Overview

Why do fifty million people remain enslaved in the modern world - and why can't we see them? The answer isn't ignorance. The information has been available for thirty years. The answer is something more precisely constructed: a set of stories - six of them - that process the reality of modern slavery in ways that discharge moral discomfort without requiring any change in behaviour. Still Enslaved identifies those stories. Then it dismantles them. The Six Myths This Book Demolishes: It happens over there. Modern slavery is a problem of the developing world - poor countries, weak governance, places far from our cities and lives. Except that investigations in Leicester, Coventry, rural Queensland, and German abattoirs found it on domestic high streets, in local supply chains, serving local consumers. The geography was never the problem. The assumption was. It's caused by criminal supply. Prosecute the traffickers, eliminate the vulnerable, and the problem resolves. Except modern slavery has increased by twenty-four percent in the last five years - the same five years in which supply-side enforcement has intensified. The cause isn't the victim's desperation. It's the economic demand for a price that can only be delivered if someone absorbs a cost they cannot refuse. It's primarily about sex trafficking. A powerful story, with identifiable victims and satisfying rescue narratives - covering approximately seventeen percent of the actual problem. The other eighty-three percent - men and women in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, fishing, and domestic work - remains almost entirely invisible. Slavery means chains. If a person can walk out the door, they are not enslaved. Except the woman who cannot leave because her debt is structured to be unpayable, her documents are in her employer's desk, and her immigration status depends on maintaining the relationship with the person exploiting her - she is as unfree as anyone in physical restraints. Businesses cannot act. Supply chains are too long, too complex, too opaque. Except that the businesses making this argument most insistently are the ones that benefit most directly from the exploitation they claim to be helpless against - and decades of evidence on corporate due diligence says otherwise. It's a criminal aberration. Route out the bad actors, and the economic system will produce just outcomes. Except modern slavery is not what happens when the system goes wrong. It is what the system produces when it operates exactly as designed. Drawing on twenty-five years of counter-slavery investigation - including operational field experience across multiple regions and advisory work with the United Nations - Brian Iselin writes with the authority of someone who has sat in the rooms this book describes. The domestic worker in the Gulf whose passport is in a desk drawer she cannot open. The construction worker in the heat who hasn't been paid in two months and, when asked why he stays, says simply: Where to go? I owe. The teenager in a European city who doesn't know what country she is in. These are not rhetorical devices. They are the unit of analysis the human brain can actually process - the specific, textured reality behind the number fifty million that the brain cannot feel. Still Enslaved moves between the room and the system, between the individual and the structural force that put them there, because neither alone is sufficient. The room without the system is a tragedy. The system without the room is a policy paper. Together, they constitute the thing that demands a response. This is the second, substantially revised edition of Brian Iselin's landmark work on the architecture of modern slavery and the myths that sustain it.

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