KevinBales

I haven't worked in this problem in Qatar in any deep way (Qatar won't let the Global Slavery Index team in!), but it's hard not to know about it because some great research has been done. It's surprising to me that there are any sponsors left and anyone willing to buy a ticket given that this is blatant exploitation, horrific working conditions, and many cases of slavery as well.

For the most part yes. This is because the fairtrade cooperatives that supply fairtrade goods don't have slavery, they're mostly farmers cooperatives. I trust fairtrade to mean slave-free.

Yes, I think that legalizing prostitution INCREASES enslavement into commercial sexual exploitation - the research I've seen seems to say that. It seems to me that a better model is to make buying sex illegal and selling it legal - as they do in Sweden - but even that seems not good enough in terms of lessening the damage that commercial sexual exploitation does to people.

Probably, and especially in the wealthy countries, that it is all about enslavement into commercial sexual exploitation AND that people in slavery are somehow different to the rest of us and should be thought of as one-dimensional victims.

I saw a leaflet in the early 1990s that said "There are millions of slaves in the world today" and I thought it was BS! Inside the leaflet were single case - and I thought that you can't make millions out of a few cases ... but then I thought if this is true it would be astounding and if it were false someone show disprove it. So I started digging into it and found more and more slavery .... and I'm still at it!