This year the Edinburgh International Festival is featuring Brett Bailey’s performance piece Exhibit B. Exhibit B presents thirteen living pictures, created with local African residents and asylum seekers…
It’s hard to pin down the supply chain for prawns.
EPA/Daniel Munoz
The use of slave labour in the global chain that supplies prawns to supermarkets in the US and the UK has been highlighted by a report in The Guardian. Following a six-month investigation, it was revealed…
This article contains spoilers. Some reviewers have somewhat lazily compared Amma Asante’s recently opened film Belle to the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, that other film about slavery. But this entirely…
Voluntary Corporate Social Responsibility - because retailers care.
Tim Ireland/PA Wire
After years of campaigning and lobbying, several evidence reviews, a draft government Bill (last September), and pre-legislative scrutiny from a joint select committee of peers and MPs, the UK government…
The slave trade may have been abolished but the job isn’t done yet.
stringberd
Should the descendants of slaves receive compensatory payment? This idea has returned to the US since the publication of a major essay in The Atlantic setting out the case for reparations. Here in the…
Boko Haram’s recent kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Africa’s slavery crisis.
EPA/Ruth McDowall
The mass kidnapping of schoolgirls by terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria is neither a new nor rare occurrence, though this does not make it any less shocking. Boko Haram has been active in Nigeria for…
Children who were rescued from working as bonded labour stage a protest against slavery in New Delhi, India.
EPA
In the late 18th century, a small band of British Quakers and other humanitarian-minded folk began to build the case against the slave trade. Britain’s supremacy in maritime power and technology meant…
Lupita Nyong'o and Alfre Woodard star in Steve McQueen’s new biopic.
Chris Pizzello/AP
The United States was in the middle of a civil war 150 years ago and, while Abraham Lincoln had just issued the emancipation proclamation, it would still be another 18 months until freedom finally came…
And when you’ve finished those there’s the toilet to clean.
Mysid
Launched amid a considerable level of political hype we finally have the chance to read the new Modern Slavery Bill – promised by the home secretary, Teresa May, in a column in The Sunday Times back in…
Responses to violence through human trafficking and slavery demand a multifaceted approach including governments, according to a new report.
shutterstock
The NSW Community Relations Commission today released a report which found the NSW government is failing to adequately acknowledge or respond to reports of human trafficking and slavery. While many in…
Not-so-great wall: Maoism was alive and well in 1970s London.
EarthOwned
The couple accused in the case of alleged “domestic slavery” in London were reportedly the leaders of a tiny Maoist sect, the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, which had gone “underground…
Workers without visas can be swept under the carpet.
Shht!
The recent discovery of three women in Lambeth who had allegedly been held as slaves for more than 30 years has sparked a national debate on the prevalence of slavery in the UK today. In Lambeth, police…
Thousands of people are in domestic servitude in the UK, and many are migrants.
Photographer: Evil Erin
Details are still emerging in the case of three women who claim to have been held as slaves for three decades in a suburban house in London. The Metropolitan police have stated that a 69-year-old Malaysian…
Slaves confront slavers in former colony of Demerara.
Joshua Bryant, 1823
Gelien Matthews, The University of the West Indies: St. Augustine Campus
Caribbean countries are calling upon former European colonisers to engage them in dialogue for reparation for centuries of slavery and genocide. Members of Caricom, the organisation of Caribbean Community…
Rapper Kanye West’s new album Yeezus reflects on race and discrimination in present day America.
EPA/Ferdy Damman
This month, rapper Kanye West’s highly anticipated new album Yeezus was released at perhaps one of the coolest launch events ever. His latest single New Slaves was simultaneously featured on 66 screens…
This week we were again warned by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer that we are rapidly approaching a time when antibiotics will be largely ineffective. We are at risk of returning to a pre-antibiotic age…
Forced labour includes cases where people are told they must work for free to repay ‘debts’.
Anti-Slavery Australia
New legal amendments passed by the Australian parliament today will make forced marriages a criminal offence and make it easier for victims in slavery, forced labour and forced marriage trials to be compensated…
Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” set in the context of slavery, depicts stark racial stereotypes.
AAP/ Facundo Arrizabalaga
This year, America will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a presidential decree that effectively abolished slavery in all states in rebellion during the Civil…