An unnamed(!) victim of slavery had an agreement with her enslaver to keep excess wage money from her work, which she used to buy the freedom of another person, Sally. Her enslaver figured she didn’t have the right to own “property” and it was his lucky day to now own 2 human beings. The courts disagreed and said Sally was a free person. However this was still South Carolina so they made sure to patch up that little “loophole” after the case was over.
The full list is quite interesting. The ~1780 cases in New England outlawing slavery (while the Revolution was ongoing!). Dred Scott and Amistad, of course. Cases mostly from 1780 to 1859. But then heinously, but somehow unsurprisingly, there’s a case from 2021: Nestle Inc makes an appearance using child slave labor for cocoa.
I wish more people realized that when we talk about child slavery in the cocoa industry we are not talking about kids working alongside their parents.
We are mostly talking about trafficked and stolen children taken to plantations in the middle of nowhere and forced to labour long hours by themselves.
Well this is news to me and I say if you have some articles bookmarked already fuckinf share them here (as a new post)*** cuz on lemmy rn it’s more likely to reach front page. I consider myself more aware than average American and I still didn’t know this.
Some children end up on the cocoa farms because they need work and traffickers tell them that the job pays well.[8] Other children are sold to traffickers or farm owners by their own relatives, who are unaware of the dangerous work environment and the lack of any provisions for an education.[25, 4] Often, traffickers abduct the young children from small villages in neighboring African countries, such as Burkina Faso and Mali, two of the poorest countries in the world.[26, 27] In one village in Burkina Faso, almost every mother in the village has had a child trafficked onto cocoa farms.[6] Traffickers will then sell children to cocoa farmers.
Journalists who went undercover as cocoa farmers documented traffickers in Ghana selling children to them for $34 a child.[14] These children were liberated, and social workers reunited them with their families.[14]
Once they have been taken to the cocoa farms, the children may not see their families for years, if ever.[14] If a child who has been trafficked wants to go home, they will likely not be allowed because the trafficker has sold them to work on the cocoa farms for a certain number of years.[14]
Most of the children laboring on cocoa farms are between the ages of 12 and 16, but reporters have found children as young as 5.[28, 29] In addition, 40% of these children are girls, and some end up working on the cocoa farms through adulthood.[29, 4]
Child laborers on cocoa farms work long hours, with some being forced to work up to 14 hours a day.[30] Some of the children use chainsaws to clear the forests.[29] Other children climb the cocoa trees to cut bean pods using a machete. These large, heavy, dangerous knives are the standard tools for children on the cocoa farms, which violates international labor laws and a UN convention on eliminating the worst forms of child labor.[20, 31, 8]
Once they cut the bean pods from the trees, the children pack the pods into sacks that weigh more than 100 pounds when full and carry them through the forest.[8] Aly Diabate, a former enslaved cocoa worker, said, “Some of the bags were taller than me. It took two people to put the bag on my head. And when you didn’t hurry, you were beaten.”
You reminded me of a legal case I read recently: Guardian of Sally v. Beatty
An unnamed(!) victim of slavery had an agreement with her enslaver to keep excess wage money from her work, which she used to buy the freedom of another person, Sally. Her enslaver figured she didn’t have the right to own “property” and it was his lucky day to now own 2 human beings. The courts disagreed and said Sally was a free person. However this was still South Carolina so they made sure to patch up that little “loophole” after the case was over.
The full list is quite interesting. The ~1780 cases in New England outlawing slavery (while the Revolution was ongoing!). Dred Scott and Amistad, of course. Cases mostly from 1780 to 1859. But then heinously, but somehow unsurprisingly, there’s a case from 2021: Nestle Inc makes an appearance using child slave labor for cocoa.
I wish more people realized that when we talk about child slavery in the cocoa industry we are not talking about kids working alongside their parents.
We are mostly talking about trafficked and stolen children taken to plantations in the middle of nowhere and forced to labour long hours by themselves.
Well this is news to me and I say if you have some articles bookmarked already fuckinf share them here (as a new post)*** cuz on lemmy rn it’s more likely to reach front page. I consider myself more aware than average American and I still didn’t know this.
I think it has to be actual news to be posted in here?
Here is an article
Excerpt: