India has more than 18 million people in slavery who are exploited and hundred people justify this oppression to themselves. Austin Patrick spent years and some solutions to slavery are easier to come up with months we know Mark that slaveholders. Joining us feel is Austin Fitzpatrick. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. This project dates back to a 2001 sting operation in India. What were you there to do. We were there to do what well-intentioned and hard-working people are doing the whole world ground which is due arrest human trafficking wherever we find it. And I had a very particular idea of what the problem was and it was clearly human rights violators violated one of our earliest and oldest switches people to be free from slavery. Want people to be living in freedom of course. I was challenged by how hard that is to really do there's gotta be a more sophisticated way of thinking about and arresting the perpetrators assuming that the job is done. So what does contemporary slavery look like. It takes many forms there's trafficking which has exploded over the last 20 or 30 years. The caste system and radical inequality have essentially left some people but the steep hierarchical letter with no options for themselves with no access to loans and labor markets stuck doing. Will take out a small loan that's a $20 and in some cases have seen over the course of decades in some cases working for generations. All as people was the original debt. They will say I got it for my father. So it leads people to be marginalized and taken advantage of. What did you learn and what goes against ideas of what drives slavery. It is illegal everywhere which means everybody doing it is fundamentally a criminal but the closer we get to these folks with more we realize that criminals and they are in the midst of their own lives. Canceled selves and what other options are available in society for that person for example so you are talking about and someone is humanizing these slaveholders so that we can humanize you as you are talking to them but as he was say they are still cold violating the human rights of people collectively. This is the question that they are struggling with right now and what is our obligation to the other. What is the obligation to get the -- public space to those ideas that we disagree with. There is a tension that comes through in my own thinking just in my own mind about this issue and I hope it is something that readers come across scratching their heads with themselves. I and with this quote I love where he says the line divides evil and good does not cut between people but actually cuts for each of us internally and bags of each of us to question how we can place it. This is a great question How do you think those efforts could be improved given some of the insights. We do not know this because of official reports. The government is a notoriously bad job collecting data. The government has been largely silent on these things but in my interview with perpetrators of them and complaining about new laws and they have nothing to do with contemporary slavery. They have things like ways that workers can hear about jobs that they can get to in cities that are growing. They have actually undermined the ability of these slaveholders to actually hold onto people. So big academic changes matter this is something that is driven by policies and you have good laws on the books that are enforced. The perpetrators Tony why are they enforcing these laws that of nowhere. It's the good work of anti-slavery organizations in India and elsewhere they do not necessarily realize that.. They are doing what they can to get by which suggests the programs help them get job training or access to loans would help them find targeting to victims as opposed to rewarding those who are criminals. We should be focusing our attention on victims and survivors. They can move to where they will not be exploited. The international community is already engaged in these folks. They are already in the international egg -- AIDS programs. Better recognize the international aid recipients may be right to violators and finding my sophisticated way to do that. You can get a micro loan as long as he can prove that there is nobody working for you it's kind of the definition of contemporary slavery. Right now we do not have. Thank you so much Austin. Thank you.
About 20 years ago, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick got involved with an advocacy group working to curb human trafficking. One of his first assignments in rural India was to pose as a brothel customer demanding increasingly younger girls before leaving in a huff. The video he secretly taped was shared with local police who conducted raids to rescue the victims and arrest the perpetrators.
But Choi-Fitzpatrick soon realized that many of the wealthy slaveholders would bribe their way out of court. So he set out to learn more about what drives modern slavery in India, including how slaveholders view themselves. Now a professor of political sociology at the University of San Diego, Choi-Fitzpatrick has written "What Slaveholders Think," based on hundreds of interviews. He is clear that while he sought to understand slaveholders, he isn't justifying their actions.
"I have gotten this pushback—aren’t these guys just criminals?" Choi-Fitzpatrick said. "One hundred percent, they’re criminals engaged in one of the world’s oldest forms of rights violations. But is that all that they are? If we want to address this issue in a sustainable way, should we also recognize they’re exposed to larger economic forces?"
Much of the slavery in India is bonded labor. Poor workers have little access to credit, so they borrow money from slaveholders for things like family weddings or food. They pay off their loans through things like agricultural fieldwork, but the cycles of debt for loans as small as $20 can go on for years.
Choi-Fitzpatrick suggests that this insight into what motivates slaveholders could lead to improved solution. For example, slaveholders openly complained that expanded access to education weakens their hold on workers. He joins KPBS Midday Edition on Monday with more about his research.
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