Slavery is the use of deception or violent coercion to compel someone to labor without pay or for no pay beyond the substance necessary to continue the labor. Ambassador Mark Lagon, Executive Director of the Polaris Project explains in At the End of Slavery, "Slavery is when someone has their humanity taken away. They're turned into a thing, a commodity for sale, for sex, or used for forced labor – sometimes by brute violence and coercion, sometimes by manipulation and fraud, but the defining characteristic is dehumanization."

Most simply, slavery looks like life without freedom. Victims of slavery are often deprived freedom of movement — they are not free to seek employment elsewhere and are sometimes unable to leave the facility where they are forced to work. Modern-day slaves are abused around the world in variety of industries. Modern-day slavery can take place in a rice mill on a farm; in a brothel or massage parlor; in an industrialized factory or a rudimentary workplace.

There are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world today—more than any other time in history (Kevin Bales, Disposable People). Children below the age of 18 years represent between 40 to 50% of all forced labor victims (ILO, 2005).

Two hundred years ago, heroic abolitionists defeated the trans-Atlantic slave trade through securing the passage of legislation that made this brutal trade illegal. Today, we fight a different battle. Slavery is nearly universally illegal — but millions are still victimized by the crime simply because the laws designed for their protection are not enforced.

For example, a recent, wide-reaching survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that 40% of countries burdened by human trafficking had not registered a single conviction against perpetrators of the crime, which is crucial for deterrence. The U.N. has determined that 4 billion people live outside the protection of rule of law. In order to end slavery for good, we must ensure that public justice systems – police, courts, laws, etc. — protect all people and put traffickers and slave-owners behind bars so they cannot continue to abuse vulnerable people.

The methods that traffickers and slave-owners employ to entrap their victims vary, but the two universal elements are violent coercion (whether violence is threatened or actually committed) and deception – girls trafficked into brothels may believe that they are accepting a job at a restaurant or hotel; people trafficked into labor slavery may believe they are accepting temporary employment which they will have the freedom to leave.

Debt bondage is a common method of deception used to entrap victims of forced labor slavery. In this illegal scheme, an employer offers a small loan (often as low as $25) to a laborer when they accept a job. The laborer is then forbidden to leave the work facility until the loan is repaid in full but the perpetrator ensures this repayment is impossible by inflating the loan through exorbitant interest rates, false charges and denying requests for information on the status of the loan. The employer quickly becomes the worker's owner — and the debt is often extended to relatives of the laborer, including children, who are forced to work off a false and ever-growing debt.

Slavery is exacerbated by poverty — as victims become more vulnerable to lies designed to entrap them in situations of abuse and exploitation. However, IJM President Gary Haugen explains in At the End of Slavery, "You don't have to solve the entire problem of poverty...before you can fight slavery — by making sure that those who would be tempted to commit the crime of slavery would know that they are going to go to jail if they do it."

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