History of Mental Health Reform
DELETE THIS SECTION BEFORE PUBLISHING: This page can be formatted many different ways: it really depends on what the historian and web developer want! Consider creating a slideshow of important images or information. Or a time line with important eras or dates. You could go simple and structure this as a Q&A with the "historian" by just asking and answering your own questions. Be creative and have fun!
Q&A With Our Historian
Abolitionism has existed for as long as slavery has! Here is an interesting paragraph about the early abolitionist movement in America. The thing really took off in the 1850s after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin though. Include links in your answers or listed sources so people know they can trust your expert answers!
Today there are more slaves than at any other point in human history!1 So while slavery is illegal everywhere it still exists all over the world. Fortunately, the courts are on the sides of slaves and progress is being made (too slowly) to hold people accountable for their abuse of workers.
You could include multiple sources in your answer if you would like and you could tag them by adding an in-text link to the source or adding a footnote like I did here.
Some of the biggest issues include debt slavery: where people are sold to pay off another's debts and then can never work their way out of it. Another is sex slavery: where very young children are sold or abducted and forced to work in the sex industry. And finally there's human trafficking, which can include the other forms too. People who are brought far from home (by will or by force) have very little resources or skills to flee if the work situation they signed up for turns out to be very different. They could be a nanny in a fancy suburb but if their employer holds their passport they can never quit and can easily be exploited.
As this Washington Post image shows, slavery exists all over the world, even in America! There are 30 million slaves worldwide and 60,000 of them live in the United States. The percentage of our population that is enslaved is similar to that of other developed nations in Europe and Australia, but the United States could be doing much more to stop it from happening elsewhere. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a part of the State Department and is working on the problem currently, but it needs more resources and money to deal with this real problem.
Money. There is a LOT of money to be made in human trafficking and as long as people can get rich exploiting others they will. But also, women and girls need more educational opportunities. Studies show that educating women and girls can reduce the number of people trafficked, but many countries don't want to invest in women's education. In addition, migrant labor and guest worker programs are popular in the United States but make workers very vulnerable to trafficking.