Modern slavery rarely uses the shackles, whips, ships’ holds and slave markets historically associated with the transatlantic slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Britain legislated to abolish slavery in 1833 after years of lobbying by William Wilberforce and others. But slavery has not gone away.
As far as the world may have come since the UK’s Abolition Act of 1833 and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, according to the International Labour Organization over 21 million people remain in forced labour worldwide. Over 11.5 million of these are in Australia’s neighbourhood – the Asia-Pacific.
Mark Sneddon & Pete Mulherin
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