HOW TO COMBAT MODERN SLAVERY

This is not about lousy marriages, this is not about jobs that suck. This is about people who can not walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. It's real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history. 

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We're  particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction. Around the world, slaves are used to destroy the environment, cutting down trees in the Amazon; destroying forest areas in West Africa; mining and spreading mercury around in places like Ghana and the Congo; destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia. It's a pretty harrowing linkage between what's happening to our environment and what's happening to our human rights. 

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Kevin Bales​

Co-founder of Free the Slaves

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(TED Talk)  2010