According to the United Nations new report titled “Stacked Odds” has revealed that 29 million women and girls are victims of modern slavery, exploited by practices including forced labour, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude. Developed jointly by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Walk Free Foundation and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the report published on recently has revealed the true scale of modern slavery around the world.
This report has come as an eye-opener for the world where women and young girls are ill-treated on a daily basis in various countries. According to this report, one in every 130 women and girls are subjected to forced labor, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude on a daily basis.
Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Walk Free anti-slavery organisation, said that means one in every 130 women and girls is living in modern slavery today, more than the population of Australia. “The reality is that there are more people living in slavery today than any other time in human history,” she told a UN news conference. Walk Free defines modern slavery “as the systematic removal of a person’s freedom, where one person is exploited by another for personal or financial gain,” she said.
As per the report, 99 per cent of the victims of forced sexual exploitation are women. Additionally, 84 per cent of all victims of forced marriage and 58 per cent of all victims of forced labor are also women. What is more saddening is that the researchers found out that this exploitation is slowly becoming a normalised concept and the pandemic is only making things worse for these victims. “We’re seeing normalized exploitation in our economy in transnational supply chains and also in migration pathways,” Forrest said.
Forrest said Walk Free and the UN’s Every Woman Every Child program are launching a global campaign to demand action to eliminate modern slavery. One of the main motives of this campaign will be to urge governments around the world to criminalise child and forced marriage — practises that are yet popular and decriminalised in nearly 136 countries. Forrest also aims to completely eliminate the practice of kefala — a bondage programme that legally binds a migrant worker to an employer or sponsor for the period of their contract. The campaign also urges transparency and accountability for multinationals. “We know that women and girls are experiencing unprecedented levels of exploitation and forced labour in supply chains of the goods we buy and use every day — clothing, coffee, technology,” Forest said.
