As with so many primitive practices that we have legislated out of sight, slavery was never completely abolished -- it simply went underground.

This was the message at a forum on "modern-day slavery" hosted by Ryerson's Campus Leadership Advisors in Oakham House on Thursday.

On the second-to-last day of Black History Month, an audience two dozen students heard that even today, 12.3 million people worldwide are forced to work against their will for little or no pay.

This conservative estimate is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Africans sold into bondage throughout four centuries of legalized slavery, from 1500 to 1900.

Even as country after country abolished slavery, human trafficking flourished.

Now it is the world's fastest-growing transnational organized crime, and the subject of a number of awful reports suggesting slave-labour is more common than most had thought.

At the event, Ambreen Syed, head of the RSU Women's Centre, spoke passionately about the plight of women sex workers, and Journalism Chair Paul Knox discussed the role journalists have played in drawing attention to past and present abuses.

No simple answer

However it was a member of the audience, Marco Gomes, who was best able to explain the challenges faced by those policing human trafficking.

A consultant to the UNHCR and a Master’s student in Policy Administration at Ryerson, Gomes said resources for trafficked humans are slim and fleeting.

“It’s quite difficult to keep services on the ground,” he said. “They’re always moved quite quickly because of the dangers.”

The “lucky few” who actually make their way to a refugee camp or an embassy, he said, have often already suffered “in this environment for long periods of time.”

Because trafficking and forced labour happen covertly, it is difficult to access the victims and improve their conditions.

Gomes said that the UN works to improve anti-trafficking legislation and enforcement with governments of countries where the trade is most rampant, in Eastern Europe, Russia and East Asia.

But the problem exists everywhere.

This woodcut of a slave in chains appeared on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, "Our Countrymen in Chains." The design was adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s.

Every day, Gomes said, Canadian border officials intercept an average of six or seven trafficked people, most often in shipping containers.

They are placed in refugee camps, given a hearing and then either deported to their countries of origin or, if they can prove their lives would be endangered upon return, allowed to claim refugee status in Canada.

Regardless, the problem does not stop at the border.

“We don’t know how many there are [that get through], because it’s illegal,” Gomes said. “It’s very hush-hush.”

Disposable people

Where slaves once went "underground" in order to seek refuge in free states and countries, today this journey is inverted in a cruel perversion of the once-celebrated railroad.

Free people are abducted or coerced into the underground where they languish as human widgets in the world's most profitable black-market trade after guns and drugs.

Experts say the price of bonded labourers is at a historic low -- $40 for a young male labourer in Mali, for example -- suggesting the potential return on such an investment would be at a historic high.

In the book Disposable People, anti-slavery activist Kevin Bales argues that the low cost of slaves and the high risk of losing them to disease, injury or escape has led to exceptionally cruel business practices, even for slavers. Workers are exploited intensely for a short time, then discarded and replaced.

Sex workers in Thailand might be drugged and forced to work day and night until they contract HIV, then thrown out on the street to die. Underage workers in China might be forced to do the most dangerous work in a mine until they're injured, at which point they would be ditched without receiving any medical treatment. In the most extreme cases, workers might be killed to erase any trace of their illegal work.

For more information about forced labour, check out this country-by-country survey of human trafficking worldwide compiled by University of Massachusetts professor Martin Pratt.