Modern Slavery

Thursday is college lecture day. Today we were given some real heart rending stuff on modern slavery. Next year is the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade legislation in the UK, pioneered by William Wilberforce. However, it is reckoned that there are still at least 26 million people in the world living in slavery today. And that is not counting those in child labour, child soldiers, or economic migrants. Slaves range from people in India selling themselves in to bond labour to pay off debts that they can never repay, and their children being born into that bond labour, to women forced to work in brothels in European cities, to labourers shipped across continents to work in sweat shops to provide us with cheap clothes and food.

Jesus came to set the captives free, it's one of the first things he said in his public ministry.

How can we take our part in that work? Well, that will be different for all of us, but what we can all do is look at how we live, and the impact it has in this arena. We can all raise the public conciousness of these issues. There are some good resources and ideas from Anti Slavery International.

Sorry for the preach, but it hit me hard.

TimC