An Educational Strategy to Combat Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery including debt bondage, serfdom, forced labor, forced marriage, transferring of wives, inheritance of wives, and transfer of a child for purposes of exploitation. Also forced prostitution, child prostitution, sale of children, and trafficking in children.

Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery

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An Educational Strategy to Combat

Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery

While it is true that raising awareness of human trafficking is key to combating it, media articles can be only mildly effective ... they arouse momentary outrage and they elicit transient sympathy for the featured victim, but they do not seem to have a lasting impact.

Millions of people around the world still suffer in slave-like situations of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation from which they cannot free themselves. Like other abusive societal problems, this one can yield to a well-thought-out, carefully-planned program by dedicated leaders. One element of the solution will come through education, and the media can surely be encouraged to contribute to that effort.

If the subject of Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery could be integrated into school curricula in graduated increments, so that lower grade pupils are exposed only to the kidnapping and forced-labor aspects while secondary school and college students are shown the full picture, a long-term solution will have begun. Broad-scale awareness achieved through the education of two or three generations is the surest way to achieve systemic change. An enlightened society, broadly aware of the nature and scale of modern-day slavery, will not allow the practice to continue.

Prof. Martin Patt

Professor Emeritus

University of Massachusetts - Lowell