Slavery

Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave, who is someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is treated like property. Slavery relies heavily on the enslaved person being intimidated either by the threat of violence or some other method of abuse. In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner. In economics, the term de facto slavery describes the conditions of unfree labour and forced labour that most slaves endure. In the course of human history, slavery was often a feature of civilisation and legal in most societies, but is now outlawed in all countries of the world, except as punishment for crime.

In 2019, approximately 40 million people, of whom 26 percent were children, were enslaved throughout the world despite it being illegal. In the modern world, more than 50 percent of enslaved people provide forced labour, usually in the factories and sweatshops of the private sector of a country's economy. In the industrialised countries, human trafficking is the modern variety of slavery; in the unindustrialised countries, enslavement by debt bondage is a common form of enslaving a person, such as captive domestic servants, forced marriage, and child soldiers.