30 Quotes by Kevin Bales

Looking at the nature of new slavery we see obvious themes: slaves are cheap and disposable; control continues without legal ownership; slavery is hidden behind contracts; and slavery flourishes in communities under stress. Those social conditions have to exist side by side with an economy that fosters slavery.

If a government has no motivation to guarantee human rights within its borders, those rights can disappear. If those whose rights are violated cannot find protection, they are unlikely to accuse and fight those with guns and power.

If you look at slavery across all human history, and you sort of strip away the packaging, whether it's racialized or religious-based, and you look at the actual core of the slavery, it's one person completely controlling another one.

The flow of people into the United States into slavery, it follows the other types of immigration into the United States, so people who are trying to build new lives, trying to build a better life.

If our kids were hungry, we'd step into slavery.

Most of the people who come into slavery today, the people who enter into slavery for the first time in the present moment, are not captured, they're not knocked over the head, it doesn't follow the old sorts of mechanisms.

It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.

It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.

The factor that makes people extremely vulnerable to enslavement is the lack of the rule of law.