Digital Commons Network^™

Applying Community-Based Learning In Teaching And Researching Contemporary Slavery, Monti Narayan Datta

Political Science Faculty Publications

Over the past several years, student demand for courses, research opportunities, and internships in the realm of human rights and modern-day slavery has reached a tipping point, for several reasons. First, social media have made contemporary slavery a familiar issue. MTV’s Exit Campaign (http://mtvexit.org), for instance, has informed at least 20 million people about the subject since the campaign’s launch in 2004. Second, Hollywood has taken notice. With films like 2009’s Taken, starring Liam Neeson as a father who single-handedly (even if unrealistically) rescues his daughter from the clutches of sex traffickers in Europe, students know trafficking is a moral …

Neither Slavery Nor Involuntary Servitude, Monti Narayan Datta

Political Science Faculty Publications

The sex trade grabs headlines, but modern-day slavery takes many forms across the globe, spreading like a cancer in the 21st century. Scholars estimate that there are as many as 27 million slaves today; the majority are not in forced prostitution, but instead in other heinous forms of exploitation (though rape and/or other forms of torture are often tools of coercion).

Slavery permeates northern India, where children, to help pay off their family's exorbitantly high debts to corrupt local businessmen, hunch over in the dark for hours at a stretch as they weave carpets on looms until their small, delicate …