Taylor White White
Katheryn Dietrich
SOCI 314-502
Sociology Term Project Paper
A. Description of the Problem
Africa has had an extensive history of slavery. From the tenth to the mid-nineteenth
century, around 12.5 million slaves were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Slaves
were produced by raiding and capturing between various groups and then the selling of
slaves in exchange for imported goods and weapons (Dalton, 2014). In 1833, Britain
abolished slavery throughout its empire, however this industry has not only continued, but
thanks to globalization, taken on to a more surreptitious life-style. When one hears the
topic of slavery, you might assume that the subject would be discussed in the past tense,
however human enslavement is a thriving multibillion-dollar industry that feeds on
“inequality, poverty, crime, corruption, and violence” and generates over 10 billion dollars
each year. The topic that I chose for my term project paper is modern day human trafficking
and slavery in Africa and how women and children are disproportionately represented in
this industry.
Human trafficking is the illegal movement of people, typically for the purposes of forced
labor or commercial sexual exploitation. Sex slavery, is a key component of modern slavery
and is facilitated by human trafficking. It involves illegal movement of young girls and
women from poor and rural places to areas considered by a high demand for commercial
sex. There are three main factors that predispose women and children to being trafficked
for sexual exploitation and sold into slavery: poverty, lack of education, and gender
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inequality. Human trafficking removes people from their familiar surroundings in order to
create a dependency on the traffickers, control the victims with violence, both psychological
and physical, and often establishing debt bondage (Campbell, 2014: 346). In impoverished
rural areas in West Africa, many young girls future involves work as a domestic servant
(like the abaawa discussed below) or becoming a commercial sex worker (Ouattara, Sen,
Thomson, 1998).
In Ghana, the abolishment of slavery happened from 1874 to about 1930, however “the
ways that emancipation reconfigured the post slavery social structure and gender
formations remain to be fully studied” (Akurang-Parry, 2010: 28). Similar to the way that
the emancipation of African slaves in the United States led to the subsequent financial,
social, and political enslavement of them by systematic oppression and disadvantage in
order to uphold a more subtle hierarchal structure, in Africa, males used innovative,
empowering avenues of social mobility to disempower females. Abaawa, an Akan word
that means prepubescent female, is also used to describe the forced labor class that young
women have been placed in, under the guise of apprenticeships and kin-based institutions
(Akurang-Parry, 2010). This practice mainly denotes domestic servitude.
During their initiation to the practice of sex work, women often experience physical,
mental, social, emotional and psychological manipulation and abuse, forced or coerced
usage of drugs and alcohol, “economic exploitation and debt bondage, legal insecurity,
abusive working and living conditions and a range of risks associated with being an illegal
migrant (Zimmerman et al., 2003; Aborisade, 2008: 128). Sexual abuse and violence against
women is too often ignored, despite the untold numbers of unwanted pregnancies and
negative health implications (Ouattara, Sen, Thomson, 1998). Of the more than 14,000 rape
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cases registered in provincial health centers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
between 2005 and 2007, only 287 were taken to trial (Kulogy, 2006). Women in these areas
are put even more at risk of being sold into slavery for sexual or other purposes because the
national esteem on the value of a woman’s life is extremely low.
There are several different categories of sex workers according to Ntseane (2004):
kids who are still in school, aged 12-15, unemployed out-of-school youth aged 16-25,
educated working class, aged 30-45, alcohol addicts, aged 25-45, and retired, but part-time
women who are 45-50 years of age. The common denominator in all of these categories is
the motivation behind doing the work is lack of money.
Two studies on sex workers in South Africa found that of the 1,209 people working
(either on the street or indoors), eighty-nine point six percent of them were women (Gould,
2014). The Ghana Statistical Service’s survey of 2003 shows that “‘1.5 million children
under the age of fifteen were estimated to be working in Ghana’; this figure includes
children engaged in ‘forced domestic’ labor” (Akurang-Parry, 2010). Dzidzienyo writes:
The sample of the housemaid population was found to be relatively young. The
youngest age at which a girl been [sic] employed was seven years and the oldest, twenty–
five years. Half of the number of housemaids interviewed indicated that they left their
parental home to begin employment before the age of six years (587).
In a local household, an abaawa is supposedly an “apprentice” or a helping hand
who, from the surface, appears to be an genuine part of the family. In reality, however, an
abaawa is a marginalized, involuntary laborer in various capacities. The labor of an abaawa
is exploited by the abaawa holder for the economic benefit and social standing of the family
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(Akurang-Parry, 2010). This is a trend that has withstood hundreds of years from slavery,
through abolition, until now.
The postcolonial abaawa institution, is different from domestic slavery for several
reasons: it is not as brutal, some are enrolled in school in order to become educated, and
most are able to return to their families after a number of years or upon getting married,
and some are compensated meagerly unlike slaves who were paid nothing at all (Akurang-
Parry, 2010).
Aborisade (2008) states that Nigeria is among the major countries of origin for
young women and girls who are more often than not under age and being trafficked to
African, European, and Middle Eastern countries for sex work (Norli, 2006; Olateru-
Olagbegi, 2006; Skogseth, 2006). In Lagos, which has the highest number of brothels and
native prostitutes, the HIV/AIDS prevalence went from two percent in 1989 to seventy
percent by the year 1995.
The pervasiveness of HIV/AIDS in African countries, and the financial burdens it causes
falls mainly on the family of those who are infected. This further exacerbates the already
existing poverty, and with the death of many adults in the household, and the inability of
the extended family to care for them, children, namely female children, are placed at a high
risk of being sold into slavery (Love, 2004).
Gould (2014) learned from interviewing sex workers in South Africa that the flexibility
of the work attracted some of the sex workers there. Women could work off and on as they
needed to meet financial obligations.
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Flexibility extended to working hours: 45 percent of brothel workers said that they
could choose how many days they worked in a week. For 55 percent of indoor sex workers,
the number of days worked per week was set by the brothel (Gould, 2014).
Seventy-five percent of the sex street workers worked off and on, and sixty-two point
five percent were recruited by a friend (Gould, 2014). Although the majority of the brothel
workers did not relay experiences of receiving threats from their managers or pimps, Gould
compiled several responses to the question about the nature of threats made by brothel
owners:
They try to blackmail you when you want to leave and threaten that if you stay away
they will tell your family that you are doing this work or make weak cases against you at
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