Slave Next Door (6 page)

“For three years, I lived around the corner from a Catholic Charities

office and never even knew they were there.” Outside the house is a fright-

ening world full of hostility, babbling voices, and confusion to a woman

who is, in every sense, isolated. And to ensure that she stays a stranger

and a prisoner, her slaveholder takes her passport and any other form of

identification.

Beyond the shame, the sense of obligation, the fear of arrest and

deportation, the threat of physical injury to herself and her loved ones,

Bales_Ch02 2/23/09 11:04 AM Page 24

2 4 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

the inability to communicate in a foreign language, and the confusion

over not knowing where she is or where to go for help, other factors are

at work. Two of them are things we all take for granted: food and rest.

The slaveholder faces a difficult challenge: he must provide just enough

of each to allow the victim to work the long, hard hours, yet remain

totally subservient. Fed on scraps and leavings, most domestic slaves live

in a constant state of malnutrition, a significant contributor to breaking

their spirit. Sleep deprivation is another tool of the “employer”: he must

keep the victim tired enough to be confused and debilitated but not so

tired that she can’t perform her work. It is a delicate balance, and one at

which the slaveholder becomes adept. On three hours of sleep per night

a domestic slave can be kept confused and submissive for years, while

still putting in fifteen to twenty hours of work a day.

There is another, more poignant reason why a domestic slave often

chooses to remain in bondage. Over the course of time, she may form

a bond with the children of her enslavers, and the thought of leaving

them unprotected becomes unacceptable to her. Whether or not the

parents are, in fact, abusive to the children isn’t always a factor; fre-

quently, the slave will project her own status as victim onto the children

and assume the role of their protector. Time and again, this comes out

in the victim’s testimony in court: “How could I leave the children with

those monsters?”

If we roll all of these factors together, it becomes easier to see how

they forge a chain around the brain of the enslaved domestic. Fear,

shame, confusion, depression, injury, hunger, and exhaustion all com-

pound and reinforce a hopelessness and lethargy. Living in a nightmare,

the minds of many household slaves take refuge by shutting down. Freed

slaves talk of “going blank” or “not feeling anything,” hallmarks of

trauma, shock, and depression. These are coping mechanisms that help

them get through their ordeal. The paralysis they feel is easier to under-

stand when we glimpse the unrelenting abuse they suffer. What is much

more difficult to understand is the behavior of the slaveholders.

M O N S T E R S A M O N G U S

It is tough to imagine how a person could be a slaveholder. For most of

us the idea of maintaining, day after day and year after year, the sys-

tematic control and degradation of another human being is so unthink-

able, so twisted, that it turns our stomachs. Our reaction in the face of

enslaved domestic workers is disgust but also puzzlement. This is slavery

Bales_Ch02 2/23/09 11:04 AM Page 25

H O U S E S L AV E S / 2 5

in our homes, our most intimate space. These are slaves taking care of

our
children.
How could we face our children, what would they be

learning, if their care was entrusted to a slave? It is a fact so ugly that we

want to reject it out of hand, to say, “These are monsters, not humans

like us.” But is it likely that Sandra Bearden was born and raised with

the potential to enslave and torture Maria? Surely she possessed a ves-

tige of humanity; no doubt she loved her husband and child, cried at sad

movies, gave to charities. How could she have sunk so far as to chain

Maria to a post and force her to eat dog feces? How can the thousands

of slaveholders that live in the United States justify their crime to them-

selves, their families, and their children?

It may be easier to dismiss slaveholders as monsters than to look into

our own hearts and ask, “How can a person do this?” But there is a very

important reason why we should ask that question. Slaveholding is an

affront that must be wiped out, rooted out of our economy and our

communities, and that means confronting the mental gymnastics that

allow some Americans to enslave. We need to be able to explain how

someone could be a slaveholder in America today, but many of the rea-

sons are locked in mystery. This is not surprising because many of the

key questions about becoming a slaveholder have not been answered;

indeed, some haven’t even been asked yet.

This lack of answers reflects a pattern that has been played out in

America with other crimes of abuse. Back in the 1960s, for example,

there were no domestic violence shelters, almost no psychologists doing

research or trained to work with domestic violence victims, no aca-

demic journals devoted to the issue, and no institutes where research

could be centralized. Probably the biggest problem was that there was

no education for police to help them identify when a “family spat” was

actually a crime. In the 1970s people began to wake up to domestic vio-

lence in their neighborhoods and cities, and while domestic violence is

still a serious problem today, we know a great deal more than we did in

the past, and many people are working against it. This cycle repeated

itself in the 1980s when torture victims began to pour into the United

States from Central America and the Middle East. At first, confusion

reigned; clearly there were enormous needs, but there were no experts,

journals, institutes, or training programs. In time, expertise grew and

with it a dedicated body of psychologists, doctors, social workers, and

others who built the comprehensive response that torture victims need.

Now thirty-one clinics or institutes in America provide support and

rehabilitation for survivors of torture.

Bales_Ch02 2/23/09 11:04 AM Page 26

2 6 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

We are repeating that pattern again, beginning with the “discovery”

of human trafficking and slavery in the United States in the 1990s. Not

surprisingly, most of the effort—especially on the part of nongovern-

mental agencies—has gone into understanding and supporting the

immediate needs of trafficking victims, not the psychology of slavehold-

ers and traffickers. Today, there is only a glimmer of an organized

response to our need to study and understand the lives of slaves and

slaveholders in America. We have no journal, no institute, no accepted

body of knowledge, only the first few college courses and a loose hand-

ful of experts who are learning on the job and piecing things together as

best they can. The analogy to domestic violence and torture teaches us

that the sooner we build the institutions that will lead us to a deeper

understanding of slavery in the United States, the sooner we will be able

to crack this crime.

U N D E R S TA N D I N G E V I L

Until we really understand the lives and the psychology of slaveholders

and traffickers, we have to be careful not to fall into the well-worn

grooves of modern myth and simply condemn them all as “evil.” Of

course, enslaving anyone is a terrible thing to do, but simply saying

someone is “evil” does not explain his or her actions. If we look past

such easy answers, we find that there doesn’t seem to be a common

thread of personality or circumstance running through all slaveholders.

They are both men and women, rich and poor, foreign and native born.

Some are gangsters, and some seem nothing more or less than house-

wives. There is no standard or single type of slave master, any more than

there is only one reason, or one type of personality, responsible for com-

mitting murder. Some slaveholding is clearly premeditated, with brutal-

ity and enslavement being planned from the beginning. But in some

American homes domestic slavery begins with what is thought of as an

act of charity.

The slaveholder’s rationalization is simple: by bringing a person from

a poor country to the United States, the slaveholder says he is opening

the door to education and opportunity. Perhaps he actually believes this,

or at least some of the family believe it. Then a vulnerable and confused

young person is injected into the complex arrangement of emotion and

power that makes up any home. Many families are healthy and mutually

supporting, but others are sick and in conflict. When a family already

marked by anger, recrimination, and violence takes in a vulnerable and

Bales_Ch02 2/23/09 11:04 AM Page 27

H O U S E S L AV E S / 2 7

powerless young woman, is it surprising that she might be victimized?

Perhaps she isn’t the willing and happy servant they had expected her to

be. Perhaps she is frustratingly ignorant of manners and customs.

Perhaps she is sexually attractive to the men of the family and powerless

to fend off their advances. Perhaps her sexual victimization offends and

threatens the women in the house. Perhaps a housewife finds that for the

first time in her life she has total control over another person who is not

her own child. All of these situations have been described by counselors

who work with freed domestic slaves.

In trying to explain the mind of the slaveholder, the handful of

experts working with survivors of domestic slavery tell us that power is

a key variable in two ways. For some slaveholders, gaining and main-

taining total control over someone is intoxicating and addictive. The

historian John Acton said that power corrupts and that absolute power

corrupts absolutely. He might have been referring to despotic rulers, but

this maxim also applies to the minds of some slaveholders. For them, the

chance to achieve and enjoy absolute power over another person is

enough to wipe out any reluctance to be a slave master.

For other slaveholders, the power of control works in a different way.

These are the masters whose abuse of a slave reflects their own sense of

powerlessness. Those working with freed domestic slaves in the United

States say that when the woman of the house feels powerless she is more

likely to take it out on the slave. The slave, after all, sees and knows

everything that goes on in the house. If the wife is a victim of domestic

violence or is regularly humiliated by her husband, now someone else, a

possible sexual rival, knows these ugly secrets as well. In such cases,

fear, frustration, and anger can all be redirected into abuse and control.

Some light can be shed when we see that the process of becoming a

slaveholder is similar to that of becoming a torturer. Research into how

people become torturers gives us hints about how middle-class house-

wives can become brutal slave masters. Often the person selected to be

a torturer is first tortured and brutalized. In the past, when young

Brazilian police officers were selected for the interrogation squad they

were put through an extreme, dehumanizing, and cruel “boot camp.”

The instructors drove and beat the recruits, had them crawl through

excrement, and ordered them to assault each other. Once their will was

broken, they were told that only they were truly strong and pure enough

to be trusted to torture and interrogate the criminal enemies of decent

people. Then they were guided in torturing “enemies” by their superi-

ors, officers who had built into the new torturers a dependence and

Bales_Ch02 2/23/09 11:04 AM Page 28

2 8 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

instant obedience, as well as a redefinition of the “enemy” as subhu-

man. They were told that by carrying out the orders of their superiors

they were defending everything they held dear. This transformation of

the torturer into a just and moral authority opens the door to rational-

ized abuse. Slaveholders also redefine the slave as subhuman and use

their imagined superiority to “correct” and “guide” the slave through

punishment.

Other situations can also foster the exploitation of control over other

people. These can include taking small steps into cruelty that are slowly

increased until the enslaved worker is being severely abused. There

seems to be a sort of intoxication that comes with acts of greater and

greater violence and control. The powerlessness of slaves means that

they cannot fight against abuse, and each act of cruelty they suffer can

be a step up to even greater abuse the next time. Slaveholders will also

define innocent actions by slaves as rebellious or dangerous. Enslaved

domestics often report being beaten for seemingly minor mistakes:

spilling a drink, bumping into the slaveholder, or even falling asleep.

Since the victim of domestic slavery is normally dehumanized, treated

like an animal, for example, by being forced to eat from the floor, the