21st century slavery: millions of people around the world are living as modern-day slaves--including in the U.S.

• Author: Potenza, Alessandra
• Position: Cover story

If you think slavery is a thing of the past, think again. Millions of people around the world today--including tens of thousands in the U.S.--are living under modern forms of slavery, human rights groups say. Min Min * was one of them.

From a poor family in Myanmar, Min Min was 17 when he accepted a job working on a fishing boat in neighboring Thailand. The eldest son in his family, he needed the money to support his parents and two younger sisters.

Min Min trusted the man he calls "the broker" who had arranged the job and traveled with him from Myanmar. But once Min Min boarded the fishing boat and it left the dock his nightmare began. "I own you," the boat's captain told him. Min Min was forced to work up to 20 hours a day, seven days a week, with no pay and little food. He didn't have proper clothes, boots, or safety equipment. He watched as other workers were beaten if they slowed down and thrown overboard if they got injured.

One day, when the boat docked at a village after months of being at sea, Min Min tried to escape. He was caught and tortured with fishhooks. Next time he tried, his captors warned him, they would torture him to death.

"I thought of fleeing ... from this terrible condition," Min Min says. "I put my faith in God and prayed."

His plight is shared by millions of people in the world today. More than 27 million live in "modern slavery," according to the U.S. Department of State. That includes 60,000 in the U.S., according to the Global Slavery Index, which tracks the phenomenon around the globe.

A Different Kind of Slavery

These modern slaves aren't captured, stocked like cattle on slave ships, and sold in chains at public auctions. They are men, women, and children lured into trafficking by the promise of a job and a better life--and then forced to work with little or no pay, or coerced to sell their bodies.

"The injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking ... must be called by its true name--modern slavery," President Obama said in 2012. "I do not use that word, 'slavery; lightly. It evokes obviously one of the most painful chapters in our nation's history. But around the world, there's no denying the awful reality."

Slavery is as old as civilization itself. It existed in the earliest societies in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and China. In the Roman Empire, prisoners of war and people who couldn't pay their debts were sold into slavery and forced to work in homes, mines, factories, and on farms. Slaves did everything from building aqueducts to fighting as gladiators in the Colosseum. At the height of Rome's power, they made up 30 percent of the population.

In colonial America, slavery was legalized as early as 1641 in Massachusetts. Until the Revolutionary War, it coexisted with indentured servitude, whereby migrants from Europe gave up their freedom for three to seven years in return for passage to the New World or as part of a labor contract after they arrived. At the beginning of the 19th century, the expansion of cotton plantations in the South increased the demand for labor, boosting the slave trade from Africa. By the time the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was passed under President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 toward the end of the Civil War, there were about 4 million slaves in the U.S., making up 13 percent of the population.

Today, slavery lives on, in many different forms.

"You strip away whatever rationalization there is for enslavement," says Kevin Bales, co-founder of Free the Slaves, "whether it's 2000 B.C. or yesterday, slavery is pretty much the same thing."

What has changed, says Bales, is that most modern-day slaves are falsely promised a way out of poverty. Because of the booming population in developing countries, the number of people desperate to improve their lives is increasing. That boosts the supply of potential victims and makes them cheaper on the slavery black market, as the law of supply and demand would dictate.

While an average slave in the American South in 1850 cost the equivalent of $40,000 in today's money, trafficking a person costs about $90 today.

Human trafficking is fueled, in part, by an increasing demand for cheap labor, which helps sustain the growth of flourishing economies like China and India and to produce inexpensive goods for developed nations like the U.S. (see box, facing page).

About 76 percent of the world's slaves are in 10...