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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

I know the article focuses a lot on Instagram/Android/iOS, but the underlying story is utterly ridiculous. This isn't a small group of criminal gangs who are doing this. It's the middle class and upper class of a first world nation, who are literally recreating slavery in the 21st century.

I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner - no normal person would risk doing it if they faced 10-20 years imprisonment for human trafficking. Simply pass a law that all domestic workers have to report to a police station for 5 minutes every Sunday, alone, during which time they will be asked if they are being held against their will. This would likely eliminate the vast majority of human trafficking currently happening over there. It blows my mind that the government is doing so little about something so abhorrent.

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“Under what is known as the Kafala system, a domestic worker cannot change or quit her job, nor leave the country without her sponsor's permission.”

That doesn’t sound like the a law that is intended to prevent slavery like conditions for domestic workers. And very much encourage abuse in general and confiscating passports specifically (can’t leave the country without the sponsor’s permission sounds like a pretty implied permission to take someone’s passport).

It's not dissimilar from a sponsorship system in the US, where you need your employer to sponsor you so that you work and reside in the country. It is against the law to take someone's passport.

It's opposite: the employer must sponsor you for you to stay in the country, else you have to go back home.

Unlike this where the worker cannot go back home.

As I pointed out, it's against the law to hold their passport and to prevent them from returning or traveling.

While I absolutely agree that this needs to be crackef and every perpetrator personally punished, let's not forget that this is undercover also happening in other countries. Blood farms in India (look it up, horrifying), brick kilns in Pakistan where entire families are enslaved for generations, labour and disappearance camps in China and many forms of illegal slavery even in Europe, America, Australia, ...

Romanians in slave-like conditions on Italian farms, African refugees and economic migrants enslaved in North Africa and Spain, Mexicans and trafficked people in slave conditions across the US, forced prostitution in America, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Canada, ... - of locals and foreigners alike. I've heard thanks to the refugee influx you can get a prostitute in Athens for 10€. And all this nightmare is not even counting all the 'arranged marriages' between 12 year old girls and 62 year old 'husbands'.

This is a human problem, and one that far too few resources are spent on. Child abuse gets much attention but factually still too few resources (ask the 9 year old Filipina prostituting herself on Skype - although probably she's still better off than her neighbour trafficked to Thailand). But beyond this, even in what you would consider the most developed countries, you still find slaves. Because neighbours don't notice or care. Because the police is understaffed or doesn't care. Because even when they are saved there are no resources to truly save them.

We all close our eyes and ignore these crimes when they happen in broad daylight. If you are anywhere in a big city ANYWHERE there's a good chance you're not far from a slave. We ignore the rampant poverty that leads to all this. We crack down on 'illegal immigrants' and make legal immigration all but impossible - and push the desperate into the hands of real criminals that then abuse them, e.g. by stuffing them in a sealed container in which they freeze and suffocate to death on their way to their enslavement in the UK.

'Frre the Slaves' estimates that, in absolute numbers, there are more slaves today in the world than at any point in history.

Don't ask me how to resolve this. I just know that somehow we are all complicit.

> We crack down on 'illegal immigrants' and make legal immigration all but impossible - and push the desperate into the hands of real criminals that then abuse them, e.g. by stuffing them in a sealed container in which they freeze and suffocate to death on their way to their enslavement in the UK.

Another take on this is that, by making uncontrolled immigration illegal, we make the potential immigrants think twice before coming here and potentially becoming a slave etc.

>>>This isn't a small group of criminal gangs who are doing this. It's the middle class and upper class of a first world nation, who are literally recreating slavery in the 21st century.

>>>I don't understand how this isn't being cracked down in the harshest manner

Your second paragraph's question is answered in your own first paragraph. The power structure in the country isn't going to undermine a system that it directly benefits from. Especially given the culture in that part of the world, that has a very non-Western perspective on things like "submission" and "human rights"....

if epstein's suicide is indicative of anything, it's that a non-trivial portion of gov't is participating

Does anyone really believe it was a suicide?

Probably the CIA/MI5/Mossad/who else definition of the word...

"Ok, we have a target that we need to suicide"

No.

Well it's condoned by a major world religion and most of the countries that espouse that religion. Good luck changing the opinions of a billion people.

Should it be called the first world nation when people without charges are lawfuly inprisoned at somebody's house?

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