledge, this would set him free. Douglass sought knowledge out in the form of first learning to read and then write, while passionately hunting knowledge in any opportunity that he could. Through educating himself in reading, writing and pursuing knowledge, not ignorance, Frederick Douglass salvaged his right as a human being by being a human doing. His first taste of knowledge made Douglass realize the power in which it held. He states, “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty-to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man…I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass 2054). By gaining and learning the white man’s knowledge, Douglass realized that knowledge was the cause of freedom, while reading and writing was the vehicle to get him to freedom. 

Works Cited MLA requirements have changed since this essay was written
Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.
Brewton, Vince. “‘Bold defiance took its place’—‘Respect’ and Self-Making in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” Mississippi Quarterly 58.3/4 (Summer/Fall 2005). Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. CCCCD Lib., Plano, TX. 
6 August 2007 <http://web.ebscohost.com>.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. 1845. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 6th ed. Vol. B. New York: New York, 2003. 
Herzfeld, Beth. “Slavery and gender: women’s double exploitation.” Gender & Development 10.1 (Mar 2002). Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. CCCCD Lib., Plano, TX. 30 July 2007 <http://web.ebscohost.com>. 
“Slavery in the 21st Century.” Free the Slaves. 2006. Free the Slaves Organization. 1 Aug. 2007
< http://freetheslaves.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/edpack_1.pdf>.
“Slavery today.” Lancet 361.9375 (June 2003). Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. CCCCD Lib., Plano, TX. 30 July 2007 <http://web.ebscohost.com>.
United States. Dept. of State. Distinctions Between Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking. Jan. 2005. 31 July 2007 <http://www.state.gov/g/tip/fs/2005/57345.htm>.
---. Trafficking in Persons Report. Jun. 2007. 31 July 200 <http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf>.