Of human bondage
How best to tackle slavery’s scourge? Dinyar Godrej meets some Indian activists who have taken up the challenge.

Child, slave, soldier
You can carry a gun and still be a slave. One child soldier tells his tale.

Going cheap
The global economy doesn’t seem too outraged by the contributions of slave labour. Kevin Bales deciphers what this means for the people at the sharp end.

Dollars and sense
Cough up the cash and liberate a slave. But it’s not quite as easy as that in Sudan, as Mike Dottridge reports.

SLAVERY – THE FACTS

Wanted: the right to refuse
Maggie Black would like to know why forced marriage is so low on the human-rights agenda.

Mother courage
Pureza Lopes Loyola’s search for her missing son has turned into a lifelong mission to denounce slavery in Brazil.

A brief history of slavery

The violent machine
China’s brutal prison camps are, in reality, massive sweatshops. Harry Wu knows – he survived one.

Trapped in the traffic
The lure of a job abroad can land enterprising but poor people in trouble. Elaine Pearson examines the options.

Abolition encore!
A blueprint for ending slavery.

‘We are human beings, not animals.’
When it’s a group of India’s adivasi indigenous people chanting it, the slogan makes sense. The adivasis have lived for generations as virtual outcasts. Many have endured the subhuman hell that is slavery.

Who are the modern-day slaves? Poor and vulnerable people all over the world – as they’ve always been. And they’re treated – as always – like rubbish. Today’s slave-keepers, like their forebears, show few qualms about dehumanizing other people and stamping on their dignity. But even if the rest of us want nothing to do with their actions, we may find turning away harder than we think. Some products of slave labour reach us – but with no health warnings attached.

The real issue is not how to avoid this abuse, but how to engage in stopping it. Some answers come from activists who haven’t let power and intimidation deter them. Their never-say-die attitude is something we can emulate and support. This issue profiles some of them.

We join hands this month with Anti-Slavery International which has been active in the fight against slavery for over 100 years.

Dinyar Godrej for the New Internationalist Co-operative dinyar@newint.org

Beth Herzfeld for Anti-Slavery International b.herzfeld@ antislavery.org