[Epskampie]

Horrifying read. I recently read a book about a girl who was pressed into prostitution, and this reads much the same. [1] Before I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past, how awful to find out this isn't true.

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515858-slave-girl

[PeterStuer]

Why would a criminal organization that trafficked you into a place where you have no legal recourse ever stop exploiting you?

[cucumber3732842]

Same reason your government doesn't set taxes to 100%, has rules for themselves they at least sort of follow, and only treats people like shit when they've got a pretext. If they make it "too bad" then they'll have to piss away a whole lot more money on ensuring compliance, it'll threaten stability, etc.

Slaves are the least motivated and least productive form of workers. Slaves who know they're slaves are worse still. Shooting for maximum extraction of labor doesn't actually get you the best ROI. Don't get me wrong, they'll still treat you like shit. But they maximize their "take home" by not going too far with it.

I get that we all want to turn off our brains and hand wring because "criminals" or whatever but the dynamics of human organizations are unchanged regardless of what side of the law they're operating on.

[cobri]

According to International Justice Mission [1], 50 million people are trapped in human trafficking.

1: https://www.ijm.org/

[anothereng]

and most of them are in muslim countries.

[throw_m239339]

Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.

[a_better_world]

Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control."

Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...

[segmondy]

children? how about adults?

After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.

https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/the-scandal-of-a-sl...

[stronglikedan]

> I was convinced that slavery was mostly a thing of the past

Unfortunately, it's the opposite. There's more people in enslaved situations now than ever before in all of human history.

[catigula]

The West has largely snuffed the horror of slavery in its sphere but outside of that it's the wild west. There are horrifying things to read if you go down that rabbit hole.