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SLAVERY
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Comparisons In January 1834, the slave trader Isaac Franklin wrote from New Orleans to his Richmond partner and slave buyer, Rice Ballard, jokingly accusing him of holding a young woman, one of many "fancy maids" handled by the firm of Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard, for his own sexual use instead of passing her on to his partners so that they might take their turn of pleasure. The business was a slave-trading partnership, and systematic rape and sexual abuse of slave women were part of the normal practice of the men who ran the firm - and the normal practice of many of their planter customers as well. Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard supplied field hands and carpenters to the raw new plantations of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas in the 1830s, but they also supplied planters with many a "fancy maid." In fact, the letter went on to suggest, tongue in cheek, that such women were in such heavy demand that the firm might do better selling coerced sex retail rather than wholesale. The POPPY Project, which provides accommodation and support for women who have been trafficked into prostitution, has published a report summarising information and telling some of the stories of the women with whom they have worked. One woman was taken to men’s homes and hotels and reported that many of her customers were police officers, solicitors and judges. On one occasion she worked non-stop for 192 hours without any sleep or rest. On average women were trafficked between three sites selling sex, but some as many as seven, not only around London but between other British cities including Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Luton and Brighton. Stories from both the Transatlantic Trade and today’s cross-global trade all exhibit the common elements of the exploitative relationship constituting slavery:
It is the presence of coercion that distinguishes slavery from poor working conditions or migrant labour.
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