One out of every 150 people is currently living under the conditions of modern slavery, according to a new and devastating report from the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. Worse yet, of the nearly 50 million people subjected to this inhumane practice, nearly nine million found themselves living under these conditions in the last five years — the result of the coronavirus pandemic, climate-related disaster, and a confluence of other factors that have created increasingly desperate circumstances.
The United Nations report focuses on two areas of modern slavery: There is forced labor, which more than 27.6 million people — including 3.3 million children — are currently subjected to, and there are forced marriages, which have trapped more than 22 million people. Both tracks of enslavement have seen a stark rise since 2016, and are present in all regions of the world. In fact, more than half of all forced labor identified by the UN was found to occur in upper-middle-income and high-income nations. Likewise, nearly one-in-four forced marriages happened in well-off nations.
