…it’s about being free

Slavery, servitude, and forced labour are absolutely forbidden today, as is anything that seeks to undermine or limit that restriction. The horrific reality, however, is that modern slavery remains a significant global issue.

Human trafficking is one form of modern slavery. It involves the recruitment, harbouring or transporting of people into a situation of exploitation through the use of violence, deception or coercion and forcing them to work against their will.

Human traffickers do everything in their power to eliminate the privacy of their victims and strips them of their dignity in order to acquire information about them, control them, coerce them, or blackmail them, for example, by threatening to share sexually explicit images of them if they attempt to escape or disobey. 

Traffickers, among others, often use GPS technology to maintain an electronic tether over their victims, monitoring their every move, destination and location. But they do not stop there.

In one particularly horrific instance, in 2016 in the US, a woman arrived at the ER with a Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip planted under her skin. She was a victim of sex trafficking, and her abusers had implanted a chip, much like the kind used to identify who owns a pet, under her skin. She had been told it was GPS tracker, but RFID chips aren’t like GPS trackers - they are used for identifying something that you have possession of. Rather than transmitting a location, they contain information such as a name, date of birth and ‘owner’. They had tagged her like you would a pet, to make sure if they escape they are delivered back to you.

Human traffickers, and modern slavers, prevent their victims from escaping by often using commonly available technology to abuse and control them, making escape extremely difficult to impossible.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms. Article 4, Freedom from slavery

* Photo by Joe Loong on Flickr