[eckesicle]

For context, there are around 40 million people living in some form of slavery today, around four times the number of people who were sold in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so it is by no means a solved problem.

Most people in slavery today live in Asia and the Middle East, but there are pockets in Africa where it is common too.

Modern slaves are sold for as little as $10-$100 and are therefore often considered disposable by their perpetrators. Approx 70% are women and 25% children.

Slavery is illegal everywhere in the world but enforcement is lax or non-existent in some countries, notably Libya and Yemen.

[wat10000]

Relative to population, that’s probably the lowest it’s ever been. Obviously the correct number is zero, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that bad stuff tends to scale with population just like good stuff.

[eckesicle]

Yes, but unlike other bad stuff, like homicides, this issue isn’t homogeneously distributed over the world. It’s disproportionately concentrated to a small number of countries and regions, that for various reasons and to various degrees tacitly condone it.

[wat10000]

Homicide is pretty concentrated too. The rate varies 100x or more between the best and the worst countries, and there’s enormous variation within countries too.

I’m not sure it’s as extreme as you suggest. Looking up stats on slavery in different countries, there are definitely some extreme outliers, but they don’t account for that much of the global total. And by far the worst offender is North Korea, which is never mentioned in these discussion. I also have no idea how accurate these figures are, but the focus on places like Libya doesn’t seem like an honest assessment of the situation.

In any case, I’m not sure how this matters. I guess it would influence how you fight it. If it’s concentrated in a few countries then you’d want pressure on those governments specifically. But in terms of how bad the problem is, I don’t see that it really matters how geographically spread out it is.