MODERN slavery is a wide-ranging term that can encompass a multitude of scenarios. Common to all of them, however, is exploitation — whether for financial or personal gain — and exertion of control. According to a new UN report, women continue to comprise the largest component of trafficking victims in South Asia. In the patriarchal cultures found across this region, marriage can be a stifling and disempowering experience, and social mores create a conducive setting for the kind of exploitation that can be defined as modern slavery. Those who have been brought up in such a culture often cling to its values even when they move to the West, especially when the power differential between genders favours them. An extreme case of modern slavery involving Pakistanis in the US saw three individuals sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to 12 years for having subjected a woman, also from Pakistan, to forced labour for 12 years. They were also ordered to pay her $250,000 in restitution for back wages and other financial losses the victim had sustained on account of their criminal conduct.

The details are horrific. The woman’s ordeal was perpetrated by her in-laws, who subjected her to physical violence and emotional abuse while forcing her into domestic slavery and keeping her cruelly deprived of basic comforts. They even separated her from her children and brainwashed them against her. So profound was the toll on the victim that she was twice driven to attempt suicide and her brother, when he finally saw her after 12 years, found her physically unrecognisable. Situations such as these abound in Pakistan; often, one only learns of them when the violence goes too far and takes the victim’s life. Domestic violence is still considered a private matter to be resolved quietly. The stigma of divorce remains such that many abused women’s parents tend to counsel forbearance, which exposes the victim to continued risk of harm. It does not help that the implementation of provincial domestic laws remains weak, reducing the legislation to little more than words on paper. There is also a dearth of shelter homes for women who want to leave abusive marriages but whose parents cannot or will not take them in. Only when legal systems work to protect women, as in the case mentioned above, do perpetrators get the punishment they deserve.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2023