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There Are More Than 40,000,000 Slaves In The World Today

At this very moment there are over 40,000,000 people around the world trapped in slavery. A number that is larger than any point before in history… and perniciously, a figure that grows everyday.

Millions of them are children. And then millions of those are living in the most devastating conditions imaginable. 

Bruce Ladebu created and operates an initiative called Children’s Rescue where both he and his team identify instances of child slavery and then go and extract those very children from these environments

#181 Bruce Ladebu On The Curious Worldview Podcast

In this episode, Bruce discusses the modern map of slavery, some of the cultural and economic forces that allow for slavery in the modern world. The extraction process of saving the children, and then what happens to the children after they’re saved. This is 75 minutes, so there is of course much around those themes as well, including both Bruce’s trauma and the children’s trauma from undergoing these experiences, and even as well the Jim Ezequiel movie, ‘The Sound Of Freedom’. 

This podcast works alongside two other episodes we’ve done before on slavery, the first being with Matthew Freidman #152 and Lisa Kristine #160.

There is some really heavy stuff that Bruce addresses here and it can seem like such an insurmountable problem, but hang in for Bruce’s metaphor at the end and why he does all of this…

Bruce Ladebu - Out Of The Slave Fields

Forward this email or share this podcast episode , for the better informed we are about this reality, at the very least, the more discerning we can be in our consumption that feeds this industry. 

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
When I wrote to you, you said you just needed to head to Africa for a operation. How much can you say about that? How'd it go?

Bruce Ladebu
It went really well. We were working in a couple different locations in Africa. We specialize in going into places where others don't want to go. In this particular case, we were rescuing children in a remote area. We had to go by boat and the children were enslaved in the fishing industry, in mining, in agriculture, you know, like, well, it was a lot of drug fields, so it was cartel driven, but we were able to get, I think, eight children out of that one and get them into a good safe location and the...

The challenges were of course transportation, you know, going across these bodies of water and the heat and then making sure that these kids were taken care of. They're all highly abused. They get beaten a lot. They don't eat right. Most of them have lice and worms. And so we get a medical care also. We actually had a doctor traveling with us on that one.

Ryan
And how did you catch wind of these situations? Do you rely on a big intelligence network?

Bruce Ladebu
We do. I've been doing this for full time for 15 years, but I started in the 90s where I was traveling in the former Soviet Union. We had heard about human trafficking, that the KGB, when the wall came down, they became the new mafia. It was just common. So we started looking into it. Nothing I could do. I had no idea what I was doing back then. So I kept researching, you know, looking for people to help me, but I couldn't find anybody anywhere back then. Even when I started in 2009 full time, there was very few people doing this. And now there's thousands of organizations. But the. So I've just had to learn as I go.

You know, and it's been a learning process. I'm not sure I answered your question there, but kind of got sidetracked.

Ryan
Well, much of the book was sort of Pakistan and Asia. But now Africa as well. Is your network just sort of growing over time and you're told Hey, Bruce, there's this situation here, you'd be, you know, the right outfit to extract these children. Or is there other things at play?

Bruce Ladebu
Yeah, yeah, we've developed that intelligence network and I get calls, I was just talking to somebody the other day and I said, you know, I get a call at least every day, if not every other day from somewhere in the world saying, we need your help. We need, you know, my daughter, you know, 10 year old was kidnapped and they're going to marry her off to a 70 year old or, you know, these kids are missing or they've gone, you know, rebels came into a village and took them. There's some I can help with and much of it I can't due to financial limitations.

But also, some of it's just too big. We do what we can and we've been pretty successful in how we do things. So all those phone calls and all those contacts and all the travel that I've done worldwide, I've made all the contacts to become our intelligence network. And they're the ones that let us know where these kids need to be rescued.

Ryan
Is the broad figure of 40 million people right now living in modern slavery still accurate or is that number larger?

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.