* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realised that my family, and many other middle class, educated Pakistani households, were perpetrators of modern day slavery"
When I was seven-years-old, my parents brought a domestic worker home. He was not much older than me.
As a way of reprimanding me when I was misbehaving, my mother would say I should be grateful because in some parts of Pakistan, parents were so poor that they gave their children away for a year in exchange for a bag of wheat.
It surprised me, but it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realised that my family, and many other middle class, educated Pakistani households, were perpetrators of modern day slavery.
According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), slavery is “one person possessing or controlling another person in such a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer, or disposal.”
At last week’s Trust Women Conference in London, I was once again faced with this reality.
“So your family had slaves?” a colleague asked me at the conference when I started talking about the young boy who had worked at our house.
I remember hearing that question and shaking my head furiously. “Oh, we don’t call them slaves,” I offered as a weak response, knowing it made little difference what terminology I used.
And that is, perhaps, what lies at the heart of the problem. We all find ways to disassociate ourselves from the evils we do to others – largely because they are poor, vulnerable and open to exploitation. They cook and clean after us, build the bricks for our homes, make the footballs our children play with, and serve us tea at roadside restaurants.
They are slaves, yet we prefer to call them servants or domestic help. We call them familial names such as brother or sister – yet we do not give them the respect the name deserves. In fact, in many cases, we believe we are helping children by giving them jobs because they are so poor.
With this type of mindset, it is no surprise that Pakistan ranks third on the GSI in terms of absolute estimates of modern slavery.
But child slavery is not just confined to Pakistan. At the Trust Women Conference, I realised just how widespread the problem is. From Asia to Africa to Europe to the Americas, it exists everywhere.
Cameroonian Evelyn Chumbow, a survivor of child trafficking, told me her story at the conference. As a child slave, she took care of her employer’s children, cooked and cleaned up after them. In return, she was abused and exploited.
“Whether it’s Pakistan or Cameroon in Africa, they have almost similar cultures because they employ kids thinking they’re doing them a favour but they’re only using them - and that’s what happened to me,” she told me.
“They are evil because they don’t want to think. Why don’t they think, ‘what if it was my child?’ ‘Would I like this?’ Don’t take another person’s child and abuse them.”
(Editing by Nita Bhalla)
((Luavut Zahid was a participant on a Reporting Trafficking and Slavery course held by Thomson Reuters Foundation in parallel with the foundation’s Trust Women Conference. Luavut is a journalist who works for Pakistan Today))
