Slavery Then And Now Essays - Slavery, Contemporary Slavery

Slavery: Then and Now Slavery: Then and Now When we think about slavery many things come to our mind. There are many different ways one can describe slavery. If you were to look it up in a dictionary it would say that a slave is "one who is owned and forced into service by another," this was the definition given in the Webster's Dictionary. But then again if you were to look it up in the Oxford Dictionary the definition given here is of one who is an "obsessive devotee." On the whole slavery can have different meanings to different people. The meaning of slavery has a different meaning today than it did years ago. As Alex Haley wrote, slavery was difficult to explain years ago because it was going on at the time. Today when someone says the word slavery more than half of the people would think of plantations and people being forced to work the land and being mistreated. But what do you say to a little child who comes up to you and asks you want slavery is? In today's society we can take the word slavery and put it to the modern days. Would one say that slavery only existed years ago when plantation owners would buy people to force them to do hard labor and mistreat them, or would one mention about the slavery that goes on in today's society? What about the people who are forced to do hard labor like many years ago? Many people do not realize it but indeed we do have modern-day slavery. What is today's modern day slavery? There are several things that can be put into today's slavery. This is one problem that is often over looked in today's society. It may not have as much impact as it did years ago, but if we stop and think about it, this problem is still as harsh and crude as it was years ago. I would think that up to some extent the problem has grown now because it is in fact often overlooked. For example in Sudan, as a result of an Islamic vs. Christian civil war, women and children that are mostly black and Christian are captured in raids. They are later sold as chattel slaves in "modern day slave markets". Now the question that I have is, " Does a human life have a price?" Well according to these people it does, and the price that they decided to put on a human life has been as low as fifteen dollars. Slaves who attempt to run away are castrated or branded like animals. Have we learned nothing from our history? It is said that history repeats itself and thus we should learned from it. Obviously some people have not and are repeating the same harsh mistakes that we have supply worked so hard to fix. Another example of modern-day slavery occurs in Brazil. In Brazil, poverty-stricken young men are promised good work by harvesting crops. Impressed by the opportunity to better their lives they agree to for the work. Instead of going to work they are trucked hundreds of miles to isolated jungles and forced at gunpoint to clear rainforest. I don't know about you, but harvesting and clearing up the rainforest are totally different things. In Haiti men are also trucked but these men are trucked across the island of Hispaniola to the Dominican Republic and forced to cut sugar cane. The men in Haiti do not have it as bad though; sure they get paid for working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. How much? Well their wages, if they could be called that, is below the cost of food. Some people would say that they are getting paid for their work so they are not really considered slaves, but according to the Webster's Dictionary they are because these men remain captives for many years, some even for life. Modern-day slavery does not discriminate. In Pakistan and India hundreds of thousands of little children, some as young as seven, work in slavery to make beautiful oriental carpets. Where do the parents come in? Well the parents are tricked into allowing their children to be taken from their home, they are promised that their children will be well taken cared of and that they will learn a trade. What parent would not want this for his child, especially when they can't offer anything better to them. Now according to the Oxford Dictionary, there is still another form of slavery. In some way we can still call it modern-day slavery.