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Scientific American

April 1, 2002

1 min read

The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery

Contrary to conventional wisdom, slavery has not disappeared from the world. Social scientists are trying to explain its persistence

By Kevin Bales

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Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Kevin Bales. University of California Press, 1999.

Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia. Louise Brown. Virago, 2000.

Ending Slavery: Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania. Urs Peter Ruf. Transcript Verlag, 2001.

Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives. Edited by David Kyle and Rey Koslowski. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

KEVIN BALES is professor of contemporary slavery at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull UK. He is a trustee of Anti-Slavery International and a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings, to the Economic Community of West African States, and to the U.S., British, Irish, Norwegian and Nepali governments. Bales began studying slavery in the early 1990s, when few Westerners realized it still existed. Unable to secure funding for his research, he took on a commercial research project and devoted the profits to travel. The outcome—his book Disposable People—was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. His work won the Premio Viareggio for services to humanity in 2000, and a television documentary based on it (shown on HBO and on Britain's Channel 4) won a Peabody Award and two Emmys in 2000.

More by Kevin Bales
Scientific American Magazine Vol 286 Issue 4This article was originally published with the title “The Social Phychology of Modern Slavery” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 286 No. 4 (), p. 80
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0402-80
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