Slavery is all around us, but we are too blind to see it. It is in our hands, and yet
we are too insensitive to touch it. The enslaved are next to us in the streets, but
we are too ignorant to walk alongside them. It must not be relegated to a
footnote in history. It is still a living reality in all our communities, not because
we think it is acceptable, but because our sin lies in blindness and ignorance.
Slavery today takes many forms and encompasses a variety of situations,
including women forced into prostitution, children and adults forced to work in
agriculture, domestic work, or factories and sweatshops producing goods for
global supply chains, even entire families forced to work for nothing to pay off
generational debts or girls forced to marry older men.
The forms of slavery may differ, but they share the same essential
characteristics - the coercive exploitation of the most vulnerable. People are
enslaved through unpaid wages, withheld passports, physical violence,
fraudulent contracts and un-repayable debt.
The tragedy of slavery is that it is a human condition of our own making. It is
driven by human greed and those that would make a profit from excessively
cheap labour. Slavery persists for no other reason than it is highly profitable. It
is one of the most profitable international criminal industries. It feeds on human
vulnerability. The majority of those who find themselves enslaved come from
marginalised and impoverished communities.
Slavery never occurs in isolation. It takes place when the rule of law fails and
when those that are vulnerable to human exploitation are offered no protection.
It is nourished by chaos, conflict and natural disasters - all of which have been
sadly on the rise in recent years.
The ground-breaking UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 provides a helpful template.
If we are to eradicate modern slavery, then our efforts need to move beyond
simply disrupting the flows of slavery to addressing the inequality or weak rule
of law in source countries. This will be done alongside serious efforts to make
supply chains slavery-free, bringing major investors alongside the work so that
success in supply chains can have far-reaching impact, and making it easier to
report slavery by making it more visible.
The Church of England is committed to eradicating slavery in all its forms and
this statement explains the steps which the National Church Institutions take to
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try to ensure that it does not exist in any place in our supply chains. In addition,
as you will read, we seek to exercise our influence as an investor on the
companies in which we invest and to resource the wider Church to tackle this
issue through initiatives such as The Clewer Initiative.
