Reddit reviews Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy

Mauritania has two roads in the entire country. A vast majority of the country is desert, and the East is referred to as the great nothingness. To travel from town to town requires an ATV or camel. Mauritania is about as remote and poor as it gets, and they've been hit hard by the global food crisis.

A former French colony, Mauritania has been through several coups since. The male land-owning Muslim ruling class enforces a sort of neo-slavery on the indigenous Africans by contractually making them property of the Arabs. The master-slave relationship is similar to that of the antebellum South.

Imagine a land of sand and absolutely nothing else - where even the buildings were made out of the Earth. Where the most technologically advanced equipment most of the population ever saw was the country's solitary streetlight. It's a failed state that is ready to fall into that North Korean mentality. I suspect they will become, if they aren't already, a state sponsor of all sorts of black market transactions. Its proximity to Europe is worrisome, too, because the boogey-man could be using the country as a staging ground for attacks.

But then again, you'd have to first believe in the boogey-man, and zombies, and magic, and the list goes on...

Let's call it what it is, slavery.

I'm not sure about Thailand's trans rights - they must be pretty decent though - but (massive TW human rights violations) Thailand has a pretty huge human trafficking/illicit sex trade industry and I was under the impression (anyone who reads this please correct me if I'm wrong and I damn well hope I am) that young boys can be sold into the sex trade by their parents and given gender reassignment treatment.

So, given redditors' tendency to over-simplify, they see Thailand = lax prostitution laws = make jokes about exploited people. A good book for those who want to learn about modern-day slavery is Bales' Disposable People, but it's a tough one to read. The chapter on Thailand made me ill at times.

So yeah, fuck anyone who makes a joke about this stuff

According to Kevin Bales, there are "more than 27 million men, women, and children living in slavery today."

Many of the products you buy have been produced by people who have been enslaved. Chocolate is often collected by children who were simply sold to the plantation, for example.

Prostitutes are often coerced and/or psychologically "conditioned" (i.e., abused) into their trade and kept there with violence.

Children are kidnapped or 'collected' off the street and forced in the sex trade. Often, these children are too young to understand or to fight back.

Here is the Department of State's website about the problem.

This is an excellent book that opened my eyes to this subject. Really thought provoking.
http://www.amazon.com/Disposable-People-Slavery-Global-Economy/dp/0520224639