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Matt Bladen Mr. Purdie 2/16/2011 5th Huck Finn Part II Modern-Day Slavery

You may think that slavery is no longer in the world today. Unfortunately you are incorrect. There are more that 29 million people enslaved in the world today. There are many different ways that these people become enslaved. What I will be writing about are human trafficking, debt bondage, addiction, forced labor, and kidnapping. First, there are about 800,000 people who are trafficked across international borders per year. The main reasons for human trafficking are sexual exploitation and forced labor. Victims are forced to do what their handles say and will often do it for most of their life. They are forced to work under harsh conditions threatened by violence. A significant amount of them are women and children. Human trafficking is located in most third world countries. Second, many of the slaves are locked into debt that they cant pay off or will never know if they have payed it off. Creditors will tell the victims that they still own them money and that they are working of a loan. They will be trapped in this for a long time because many a illiterate or not money smart. Debt will often say in the family for generations. The third form of slavery is addiction. You can be trapped in many different ways. There are physical and mental affects to every addiction. People become slaves through drugs and alcohol. They become dependent on the substance to be able to achieve happiness or sometimes even function. In a sense it is not thought of as slavery but you are definitely a slave to your addiction.

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The fourth type is forced labor. People are forced to work for little or no pay. There are close to 12.3 million people forced into labor in the world today. Over half are teenagers of younger. This number is constantly rising. The slave holders make the slaves do jobs that nobody else will do or that people dont regularly do. The Fifth type of slavery is kidnapping. There are ten million children reported missing each year of that ten, nine are found. That means that 500,000 children are unfound each year. Kidnapping often leads to drug and human trafficking and prostitution. A story that comes closer to home is the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. She was used by a man for his sexual pleasure for a period of about 9 months until she was found a year later. In conclusion, slavery is still a major problem in the world today. People are slaves through human trafficking, debt bondage, addiction, forced labor, and kidnapping. We can help stop slavery by making the problem of slavery publicly know to the entire world. We need to let slave owners know that what they are doing is wrong and that it needs to stop.