Monica Cousins, Contributor

A victim of human trafficking in tears. - File

"Trains and boats and planes are passing by,

They mean a trip to Paris or Rome

To someone else but not for me

Those trains and those boats and planes

Took you away, away from me..."

This song of yesteryear, made popular by Dionne Warwick, conjures up thoughts of what it must have felt like for the families of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves over 200 years ago. But 200 years and many generations later, boats and planes are still trafficking human cargo to diverse places around the world, as modern-day slavery continues to thrive.

Slavery remains big business as stories from around the world tell of its horrors. It respects no one because its roots are embedded deeply in money and power. Men, women and children are all subjected to its wiles. Despite the United Nations Children Fund's child-protection programmes which "aim to prevent and respond to violence, exploitation and abuse against children", it is estimated that up to a million and half children are being trafficked on an annual basis. This kind of slavery takes away the rights of children and leads them into hotbeds of criminal activity.

Long existence

Child labour has existed for eons, and some estimates say well over 200 million children worldwide, between the ages of five and 17 are engaged in this form of enslavement. Children are working in mines, operating dangerous machinery, and labouring in agriculture.

Reports from the U.N. office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons state that over 300,000 children worldwide are suspected of being involved in military service. Some said to be as young as nine years old are on the front line or are carrying out other roles. This does not rule out young girls who are sex slaves, or sometimes referred to as 'soldiers' wives'.

In the business of trafficking, the demand for children is high because they come from very poor backgrounds and their families are made to believe that they are being given the chance of a better life. Most times, the abuse takes place in their home countries, but they may be sent to other countries, where they end up as illegal citizens with little or no right to proper justice.

Women targetted

Modern-day slavery seems to target mostly members of the female gender. Women and girls, taken against their will as sex slaves, are of every colour under the sun, and hail from every corner of the Earth. Reports several weeks ago of two British teenage girls caught at Accra airport in Ghana, carrying cannabis (ganja) with a street value running into tens of thousands of pounds sterling, has brought into sharp focus the link that Britain still has with Ghana, one of the countries that was featured so strongly during the years of the middle passage. Instead of boats, planes are today's modern mode of transport, as 21st century slave masters have little or no time to hang around. Like the people they enslave, they, too, come in every colour under the sun.

Young girls brought into the United Kingdom from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America on a regular basis, sometimes escape and relate stories of threats and torture. Lured to the U.K. with the promise of a better way of life, passports and travel documents are taken away and the girls end up in brothels, forced to have sex with dozens of men who pay brothel owners and traffickers, but not the girls. Hence, the difference between prostitutes and sex slaves.

It is reported that traffickers are paid up to £8,000 per victim. Reports in the U.K. Guardian newspaper last May state: "Police have discovered a growing number of young women being held in suburban houses, trapped behind locked doors as ordinary life goes on outside."

The disclosure by the BBC news in July 2003, that more than half the foreign women in U.K. prisons are Jamaican drug mules, confirms what most of us would not want to admit: Tha we have moved a long way from the middle passage, we are still slaves in many other ways.

Desperation

The women caught in the U.K. for drug smuggling tell of their desperation. They say they are single mothers with children who need to be fed and clothed, and one trip to the U.K. allows them to make enough money to put "food on the table" for their children.

If anyone told these women that they were slaves, they would find that quite offensive, but when they get caught by the authorities, they lose the freedom to return to Jamaica, and yet another kind of slavery ensues. They end up spending years in prison in a foreign country thousands of miles away from the children for whom they put their honour on the line.

But 'honour' for another group of women has a far more sinister meaning. In one world it means death, and there have been many reports of 'honour killings' due to slavery of this kind. Women from some cultures are now standing up for themselves and refusing to marry husbands chosen by their families. They take the risk of running away from home, sometimes to their detriment, because when they are found, they are murdered by male family members.

A young mother of three jumped in front of a high-speed train, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph of August 6, 2006. Her husband arrived at the station just as she had jumped, with the youngest child a few months old, hugging his mother while she firmly clutched the arms of the two older ones. She had become so disillusioned with her arranged marriage, she did not want her children to have to suffer the same sort of slavery. Prior to that, she telephoned her husband to tell him she was "taking the children far away." A year later, her own mother went to the same station and did the same thing. They both had arranged marriages.

But men suffer their own kind of slavery. Jamaican men are among many others from developing countries who travel to the United States and Canada as migrant farm workers. Some years ago, I visited some of the 'camps' in Florida and saw for myself the squalor in which some of the men lived.

The latest report is that not much has changed. These workers are invisible, as it were, to the people who push shopping trolleys along supermarket aisles every day, picking up and checking fruits and vegetables to find the perfect ones. They remain oblivious to the plight of the people who work on farms that produce these foods. The men work on isolated farms and have no easy means of transportation to get them into the towns and cities. They live a lonely existence as they labour to make a living for their families back home.

No voice

You cannot miss them. You see them at airports in groups, getting on or off planes with two or three hats on their heads sometimes. They have no legal status and many can just about sign their names. Yet, they are happy to be called up to go to these work camps, as many of them are unemployed or unemployable at home. They live through the kind of slavery that prevents them from complaining about unsatisfactory working conditions, poor housing and sometimes violence against them. The report a few years ago of two Jamaican men killed in an accident in Canada while cycling to make phone calls back home, brings that equation into sharp focus.

So, what has changed for men like these in 200 hundred years? Only the form of transporting them. They still have no voice and if they dared to open their mouths to complain about any form of 'bad treatment' by their employers, they wouldn't be beaten or shackled as in the bad old days, but they might be put on the next plane home, with little chance of returning to make a few more bucks. Yes, they would be put on a plane and sent back to a life of despair.

So, it seems 'those trains and boats and planes' have brought us a long way, but we still have a much longer way to go before it can be taken away from us, thereby allowing us to put slavery where it really belongs: behind us.