 Well, hello everyone good afternoon Thank you for both joining and for your patients, but we're ready to get going and I I'm really to figure out Oh, I'm a professor of the graduate school and an associate professor emeritus in the high school of business and the Department of Political Science I'm also the chair of the wine stock lecture committee and along with the graduate division the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate and My fellow committee members Isha Ray from the energy and resources group And Michael Watts from yes, I can give the talk as well from geography It's a real pleasure to welcome you to the Barbara wine stock lectures on the morals of trade Today's lecture will be given by Kevin Bales who I'll provide an introduction to in a minute And it's a real pleasure to have him We're pleased to Cosponsor this lecture and discussion which will follow tomorrow with the help of the following departments and Programs on campus and we extend many thanks to ethnic studies the Human Rights Center Economics Berkeley law and the Center for Latin American Studies Let me start by just giving a quick word about the wine stock lectures in the wine stock lecture endowment in 1902 Over a hundred years ago Harris wine stock in the honor of his wife Barbara In doubt of fun to support an annual public lecture on the morals of trade His goal was in his own words to support and I quote a better and cleaner day in store for all destined to spend their lives in commercial pursuits The thing to do is to bring this hope for day as near to our own as possible The California University Lectureship on the morals of trade is a small effort in that direction he wrote With today's lecture the first ever wine stock lecture to focus on the morals of trade in human beings We feel very aligned with the original motives behind this endowment Now we're really happy to see you today, but I want to remind everyone that We are having a discussion tomorrow as well with a distinguished panel, which will discuss Kevin Bale's presentation today It'll include our a number of faculty from from campus Arlie Hochschild from Sociology Enrique Lopez Lira from the Center for Labor Research and Education and Eric Stover from the law school so this panel will effectively respond and comment on professor Bale's lecture and Will continue the discussion that we start today So it's actually a two-day event and we it'll be at the exact same place I was going to say the exact same time, but hopefully starting 15 minutes earlier tomorrow and we'll be You know, we'll be an opportunity for even more engagement on this really kind of critical topic So with that said I want to say a few words about today's distinguished speaker the Kevin Bales Is a professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Wright's lab at the University of Nottingham in the UK He co-founded the American NGO free the slaves and his 1999 book disposable people new slavery in the global economy has been published in 12 languages Bishop Desmond Tutu called it and I quote a well researched scholarly and deeply Disturbing expose of modern slavery The film some of you might have seen based on disposable people which he co-wrote won both the Peabody Award and Not one but two Emmy Awards The Association of British British universities is named his work one of 100 world-changing discoveries In 2007 he published ending slavery how we free today slaves in 2009 with Ron Sudolter He published the slave next door modern slavery in the United States and in 2016 His research Institute was awarded the Queen's anniversary prize And he also published blood and earth modern slavery Ecoside and the secret to saving the world Which leads into his discussion today I won't steal his thunder by announcing his title let Kevin do that but I just want to say it's a real privilege and honor to have you here and We really look forward to two days of very lively and and and what is really an important discussion Kevin That was a very kind introduction. Thank you so much and And of course you read out the good bits and then there's you know the things from my old dean and the president of the Caught you know they weren't so nice, but yeah, thank you about that There's a lot there's a lot I want to tell you about So I'm going to move through a lot of slides fairly quickly Because one of the things that's really come to us particularly after we Established the rights lab was how and this sounds a little bit like a recent film Everything was everything all at once all the time everywhere and all completely linked together We begin to look out across our space looking at contemporary forms of slavery and realize oh my goodness This has powerful ecological environmental impacts. Oh my goodness This is actually tied up with religious expression for a whole number of Violent and conflictual groups. Oh my goodness. This is linked to women's empowerment in different parts of the world and also as We already knew but we found out in much more detail It was linked into all sorts of supply chain issues that that very much come into also moral questions about trade and Like that. So I'll just say that the rights lab. We've been very fortunate over the last five years to build up Something called the rights lab, which is a research Institute Focusing simply on contemporary forms of slavery and we've now reached about 80 80 Researchers based within the rights lab all working on contemporary forms of slavery But in different teams and you'll see what some of those different teams have actually done because I don't I don't know how to operate Satellites, but we have a whole team that does Now this will be the most wordy slide you have to look at but it's just to repeat what I said a second ago about There's there's an intersectionality. I have to say when I started working on contemporary forms of slavery I was seen as a niche of a niche Probably have another niche and now we're beginning to realize you can't Lift a rock hardly anywhere in the world without finding some linkage linkages that have to do with how it fits into the politics How it fits into the economy how it fits into the environmental issues and so forth. So I Wanted to just warn you that I'm going to be shooting around in different directions But also trying to put it all together in the same basket Now one of the things though you may not know about contemporary slavery is that? The cost of acquiring a person into slavery today is at its lowest point in in human history I Have a little note here at the bottom because when through Jordan when Jordan taught here for many many years And then he and I became great friends after his retirement and he helped me bring together He was a historian a lot of the fundamental data that we used to come to understand What was the the economic value of people in slavery in the past and fundamentally? We had to Use things like oxen because there wouldn't be monetary Numbers that we could compare and understand but an ox is an ox is an ox And you are able to usually keep find out what what oxen were worth at different times And as you can see in the past The cost of acquiring a person into slavery on average would be something like two oxen four oxen eight oxen And then when you get to 1850 where we we can turn it into 1850 US dollars It was still something like four to six oxen per for a for a normal average male agricultural worker person who had been being enslaved We who are going for about $1,200 on the market which in today's money is $46,000 But now look below and you begin to see that in the Côte d'Ivoire. I've seen literally seen Young man very much like an agricultural worker in the Deep South before the Civil War But changing hands in a market in the Ivory Coast for $40 I've seen girls going for more in Thailand But that's because they were being used for commercial sexual exploitation and the profits as you can see were us were obscene 8,000% profit per year on that on that purchase price. I Want to show you a little picture of where the people are where the density of slavery around the world as well This is the fundamentals the sort of foundational things Notice that well the the colors are high into the darker lower into the Into the yellow but the key point here is that you notice there are no blank countries that don't have a shade When we began to build the global slavery index back in 2012 2013-14 and we were actually able to collect information on countries all over the world and also build statistical estimation for some countries where we couldn't get direct Figures as well. We began to realize there were no countries without slavery And I used to actually stand up at it and say well Iceland, you know, it doesn't and then I said that once in those in a talk And there was a woman who's who put her hand up and said I'm I'm a member of the Icelandic Parliament And we have it too and I realized it's it really can be everywhere There's something like 40 million to 45 million people in slavery That's our best estimations at the moment around the world and that's a very conservative estimation But you can see that the densities are in those places that you might expect poor places places with looser governments or Places where law enforcement doesn't necessarily work as well as at my places where there is a tremendous amount of environmental Possibility for criminals as opposed to just in other types of possibilities But if you chart the cost of people over time You actually get This chart so this is also where when Jordan had helped me to work all the way back to 2000 BC and figure out the value of people over time and you can see that it there It varies along in terms of something like 40,000 50,000 20 30,000 and so forth over a long time and then in exact reflection of the dramatic increase in the global population in My lifetime in our lifetimes. We see this complete collapse The cost of human beings of the economic cost of human beings and I have to say for a lot of people in the world Well, I'll come to that but it's not even a cost It's just about rounding people up if you need to These are these these boys are a very good example of that So this is in Nepal They're poor kids from a from a rural background their parents have a little farm space And and a man shows up one day who seems nice and who seems well-dressed and he says, you know we need some boys to help us do some hauling and We can take good care of them and we'll give you a little bit of an advance on their wages and we'll kept them fed and so forth and it's It's a terrible decision for a family to make and especially for a mother I think to make it and to say can I let this boy go and can I trust these men? But we certainly need food. We certainly need income. We're in dire straits in terms of poverty And so they let them go but the problem is that once they leave they're never seen very often never seen again The lies of the person who's lured them away the tiny amount of cash that they've handed over And I mean a tiny amount of past and they use them as beasts of burden, you know in Nepal There aren't roads in a lot of the mountains. It's all pathways up and down and they load they carry these Big chunks of stone. Some of these will be used for tombstone Some of these will ultimately might end up on a kitchen counter top even in the United States And you can see the pathways sort of snaking down into the deep valleys between the Himalayan Mountains But here's the key thing that's both horrific, but perfectly demonstrates the disposability of contemporary people in contemporary slavery They fall down these boys they carry their own weight in stone and they go down rocky paths and they fall down into into ravines or into gullies and when the People who are driving them come along They go down to them and they take the stones off, but they leave the boy and they leave the boy because medical care for the broken leg or whatever it is exceeds Significantly the cost of us simply acquiring another boy. So they retrieve the stone, but leave the boy It's a disposable input and that's one of the key differences of today is that people in slavery in the past were significant capital purchases these Today are very likely to be much more like a Styrofoam cup the look the sort that you take and you use and you drink from and then you crumple it up And you toss it away because there it's disposable now Of course, we wouldn't do that in California now because we're all eco-friendly, but you understand what I'm getting at with that So there's there's a paradox with this right and that is One is that we've reached this point of disposability in the economic value of people in slavery Of course, it's up and down across the population of people in slavery But the other part of it is that with the population now past eight billion the 45 million in People who might be in slavery in the world is actually just one half of one percent of the global population There were times in in human past when you might have been at 10 percent 20 percent 30 percent and Particularly in some of the great slave spaces, right? If you think about the American South for the Civil War where you've got millions of people in slavery and millions of people who are Enslaving them, but it's more of almost a balance, right? It's about a one-third two-thirds thing, but now Slaves with virtually no value and in some ways just this tiny part of the global population and Yet and I I want to apologize for this. This is my nerd. I get one nerd slide per Talk, but you know here's and I won't walk through them all I just point out Human Development Index you all know what that is negatively correlated with with situations of slavery the the prevalence of all of these are our measures but between human development between free access to financial services all the things that make societies work well Aren't have a strong negative correlation with the amount of slavery that occurs within them So much and which is also fascinating because there's such a small part of the populations and yet just their presence in Higher levels as opposed to lower levels brings about something that is somehow pushing down on the economics and pushing down on the opportunity and so forth so I'm going to break this out now and Leave that big global nerdy part and start to narrow down a bit and talk about different ways that this is manifested as we go along one of them is about What happens at the global scale particularly in terms of climate change now? This is a funny kind of factoid But it's it's it's one that's that's also fairly powerful. So if we thought of slavery as being a country or A US state in terms of population it would be it would be the size of Algeria Or it's about a few million more than the population of California, but it's you know It's it's not that much more than California Or Ukraine you're right your crane is almost spot-on with that and if it were Producing what we think it is the United Nations works on this a lot and says that slavery crime generates about $150 billion a year into the global economy, but $150 billion a year is the GDP of Bulgaria or to my mind mind-blowing is Arkansas has a GDP of $150 billion a year I grew up in Oklahoma and we had no time for being from Arkansas and we never assumed it any of them had anything But apparently they have $150 billion a year even in Arkansas. So If slavery were a country or a state it would be a small poor state but When we were able to begin the measurement of co2 emissions Treatings across all the slave-based Operations of deforestation of mining brick-making of burning of coal burning of old tires to make bricks I mean as we begin to pull together over a number of years everything that we could find that would be Slave-based work that would generate co2 into the atmosphere and remember these are criminals who are doing this So they don't follow the regulations of EPA, right? They're not going there It turns out that China in the United States we know put out a lot of co2 into the air but After those two Slavery is the third largest emitter of co2 on the planet if it were a country. So it's a small poor country It is also the third largest emitter of co2 in the world Here's another chart of that and you can see how it compares to the Russian Federation to India to Japan Slavery as a if you treated it as a country is the third largest emitter of co2 now Nowhere near the United States nowhere near China because those are the those are the big ones But and the thing that When I first worked through all these stats and came to that conclusion Well, I have to say when the first went through all these stats and came to that conclusion I thought I've done something terribly wrong. This this can't be right I can't have 45 million people in the world who are in fact the third largest emitter of co2 because they don't even own factories But they're involved in this work and I actually Bill McKibben and I used to be on a thing together and and I send it all to him He's the guy who started 350.org He's one of the great environmentalists who measures this sort of that and I got his team to go through the whole thing They said no we get the same results exactly the same results and we were making conservative estimations Because we're scholars you don't go wild you this is we were working on the conservative side of it And we got to this number and I was well as we say where I live I was gobsmacked But I also knew I had one of the best factoids ever for putting the news out about it now What what are the things that happens is that we begin to realize it's not just co2 which I'll come back to some co2 in a minute, but it's a Whole series of ways that contemporary slavery has these negative Outcomes some are linked to co2 some are linked to other types of environmental concerns but some are linked to just sheer violence and conflict and Disruption and disruption of economies and so forth and a lot of them are driving this Climate change as well. So here I go into some examples this example Looks at illegal deforestation and illegal fishing species loss and child slavery child rape And then women shrimp workers who are caught up in sweatshops and held in sweatshops But I'll you'll see where all that fits together Now this is a satellite image from from our satellite team this is a photo from space of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Schunderbund's mangrove forest at the bottom of Bangladesh So this is an enormous mangrove forest at the bottom of Bangladesh It's really important because you know over here in the Western Hemisphere We know the greatest carbon sink in our zone is the Amazon But in all of Asia the Schunderbund's mangrove forest is the word is the largest carbon sink You know the the forest that sucks the most bad stuff out of the air and so forth There shouldn't be anything in a picture of the UNESCO World Heritage Site except trees but you can see there's something else going on here and I went I was down there in canoes and working on this when I was working on the book about about climate and slavery and you can see what look like buildings and Boats in that in that inlet, but those aren't buildings. Those are fish drying racks and Children very like the children in Nepal have been lured down from their families upriver above the Schunderbund's and People have gone to them and said we know you have 12 kids And you know you're having trouble feeding them all the time But we've got if you've got a you know a 10-year-old boy or 12-year-old boy You can come with us. He can work seasonally and in processing fish And they bring them down and then they disappear and the parents often never see them again and they work like this outside in fish guts in pretty horrific conditions Up to 24 hours a day because they have to process the fish as fast as they can as it's coming off the boats Sometimes they'll have a break, but sometimes the boats come on and then they have to put them on these what looked like Buildings from the satellite are actually these giant racks Where they're cutting the fish and hanging them on the racks and so forth and you can see some racks in the background that are stacked up to get more air and wind across them and One of my colleagues who is a very brave Bangladesh photographer actually got a picture of a modern-day slave driver beating children to get them to move faster on the racks now I Was I had the great good fortune to be able to to get with Four of these boys who managed to escape and I saw them the next day after they escaped They literally put themselves under a giant pile of fish because they knew the person who had the boat and When he went out he covered it up and they and they went back up river and I was able to get with them the next day and I and I One of the things that I talked to them about Was what would you know what was it like all was going on and they talked about being beaten They talked about how terrible the food was they talked about sexual being sexually assaulted I asked them about their health and they all said well You know the worst thing was the diarrhea they didn't have any other word for it But they just said you know everybody had diarrhea a lot of the time several people died of diarrhea Whatever that meant exactly and I said well, okay, if that's okay, that's the worst and then what about the next thing what was the next? most problematic health challenge that you had and This was the thing that floored me because every one of the children separately told me boys separately told me That they either knew or had watched as one of the other children were eaten by a tiger now I Know it's shocking and yet I'm gonna just loop back to point out that one of the reasons the Shundurbans is a UNESCO World Heritage site is because it's the Last free and open breeding ground for bingal tigers It's one of the last places that it's put so totally protected and that when when the criminals come in and push Cut down all the trees and push the prey animals and the tigers out of the space The tigers can't just move because tigers are territorial that have to fight another tiger So they wait and they take the new prey animal which has been offered to them, which is children But I have to say I was as shocked as you just were and I'd still kind of haunts me About how how that all works through now one of the things that we were excited about We're sad the positive way is that after we were able to establish in the lab a team that works with satellite imagery What's I was I went to that team and said here's the place where I know here's the GPS coordinates for one Do you think there are can you help us find out what else is going on in the Shundurbans UNESCO World Heritage site? And within a couple of days they came back and they said well are you you're talking about the other seven camps, right? And I said no, I have only ever seen one. I've only ever been to one. I didn't know there were seven camps They said oh, yeah, there's seven more and we can tell you where they were over the last 20 years in all the satellite data and we were able to with that to begin to push the Bangladeshi government to At least tell them where the prime was and so forth it not much happened because there's literally something called the shrimp mafia in Bangladesh which has a very strong hold on the Bangladeshi government and a lot of the shrimp that that also gets brought up through the Shundurbans goes into to local towns where almost all very poor women are given these jobs to vein and pack and all this stuff and I've interviewed and a lot of them and and they've been trying to organize as their labor and they've been Brutalized for trying to do that but it ends up and as it says it ends up here, so you know the shrimp that some of us have eaten some shrimp lately and Two four point four billion pounds of seafood that the United States imports and 90% of the shrimp that comes into the United States comes from Southeast Asia and Which means a lot of it has to be coming from there as well I'm going to jump to another one This is about slavery's impact, but with illegal mining and brick making and illegal emissions and And resulting species loss as well So this is a picture of the red line. I Appreciate red green color blind is tricky if you've got it. I've got it a little bit, but The red line is actually the the the boundary of what's called the brick belt In India and it's India Nepal Pakistan and Bangladesh are all encompassed in that that red line It's a place where underneath the soil. There's a kind of clay That you can basically dig pack make it wet shape it into bricks fire it in Open kilns of different sorts and it supplies all the bricks for all of India and Nepal a lot of other places like that It's it's a long for a long time we've understood about how families are lured into situations of Debt and then that turns into coercion and that turns into fundamental types of enslavement and it'll be the whole family so the Children are often shaping bricks out of mud As well as the moms some of the men are doing more of the lifting and shifting and firing but sometimes the children are doing it as well and One of the things that even while I had spent time in brick kilns All the way back in the 1990s because they're a significant part of that first book that I wrote about slavery and I was able to witness it all up close and Even interview brick kiln owners about how they did what they did and why they did it the way they did it We didn't understand and we couldn't find out How big was this industry? How many brick kilns were there? How how is all this supplied? It's a kind of seasonal job at hand how to have they hold on to people afterwards so Another tiny bit of science was just that we used some crowd sourcing To train up a lot of you mostly university students Where go into this crowd sourcing space where we were where they would learn how to? identify the brick kilns in satellite images and Be able to find see one in a satellite image and then mark it in a way Now what they didn't know they and they were very pleased to be able to do this work But what they didn't know was that in fact we had a whole series of algorithms behind the scene a machine learning and And and it was learning how from the crowd source They were teaching the the ML some people call it AI, but we don't really have AI yet But they were teaching the ML how to identify and See these particular things in the satellite imagery and the point occurred that finally we were able to say It learned and then it said I will now tell you and find you all the brick kilns in all of South Asia So this was a nice piece in the Guardian about how that happened and and and it said we were teaching an AI But it was it wasn't it wasn't you know, but here's here's the punchline. So every one of those yellow dots is a Brick kiln and we didn't know we literally we knew where the brick kiln We knew where some brick kilns were we didn't know where they all were so we have now have a GPS coordinate for every one of the 55387 brick kilns in Nepal Bangladesh Pakistan in India and Since I've spent a lot of time in brick kilns And I I know you could at least say there's about 10 people on average in the situation of enslavement on brick kilns There we are probably talking about half a million people who are caught up in that time of service now This is you think well, this is just bricks, right? This is just bricks. So what's the problem? Well, one of the key problems is that there's no control Over how they're fired and as well. So while the people are being Treated very poorly. In fact, they're being caught up in slavery and worked in terrible situations And then it's very dangerous work because it's very easy to fall into the kilns and for a lot of things But how do they fire they use old motor oil? They use old tires and Then a little bit of wood and other things that are not just Carcinogenic that are in fact regarded in the United States if you have a giant pile of old Automobile tires and it catches fire. That's a grade one environmental disaster and it brings in the EPA, right? there it's five it's 55,000 chimneys all putting out Incredibly sooty dangerous Carcinogenic smoke and so forth and also generating that kind of co2 That seems to make it the third largest emitter of co2 as a as an activity one more of these This time illegal forest deforestation illegal emissions species lots and so forth so one of the areas that I first looked at in the Americas was in Brazil This isn't in the Amazon. It's in the Pantanal, which is to the west of the Amazon. It's it's a it's a lower kind of forest It's not as as rich and thick as the Amazon but Certainly when I was there now getting on 20 years ago to see the first ones of those They were cutting down these forests these protected forests illegally of course criminals were doing this they'd rounded up Simtera Landless people Who were able to they were able to trick into jobs and take out and usually take them out at night? So they wouldn't know where they were ending up in the woods and then they would cut everything around them and Begin to and make these these clay ovens where they would convert the wood into charcoal and And in some ways the thing that made me crazy was just the fact that it was it wasn't charcoal for Barbecues it was charcoal to feed the Brazilian steel industry because Brazil doesn't have coke and and the right kinds of coal to fire iron into steel But you can use wood charcoal to do it Which to my mind, it's you know, it'd be like chopping down giant red woods to do barbecues or something like I mean It'd be that kind of crazy But that's that's where it was all going and into the Brazilian steel industry on a Satellite shot again just to show you the bits they've cut completely clear cut the forest and the forest that's still there and and those little bumps are those clay based ovens and so forth that Where they were turning out now if you go back to that space now There are there isn't a forest there vast areas of that part of the Pantanal have have just been completely Deforested and it's all of kind of big plain now of grassy plain and like that and the steel industry there is so cranking away If there's anything that's positive here, it's just that we're beginning to bring these techniques together so that we begin to say okay, we can begin to see more of this and Think about where to go to operate against it because we can layer up Both deforestation and other types of information as well So that's that's Brazil That's all of Brazil and you can see where the Amazon is is that big blue bit at the top and then if I zoom in This isn't all of Brazil This is just the Amazon and you can see the bit that's green and you can see the Amazon up there because it's kind of Purpley that big watercourse The green bit and then you can see the yellow bits and the yellow bits are All the parts of the Amazon This is a few years ago now. It's be worse now But all the parts of the Amazon that are supposed to be Inviolable never touched never cut but have been cut so the yellow parts of the bits where It's slowly been encroaching inward and inward and inward and closer into the depths of the Amazonian basin And you can sort of see how the how the I've drawn the red line So you can see how that's been marching ahead But then we were able because they're there's some amazingly good Law enforcement in Brazil even if they have a terrible time under a president like Bolsonaro but they could they could link us to the GPS look coordinates of murders and and Slavery cases and the big blue dots means lots of slavery cases in one place But you can see exactly how it operates so that if you go inside the 2018 curve and you go up to the right and you can see a big blue dot. That's that's more than 40 cases of enslavement and you can see that it's surrounded by I think it's 12 or 10 known murders Now what would have happened was that somebody would have rounded up Semterra Offered them a job taking them away at night put them into that part of the forest and begin to cut Because it was a good place to cut and there might have been some special trees there that they wanted to take out That would be high-value trees But one of the things that happened in those situations that happens almost all the time as we're back to the disposability com concept is that they will literally Often work them near to death and then rather than leave them behind or even worse Go let them go get away so that they might report they just shoot them So they shoot them and bury them in the forest and then it's very hard to find So the the ones that we can see that we know about all of those blue dots and all of those red dots We know that's a small fraction of what's actually happened in that space and It goes into this. I mean this is it's particularly Surprised me when I learned how many types of plumbing fixtures come from Brazil and that you know every day I may be touching steel that's been made from from that that kind of situation Okay, I want to shift for a moment and as I go into another example, but this isn't so much about the environmental side it's about What's happening with the what we're discovering is this very intense interaction between slavery and conflict So slavery and child soldiers and genocide and sexual assault and and in fact in this case the auction of young slaves But I'll point out first that just in the last couple of years We've taken the oops a la World conflict database if some of you will know that in Sweden They have this place where they record all the conflicts and then we've we've brought a team of coders and researchers And we we said okay, so for every single conflict that occurred between 1989 and 2016 We want to search every source that we can and see if there was any enslavement occurring in that conflict. I Had been working in places like Eastern Congo where I was seeing child soldiers on the ground I was seeing child soldiers on the ground in Western Africa. I was seeing children who I was very concerned about in places like Pakistan and We wanted to see is there a clear linkage between what happens particularly in these less What they what they sometimes called low intensity conflicts, which are means not major wars Carried forward by entire countries like Russia versus Ukraine, but small groups fighting each other in places When we did that and when we coded very Conservatively and we also built it into a contemporary slavery and armed conflict database Of which there were a hundred and seventy one Conflicts in that time period totaling a hundred one thousand one hundred and thirteen conflict years because the conflicts last more than one year So it comes to that so we we coded for all the different types of enslavement if there were any And I have to say I was expecting to find it, but I didn't expect to find Basically 90 almost 90 percent of the conflicts Involved enslaved enslaved either child soldiers or forced labor or sexual exploitation and forced marriage or human trafficking Then which often involved the selling of people after they had been caught captured by an armed group now that was across all of The conflicts in the world, but I'm going to focus down in a set just now on a particular one of those to do To really illustrate it now We're pushing the data backwards and we're pushing it forward So we want to see what it's going to turn out to be if we look much longer But in fact if you look back in history One of the things that I'm working on with the historian is a Whole book which will be about how conflict and slavery have been marching along hand in hand Pretty much since the Bronze Age collapse and and it's pretty clear how you do that I'm you know Rome ran on slavery the way the United States runs on oil And it was the fundamental foundation of that economy the particular one I want to point to as an illustration is Is is is Isis and I don't know if you know the Isis online magazine the beak And I have to immediately give you a health warning and say don't go look it up yourself because Homeland security will come and visit you But there are sometimes usually a university a particular computer you can use to look at dicey websites owned by terrorist groups So anyway, just don't don't don't just roll up and say oh, let's see what's in to beat this week, you know But notice the key article in this particular issue the revive revival of slavery before the hour Now that it sounds wait before the hour in fact, that's a that's a key code phrase for members of Isis before the hour is the indication of The beginning of the process of the end of the world So it's it's the cataclysmic apocalyptic Ending of the world as we know it and the Reestablishment of the world as as in as an Isis is long Islamic state And and the notion and this is a code phrase before the hour is what what are those signs? that we're going to witness but when we know the end of the world is nigh and One of them is about the revival of slavery and it was interesting that that's exactly one of the things that they focused on in their work strategically and tactically very carefully in bureaucratic ways As for example, and this is where We were able to get hold of captured Isis documents from their invasion of the Sinjar area where the Yazidis live and We were able to analyze those for the things that I'm going to show you But up at the top is where the Yazidis live the Isis forces moved into that space They actually had a religious like jury That that worked carefully through before they invaded they asked this religious jury of Exactly Who are these Yazidis and how should we treat them? Some thought they might have been lapsed Muslims. Some thought they might be something else and at the end of the day They said no, they're mushrik, which means devil worshipers. So the only thing you can do with them is kill so they they gave them that order and they Established a very systematic process where they entered all of the towns in That province and then they began to immediately round up the entire population of each town Early in the morning, they would surround them at night and then you can see the outcomes according to their age and their gender and notice that elderly women were separated Women that were thought to be past childbearing they were separated marched off somewhere else And then they would all be killed and usually put into a mass grave and likewise men Mature men were assumed to be dangerous and they would be marched off to someplace else And again, it would be a mass grave and a mass execution, but you can see what was happening with women and children Boys were being sent into military training boys were being sent into other types of work but particularly the Thing that the that the religious committee said was okay was to remember that women aren't Any equal to men according to the way they see the world and that once impregnated they become carriers from Isis right they begin this is a it's a it's a forced impregnation as There's an amazing old article from quite a long time ago, but it was called forced impregnation as genocide And it's about replacement through impregnation, right? And you can see that there were all I won't go into all of them But you can see that there were some of the women were sold some of them worse were auctioned in public auctions some of them were auctioned on online auctions and This was one of the things that surprises we didn't understand this until after we captured the documents that they were doing online auctions and we also then discovered that a lot of the women who had really disappeared Were the ones who had been purchased in online auctions and then shipped off to we don't know where and their families don't know where There's somewhere around the Middle East probably But it's it's the it's the part of the population that hasn't been found yet So you can see sold All the terrible types of thing given as gifts and so forth and one of the things that was powerful about this was how we began to say What was tactical about this and what was strategic about this and we begin to also apply that same question to other types of conflict about You can use it for the American Civil War You can look back to the what happened in the American Civil War and say what was the tactical use of African Americans by the Confederacy What was the tactical use of them African Americans by the Union? What were the strategic things? Well, it was the strategy was on both sides One was to hold on to it so slavery and what the other was to maybe stop it And they will get around to that later possibly kind of thing, but the point was They were working it very clearly in both directions and working it to In ways that we are now coming under to understand that we hadn't really grasped before about the nature of this of this Slavery slavery within conflict Becoming so much part of a genocidal approach The other thing what that we could tell from the internal documents is that they were making about two million dollars a day of by selling people that they were that they had taken and and and Fascinating to me that in in Arabic the name of the person who was in charge was the minister of spoils the minister of spoils So I'll just point out that we've now launched a much larger study about genocide and we've been looking at genocides across history and one of the things that we've been watching is Where does slavery come into the genocide? And what we're finding is that if you look closely It's hard to find a genocide that doesn't have extensive forms of enslavement as a as a parallel activity Right as a parallel activity This is the second world war everyone understands the genocide of the Holocaust and we all understand seven to eight million people killed in that way But we also know that there's about 10 to 12 million people who were caught up and used the slave labor in the same in the same time period And that there was an overlap between them and this the slave labor of the second world world doesn't get quite the attention that The Holocaust for a good reason. I'm not trying to make it into into a fight But we when you look back it turns out we're finding more So we're trying to learn about that and try to understand that in the same way That we're trying to look at something that we're starting to call world war zero The we're you know when we started to think about the processes of conflict and enslavement and genocide and when we look across this and I Appreciate I'm out on a limb here and all the historians are going to kick me in the shin later, but We look at this and say this 1492 to 1900 period. Well, that's not like a bunch of Indian wars. That's not bunch of just slave trading That's that you did this this is a this is a Euro invasion of the Western Hemisphere and we're saying it needs to be thought of in that way for a while so we can see the big picture and You know, there there's a been a recent book called the other slavery From someone in California Davis, which is powerful because he understand He's written about and exposed what the Spanish were doing over that entire period and and into the American so we've been also coding up something we call the Euro invasion conflict database, right and One of the things that I'll just point to is that we've been turning up things like this Documented genocidal massacres and this is just the ones in California. Now. These aren't vast numbers of I mean, unless you're one of the dead people, it's pretty important to you but you know the but these were significant numbers for the for the indigenous people who were living in California at the time and As we work through and say, okay, was this just a conflict or was this a battle? No, actually this was a massacre and was this a massacre that was just An accidental battle that turned into a massacre? Well, no and the reason why we can call it a genocidal massacre is because Before it occurs The governor the lieutenant governor the local mayors the preachers are making clear genocidal statements Saying We have to kill all of them I mean, it's there in their newspapers It's there and they're in their political records and you say, okay, so that's a that's an exterminationist approach Right, this isn't just a fight. It's not just a fight. It's this and then on the side slavery as well Now here's a few couple of things. I'm just going to throw out to say this is where we're headed next One of the things is that we're we're finding a lot of linkages, but between conflict groups Who are also very religious And are also very much involved usually in not just the suppression of women but also in things like child enforced marriage So, you know, all of these groups you may not know than all of these groups But they're all kind of as bad as each other And they all are very clear about they're acting from a religious basis And and that religious space is somehow Enables them makes possible for them Gives them the justification the religious and spiritual justification To not just kill but also to enslave and also to have this total control, especially over women and girls And we're beginning to try to understand we want to try to break this apart and strangely There's actually now if you know the Templeton foundation, which is a very odd outfit in You know, I hope no one's here from there, but they're a pretty strange outfit But they're actually now very interested in in supporting research It looks at the in a sense the negative impact of religion And they they find this a bit interesting right so Can we reduce or enslavery in the current global emergency after all those horrible things that I've told you Can can I even raise this question and the answer the short answer is Yes If a whole lot of positive things happen and we take certain actions And we actually know the likely cost and we also have some proven methods of liberation and reintegration that have worked out over the last 20 to 30 years And we also know from other economic studies that we're That almost every time you bring a group to freedom There's a what we call a freedom dividend the the economic activity always increases and the economic turnover always increases So a couple of those this this is one that I know well 25 years ago. I was in northern india. I was in villages where they were in hereditary forms Of collateral debt bondage slavery, which I appreciate is a long name But it's they were in hereditary slavery families in small villages. Oh um and Working with local NGOs, we found a way to to bring these villages to freedom But it actually involves a kitchen cooking school meals Inserting like injecting a school into the village. It takes three years for it to happen but at this point The NGO that I work with which is a california based one called voices for freedom 50 schools and villages with hereditary slavery 5000 And here's the fascinating thing because we've been able to do really tight economic costings 195 dollars per person to bring them from slavery to freedom 195 dollars, right Now these things are cheaper in india, right, especially cheaper in ultra pradesh But you know you multiply that up and you're we're still not into crazy numbers, right? We also know that Go ahead. Go to the next one. Oh, I don't know what's happened now. Oh, there we go. Um Oh, I wanted to do that. I don't know why we also know that carbon credits Which are debatable I totally understand that carbon credits are a debatable situation But if you took the simplicity Model of carbon credits and you actually said in places like brazil We will you've been forced to cut this forest We will now pay you to replant this for us and we will bankroll this by selling a carbon credit And we're going to do mixed for us not not monoculture We're going to put try to put the amazon back the way it used to be We know that if you multiply up just what we know about the deforestation using slavery is that it would be The carbon credits at the at the normal rate today of carbon credits would be more than enough to pay for The costs of bringing people out of slavery around the planet so It estimates we think we'd be about 27 billion That you could do from all the forests that are being cut by people in slavery if we could go there, right? but What we think we know is About 23 billion right Is what if you amortize it across all of the different levels of slavery around the world It's about 23 billion would cost we think it's around 500 dollars to per person Much more in the united states five to ten thousand dollars But in northern india $195 so you know it begins to average up And but if you add up what all the anti-slavery groups and all the governmental Budgets are for this around the world you get to 400 million a year at most So that means 58 more years, but we don't have 58 years and of course people will live and die in slavery in 58 years And then we have to do that somehow before the ecological collapse Which the people in slavery are pushing along by through deforestation and so forth so This is where we are on the planetary boundaries Every place you see red is a place where we've already crossed a line as a as a global population to create a situation of of danger of ecological and environmental danger And we and we know that that the yellow zones are the places where They're still expanding, but they're but they're not contracting. They're all expanding So that just takes us to to this Fundamental thing that i'll finish with and say there's a very interesting set of scenarios, which i find Myself and i'm like a congenital pathological Optimist i'm a very optimistic person, but i find them worrisome very worrisome Because we as a public we we're thinking about the disasters and there's wait. There's there's some kind of cold wet River that's flowing over us now and we're all supposed to worry about that But in fact we've got to think big and get away from this disaster snowball and like that What are these scenarios? Well, i'll start with the worst one, right? The paleocene eocene thermal maximum model so this was like Millions of years ago on planet earth, but it was a time when co2 began to increase Very dramatically over a very a pretty long period of time and it led to a situation where the The mean temperatures went up between five and eight degrees centigrade to the point That doesn't seem like a lot, but half the Life forms in the oceans died And during that time period Huge areas of the earth began to be deserts Antarctica lost its ice I mean it was a it was a very dramatic alteration Into in the entire ecosystem of the planet It's just that we are now Moving our co2 up the ladder faster than happened in the Paleocene eocene period right so we're actually moving much more quickly and in that direction and you know To the point that some of the people in this room might actually see some of that start to happen or We could have these anthropogenic impacts all over the world create problems for us Whether in conflict or in in the environment or in business or ignoring it and not letting us worry about where our shrimp comes from or like that And and it tends to all of that tends to underfund and delay and haul to all anti slavery activities It's the that's the business as usual model because that's where we are right now Or we could actually say What what if we were to invest In anti slavery in those specific activities, which are actually dramatically altering Ecological and environmental factors So if you if you stop people destroying the forest, that's that's a great move If you get the same people to replant the forest That's even better and or you stop the the the brick making in the way that it's occurring and the co2 drops very dramatically we could actually pause The co2 rise perhaps for some years or something like that I'm hoping we might go For scenario three. I'm not quite sure how we make that happen. There's political scientists here who I'm sure I figured that all out ahead of time Um, and I know that I'm right up against my time and we started late So I'll just say and we're gonna have questions. I think as well, but um, thank you. Thank you very much Thank you very much. Kevin. That was uh Not only thought provoking but eye-opening We will have questions now in order to Have questions. I'm gonna ask for the assistance, but I also want to just recognize and thank Our wonderful partner in the graduate division who more than anyone else makes this event happen, which is jane fink Jane is uh going to assist I I think because I don't have a lot of where maybe you can just call on people If you put up your hand and jane will will bring the Bring the mic and you can ask your question. Kevin. Do you want to just take the questions yourself? Yeah, thank you. Yes, ma'am Um, thank you for your presentation on one of the slides. You mentioned hereditary slavery and how um, like a method in Resolving slavery out of areas was like through targeting like these villages that Were experiencing hereditary enslavement. Um, could you please elaborate on what that means and what that process Yeah, and what the process looks like. Yeah, it's it's it's fairly simple Um, this is we're talking here about a very large area of northern South asia But so it was a pradesh, which is a state, but you know, it has 750 million people in it Just one state, but so it's a big rural area and but it's also happening in napal. It's also happening in pakistan fundamentally it's almost always um The first part of the mechanism is there's a cultural or defined difference between the groups So a local landowner who's like the big daddy in the area and then there are these groups who are not even on the um on the ladder of the of the of the indian caste system There are people who are off the bottom. It's like coals And others who are tribal often referred to as tribals those Quite a few generations ago would have been promise jobs they would have brought been brought in to Work in a say an agricultural setting or possibly a mine or even a deforestation project or like this but this could be we could be talking about 80 90 100 and more years ago And the the people who bring them in say you can build a hut. We can give you food and so forth. Um But dang, you know, they they they never pay their debt They're this has advanced to them as a debt and They're illiterate and they can't keep read the the the records anyway and the and the local landowner Who's a brahman or someone else at a high caste and has the police on their side? Just simply keep saying sorry. You still haven't made it You're just gonna have to stay on Now because they can't leave their community within a generation or two they lose any sense Of what it could be like to live in a situation of mobility Of freedom, right? They they have no sense of freedom of movement and very little of even temporality They have a sense of the present They must live in this present because they can't they don't really have a future. They don't even understand their past very well, so That's why it's called hereditary collateral debt bondage slavery because they offered themselves as collateral ins to debt Well, actually it was great great grandfather who did that But there's plenty of written about that particular type of enslavement if you want to we can I could tell you I can tell you some sources later How's that? Yeah, yes, sir. This was bracing sobering Have you had any um, have you made any effort to deliver this roadshow to any of the um parliaments or congresses or executive branches or consortia of Governments or you name it anywhere Has anybody has it gotten any traction anytime you've delivered it and has anybody done the math? I mean when you do the math and you say basically for 23 billion dollars We could wipe out a whole ton of this maybe all of it And uh, you know it would take us some time But all we have to do is put the money aside and plow ahead Have has anybody actually said well we we could we would be happy to cut a channel to make that happen You just bring the money or you just bring the this or that is there any effort going on to To instrumentalize all of this the short answer is In the most meager ways if at all um There was a moment and again I think it might have been 20 years ago when I was talking in seattle and I talked about That 23 billion or it might have been 19 billion at that point because it was 20 years ago And there was someone in the audience because it was seattle who said, you know, I could do that. I could make that You know, yeah, it wasn't Bill Gates. It wasn't Bill Gates But you know who actually said we could do that now I will say that particular person went on to bankroll a foundation which has been bankrolling work that's been At the right level and doing the right kinds of things um But not at the scale that that we really need we really really needs to be governmental scale, doesn't it? And yeah, have we talked to have I talked to yeah I mean bill clinton held my books up at the global initiative and said read this guy's books And we're going to make this happen and bing bing bomb and I'd come and help planning the The initiatives and all this kind of stuff and even george bush was barely on side You know, he didn't I'm not sure he totally understood it when I talked to him about it But he you know, he he seemed like he wanted to do something um Norway's the government in good norway I've worked with them closely for a long time now and they do great things, but they're only norway, right? You know, they can't they can't do the big stuff in the same ways And and it becomes a political issue that fades in and fades out and slaves don't vote And if I if you're aware of what's going on in the uk right now where the conservatives are actually trying to shut all doors for immigration And refugee status they're actually creating a situation that a lot of us are screaming about because If they do that it will actually be a gift to human traffickers Because they say if someone comes here and then applies under we have something called Uh a modern slavery act that I helped write in parliament, right? And we have this mechanism called the national referral mechanism where you can say I've been brought here in slavery I need to enter this system and I'm going to go down this pathway and I'm going to be taken care of It'll shut the door to that This this new law the Tories say they were going to pass this law. They're going to end that Throw the law out throw out the anti-slavery law And we're just we're gobsmacked and don't know where to go with this I mean, it's like being under trump in a weird way because it's like Just the opposite in and so we're fighting at the minute for example So there's people moving backwards, right as well as the people who move forwards No, I and I you know, maybe it's down to me. Maybe I'm good, but I'm not good enough, right? You know, maybe if I was Frederick Douglass as opposed to me, right? I could actually move people in the way, you know I I would like to have done Or maybe we just haven't quite hit that tip over point But every time there's another crisis Many of them are Are things that we really need to think about like global warming And need to focus on as well Then you you say well, do I get everybody in the world out of slavery or do I Try to reduce co2 or you know, what? It's a tricky situation and I I'd love your ideas if you can help us figure out How do we make how do we mobilize this in a in a way that goes as big as we as it needs to We've worked on that for years. It's gotten a lot bigger, but it's still not It's still not the red cross, you know, it's still not save the children or something like that I don't know if that really answered but Yeah, yes, ma'am I hope the answer this is not obvious and I'm just not seeing anything but Um, I realized that in the United States. It was very yellow You know a pale yellow for for indicating the level of slavery human slavery But can you tell me like how does it come down in the united states? Like what does it look like here in ways that We may not have thought of I certainly I can do um And one of the things I'll tell you though is that that yellow color does not include what happens in the prison system Okay, I wish I could but I can't get clear It's very interesting that because prisons are now owned and run by corporations They go under a business Privacy law and so you cannot get at The actual internal records of prisons anymore When I moved out of america a long time ago I'd worked in prisons and you could actually there were government entities so you could ask for government So so I You know when people ask me, you know, is that Is that state-sponsored slavery in the prisons in the united states? And I all I can say is, you know, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck It's probably a duck, but I can't actually no one will let me dissect that duck to make sure it's a duck To be totally academically precise about it in terms of the other there's a there's a There's a significant amount of enslavement in the directions of agriculture Or even construction After the the big hurricanes down in new orleans in louisiana They stopped a lot of the trafficking of human being of mostly women into commercial sexual exploitation enslavement into commercial sexual exploitation Because that party town of new orleans had a lot of that going on but after The hurricane Wiped it out That all stopped and it all began to be replaced by People from south america and central america and some from india and some from pakistan. They were brought in for Demolishing all the broken buildings and rebuilding and all this kind of stuff. Some of that came to federal in right Pretty much almost anything you can think of where you could hide a person away So we know that there are chinese gangs from certain state provinces of china For example that move people over And put them in the backs of restaurants and put them into brothels and put them into these others So you've got that kind of work as well so You know i've i've i've actually When we wrote the slave next door, which was about i wrote that with a co-author which is about all the types of slavery in the united states You know, we actually found a case in a circus Right people who had been lured into this situation and enslaved in a traveling circus in the united states I mean, that's a weird and strange one, but it it kind of rolled and rolled. It's like you if you poke and Look and Pull the the curtains back you you can find it a lot of places in a lot of different things But you can you know, which ones it'll be it'll be the dirty dangerous jobs Right and one and some of these are exacerbated by u.s. Government policies So i don't know i don't know if the law is still exactly like this But it was when we wrote that book is that there was one type of visa For nannies to come from western europe In other words white girls, right from nice White girl countries, right? So if you were irish or german or french or dutch you had this special nanny visa Where you had where the people would check on you The government had a person to check to make sure you were safe and fine And you could have a phone that you were given that could you call immediately if you needed any help But if you were coming from peru Right chili mexico guamala no such thing Right a completely different system Right and you could end up somebody you you would be Broad with people saying oh, this is a nanny, but you could do anything you like with them Almost no protection. So It's a it's a big country and there's a lot of entrepreneurial people who aren't nice, right? What's another question? okay Thank you for the lecture You talked about the slave women Who were deveining fish? um Are these national governments? not acting on slavery because the Institution of slavery in their countries are profitable for them and Do you think that international organizations like the un could help with this? Well, the short answer is yes The they're the That was been bangladesh in particular and in bangladesh There is literally a thing that I don't know how to say it in bang in the bangladesh language But if they call it the the shrimp mafia If there's so many billions and billions of us dollars that flow in on shrimp and fish in the bangladesh That the government now is in the pocket of these basically mafias And yeah, uh, there's a lot of reasons why they won't like that to happen when we first found the fish camps I worked with the person who was the state department's ambassador on human trafficking And he went he flew to bangladesh and talked to the prime minister and said Look, here's the the photographic evidence and here's the locations and here's this and here's that And he said oh, yeah, that's really bad. That's we you know, we'll we'll do something about that and they did nothing except um threaten and expel Some of my colleagues some of the people I've worked with there Who they said you need to leave the country right away unless you want to get hurt I mean it was that that it's that kind of mess, right? So there are parts of While while while people in slavery are very little and sometimes they're working on things that actually don't sell for much money Or if anything like a brick There's areas where it's very lucrative and very mean and Soprano type people right, you know real mafia Are builds around it and are and are not going to open up a way For people to get in there and it would take tremendous power the un Doesn't have that power You know, it's sad but true I worked in the un for a while in the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking part of the un in vienna and the best we could do was talk and really and and push things very slightly but It's the one of the best ideas in the in the history of people the un But it's pretty puny in terms of what it can actually accomplish Yes, sir Thank you. This is a really an amazing talk. I'm glad I made it out here today Um, I'm glad you did too. One of the things that that I was a little bit late So maybe I missed some of the beginning part of this But there's clearly a connection between the lives that we live And the existence Of slavery as you've described it Across the board. I mean from what we eat to what how we decorate our bathrooms Our kitchens, you know, those slabs on the back of those boys don't go into their homes. They go into ours So, you know, what are your thoughts about rather than finding the odd billionaire that's willing to throw billions of dollars at it Getting a billion people to throw one dollar at it by saying no I mean no to not A proposition coming from there But no to some of the propositions in our own culture about how we live about what we need to have to feel happy and successful And whatever, you know, you know within our cultural milios any thoughts on that Well, one of the first thoughts is of course, we don't have to we don't have to stop Enjoying a lot of things that we do enjoy even in our obscenely rich lives compared to the rest of the world Because not all of those things are coming from the hands of people who are caught up in slavery One of the things that slaveholders don't do is Lower their prices You see if I'm if I'm a slaveholder and I make if I have a giant cocoa farm in west Africa And cocoa is going for six hundred dollars a ton of beans, right And I can produce it for two hundred dollars a ton and my neighboring farmers who are honest people Can only produce it for four hundred or five hundred dollars a ton. I don't I don't compete with them I want to make six hundred dollars a ton that I've only paying out two You know, I mean the the profit margins for slavery are so high You never they never try to undercut, right? So what what I what that means is that you then you you're in this situation where it's sometimes hard to parse out What's the dirty one stuff and what's the clean stuff? And wonder that that the book I've written most recently particularly about the environment traces a lot of supply chains that you're describing and actually identifies the point at which there's suddenly this sleight of hand and all this slave produced gold considerite molybdenum Coltan you name it, right becomes free Right or okay, or whitewashed, right or whatever And and that's that's part of that very tricky part now I appreciate what you said because we you know There have been a couple of times in the history of this anti-slavery movement this current anti-slavery movement Where people have suddenly woke awake awakened to something like Gosh, cocoa has slavery in it. So chocolate has slavery in it So we need to think about where our chocolate comes from and we can you can make slavery chocolate. That's that's okay And for four or five years there was a huge outcry about this But I also was working with major chocolate companies and the guy at mars said, you know If I change the color of a single m&m in a bag I get a thousand letters And in the same year i'll get three about child slavery and cocoa and and And that's in part because while you're aware and I'm aware and now everybody in the room is aware But there's a huge an enormous number of people in the United States if we're only just talking about the United States whose Immediate concerns about economic life and what they have to do with their responsibilities and the work they have to do And the children they have to support and all of those things preclude and a moment for them often to Reflect in the way that you just reflect in that I reflect as well. So we have to find that way We have to find that way to spread that word And it's not easy, right? It's not easy. It's it's a It's a day after day job that we have to bring to it and then when we Cross that line which this anti-slavery movement has done from the post from the pre untruth eco Media world to the one that we're in now The crazy media where you can't even get truth in into a lot of space. It makes it even harder Sorry, that's that was tried to be optimistic and then they just got into this. Yes, ma'am Tell me when this is very enlightening. I think one thing that we're hearing in this room is we're all surprised We did not know this and it occurs to me that instead of asking billionaires to give you billions of dollars Maybe what you could do What I would try to do if I knew as much as you did was approach people like Matt Damon You know like mpr that is people who can publicize this so there's much greater awareness and If you might I may start with the pictures of What's actually happened and the graphs later to your conclusory remarks Have you know, they're important, but the punch isn't what we actually see these people do this and this is what's happening to them and I think you know like There are a number of people in Hollywood who like to think of themselves as being socially conscious and their ambassadors of goodwill to children or to women like Michelle yo just won and she is very very concerned about the plight of women and children in disasters And these are economic disasters that are very long running, but you know, these are definitely disasters. So I'm sure you've already done things like this, but I feel like there is room here for them to help you to help us And I'm sure there are I'm sure there are and we've had A number of people in Hollywood who have worked with us on this and pushed it along in different ways over the last 20 years In some ways and and and some of them are still doing so and actually operating their own NGOs who do things like There's a there's there's one particular movie star down in Los Angeles who has been bankrolling a whole bunch of techie folk who actually run drones over houses and find out who's looking at child-based pornographic Imagery that is likely to include enslaved people and then they reach out to them And shake them up a little bit and all this kind of stuff. I can't tell you much more about that, but there's There's always this situation where this never goes away, but it also never quite breaks through And there have been those times when we've been very Suddenly big. So we've been on NPR a lot. We've been in the news a lot But it's been very interesting in this post truth world about how hard it is to get into those outlets when we're all supposed to be coming down to these six three word, you know punch lines and It takes a little bit longer than that. I totally am with you and don't think I get to ask billionaires all the time. I mean that only happened that only happened once a long time ago and and so We've certainly asked a lot of people a lot over time and do our best to do so This chap over here has been waiting for some time. Yeah. Oh, yeah, sure. Sure. Sure. Sure First, thank you for coming here and giving this presentation. This is great. My pleasure and so I have a question it's related to the No, instead of just what what can we in the developed world do What can the states do in the form of armed rebellion or any kind of rebellion from from their side? right to Improve the situation or raise the cost of slavery to the point where it's not as economical to to run these so You mentioned before like during the roman era there were like floods there was a slave For almost one state for every citizen and yeah, and when they were Was much easier to have slave uprisings at during those times the servile word Spartacus upright And especially after the second servile word of Spartacus. Yes, you know, there were huge changes to the slave code In the roman slave slavery code that Eventually, it's you know, they they had to treat them better or they had to they couldn't just beat them to death and things like this They had to loosen it up, right? And your graph showed that the percentage of slaves Has been going down right to you know to a much smaller fraction And to me there is a challenge In the sense that When you save a smaller percentage of people like you said people it kind of goes out of People's vision the average person's vision the average person that might sympathize right and You know, for example, conscription is a could be a form of slavery, right and During this during Vietnam, you know, like they were Uprisings throughout us campuses and you know, that was a factor for for the defeat and well now with the iraq war My cousin has been getting sent over and over He has PTSD. He was in the second battle of aluja. His His you know, he got divorced. He's on substance abuse now But there aren't as many Uprising except maybe capital that january 6. Maybe that could be considered something but there isn't the kind of Empathy in the population there isn't the kind of critical mass, right for an uprising So now I'm sorry. I mean the this the Spartacus model Is is appealing in some ways But you actually need an incredibly large number of people in slavery who could communicate with each other And and slavery is atomizing So one of the things that we've been learning from people who have come out of slavery Who are now working in the lab and and and who are getting their phd's and like that Is is how it affects the mind and how it affects the mind so that people become Atemporal they live in an eternal present when they're in slavery and they they're a spatial and they won't move around because they can't and organizing people who are already traumatized and arming them Is kind of a hard one to get moving in the right direction now I will say that a couple of times At the very beginning of when we worked with those villages in northern india and we had to not yet perfected the techniques of pacific Movement into freedom There were some conflicts and people died And we don't you know, we don't we don't put that in the posters, right? And it wasn't it wasn't you wasn't the people in slavery who died. It was the slaveholders who died And because there were just some very very angry ex slaves, especially the women because they were being sexually assaulted And and people died. I have to say I'm a of a particular bent that armed Conflict is not my thing really You know, I tend to be on the pacific end of things. I think we can probably find other ways forward but there are certainly those moments of Frustration and and almost terror when you think Where you begin to think in violent terms But I don't think violence is the right way to go. In fact, I think if there's any place in the world Which demonstrates that violence is the wrong way to end slavery is the united states But we we brought slavery to an end here at a cost of about two million dead Something like that or even more if you counted the people that weren't counted as just battlefield casualties and then it didn't even work well Right. I mean, I don't I think the the the greatest lesson that one of the greatest lessons the United States has to teach the world is Don't try to stop slavery by having a civil war over But in the case of the IDD on the Kurdish and Syrian Yeah, hold on a sec though because you're taking up her chance to Yeah And this is our last one. I'm afraid Thank you for the talk In hearing you speak I was reminded of one of your predecessors Amartya Sen who gave the wine stock lecture and Amartya Sen Spoke extensively about what he called unfreedom And he wasn't referring of course to the type of chattel slavery or collateralized debt slavery that you're talking about But forms of work Which are coerced or exhibit some type of unfreedom Undocumented workers in the central valley low-cost Dalit in India Gulag labor in China if you were to include all of those it wouldn't be 45 million It would probably be 10 times that and I'm wondering whether That in a sense that observation whether you think that's useful or right And secondly, whether that would add to your movement politically that connection between Unfreedom and modern slavery or in a weird way might dilute the efficacy of your movement That's a very interesting idea and thought Alex Let me point out that unfreedom is is a sin talks about it is exactly what you've talked about that it It's very wide continuum across these types of treatment Within the world where we talk about slavery and I have to say the definition of slavery Was incredibly problematic at the beginning of this anti-slavery movement And and and probably 15 years were lost in arguments about what is human trafficking and what is not and all this kind of stuff There's been a resolution of that issue and it all it all hinges around the the Adoption of what are fundamentally the the the definition in the 1926 league of nations Convention which I you know, but I'll just point out that it says That if a person is treated as if they are property And that you can use the indications of what you can do with property To determine if a person is caught up in slavery. So what can you do with your own property? You know, you can use it. You can buy it. You can sell it. You can rent it out You can mortgage it. You can destroy it, right? So if if you could treat another human being exactly as you would, you know, my plastic bottle of water That's a person in slavery now What that means is that it then Takes us up to the edge of some of the workers that you just described that sin You would have put in the space of unfreedom the kind of horrific types of work Which don't necessarily cross the line into the the being able to extinguish them as if they were your property and It's a very interesting and open question That you've raised is like what if we did? What if we did expand that definition? I might want to just lie down for a while because the definitional Arguments went on for so many years. I don't want to start anymore. But You're right. It might change the way people understood, but I don't want to dilute The reality of enslavement either, right? I absolutely don't want to do that So I'll stop there I'm sure we can go all night. I'm sure we could again. I want to thank everyone for attending. I I want to just reinforce that this is a two-day Event tomorrow. We're going to have a panel discussion here at four o'clock a little bit after four o'clock with You know the three professors hosted by or moderated by professor watz on the committee and also with Professor bales here. So I encourage you all to continue the discussion. I really want to thank you. This is a fantastic lecture