Slave Next Door (7 page)

slaveholder can redefine his own actions from “hurting” to “helping”

through corrective discipline.

The brutalization of slaves also occurs because of the anonymity of

the slaveholder. Behind locked doors, the slave is invisible to the rest of

society. Anything done to the slave exists outside the moral sphere of the

community. Anonymity is known to allow and increase aggression; tor-

turers and executioners routinely wear hoods or masks. In 1974, the

anthropologist John Watson studied twenty-three cultures to determine

whether warriors who changed their appearance, using war paint or

masks, for example, treated their victims differently from those who

didn’t. He found that masked warriors were more likely to be destruc-

tive, by killing, torturing, or mutilating their victims, than unpainted or

unmasked warriors. Phillip G. Zimbardo, the psychologist who con-

ducted the famous “Stanford Prison” experiment that showed univer-

sity students engaging in torturous abuse when randomly assigned to be

“prison guards,” explains it this way: “It’s not just seeing people hurt,

it’s . . . controlling behavior of other people in ways that you typically

don’t.”5

There is recrimination in the very existence of a slave. Every slave-

holder, even if he does not feel he is doing something wrong, knows that

he is committing a crime. If a slaveholder has any sense of guilt, then the

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slave is both the constant reminder of his culpability and the evidence

on which punishment could be based. That brutal people will blame

their victims and punish them is no surprise. For slaveholders, their

silent and cowed accuser is always present and available for abuse.

We also know that when a slaveholding couple is having marital prob-

lems, there is a greater likelihood of physical and sexual abuse of the

victim. High levels of stress feed into abusive slaveholding. But it would

be wrong to assume any one of these patterns fully explains the mind-

set of a slaveholder. Whether a person is drunk with power or acting out

powerlessness or stress, we have to consider the preexisting mental

states that he or she brings to the situation. A sense of inferiority and

the need to dominate can shape interaction with a domestic servant. By

expressing that domination, masters routinely dehumanize slaves. One

middle-class family forced a domestic slave to wear a dog collar and

crawl around the house. Fed only leftovers, she was forced to sleep on

the floor and was regularly called “creature” or “dog.” Racial and

ethnic differences will also feed into this process. If a victim behaves in

a subservient way, either because that is what is expected of young

people in many parts of the developing world, or simply out of fear, this

confirms the slaveholder’s sense of superiority.

Many slaveholders throughout history have worked hard to reclassify

their slaves as less than human; that pattern continues today, sometimes

in surprising ways. In one family in California, one job required of a

domestic slave was to carefully slice meat and fruit to feed to her mis-

tress’s dogs, though she wasn’t allowed to eat any herself. Her mistress

had her dogs “write” greeting cards to her domestic slave and forced her

slave to write back to the dogs. At one point the dogs and the maid were

carefully arranged for a portrait photo. The mistress was building a fan-

tasy of happy pets, both canine and human, a rationalization that

allowed her to think all was well with her subhuman charges.

Sadly, such photos can work against the slave if her master or mis-

tress is brought to trial. The slaveholder’s lawyers will introduce photos

taken at family celebrations. In them, usually in the corner of the pic-

ture, will be the slave, smiling. The lawyer says, “See, how can this

woman be a slave? She was invited to the party and is obviously happy!”

Of course, the slave is there to care for the children or serve at the table,

nothing more. Nor do slaves smile from contentment; they smile

because they are ordered to and because they are afraid not to. Yet such

photos can help to shore up the slaveholder’s self-deception that the

slave is happy and appreciative. Strangely, a party can also be part of the

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mind control exercised over the slave. Abused one day and included in a

celebration the next, the enslaved domestic is kept off balance and con-

fused about her true role within the family.

“ I A M A S E V I L A S I A M G O O D ”

We still have a lot to learn about the psychology of slaveholders, but one

thing about the enslavement of domestic workers is clear. Like rape, this

is a crime of power. The “profit” from enslaving a maid, the wages not

paid, the overtime she can be forced to work do not add up to vast sums.

It is nothing like the kind of money that can be made from forcing traf-

ficked women into prostitution. The families that hold and abuse

domestic slaves can afford to pay for the same services in the normal

way. For this kind of slavery, at least, the allure is power itself.

Americans are uncomfortable when it comes to household workers;

there is something about that relationship of power over a servant that

just seems out of place in the land of the free. Treating servants as if they

are invisible is a way to avoid this discomfort, and—on a more sinister

level—one of the reasons household slaves can be hidden in plain sight.

In many upper- and middle-class homes, pretending that servants aren’t

in the room is standard behavior. The “help” are expected to perform

their work invisibly, even if they live on the premises. And with the

expectation of invisibility, slaveholders can more easily prevent visitors

from having meaningful interaction with, or becoming aware of, their

house slaves.

We might say this is a class issue, but that does not fully explain it.

Many people who employ domestics do not act in this way—so maybe

it’s really about people who want to feel superior to and exercise con-

trol over “the help,” as opposed to those who don’t. While the psycho-

logical source of that need for superiority is complicated, the need

exists, and when it involves a household slave it carries a particular

danger. Because domestic workers (as well as janitors, hotel maids, and

many other service workers) in the United States are often ignored, this

can cause a slave to remain unseen. And we know that this is exactly the

type of worker most likely to be caught in the web of trafficking and

enslavement.

How that power is played out is another story. If we look back into

our slaveholding past to the time when slavery was legal and accepted,

we can see that slaveholders were as various and complex as the rest of

the population. Even ex-slaves admitted that there were a few kind slave

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masters, though there was always a limit to their kindness. In the past,

Americans agonized, in ways that we can barely understand today, over

the fact that “good” people could take part in slavery. While we tend to

think about slavery in terms of innocent slaves and cruel masters, before

the Civil War it was not unusual to know someone who was a slave-

holder, or even for your sweet old Aunt Sally to own a slave herself.

After all, these good citizens, who believed in the rule of law, were living

in a country where slavery was legally vouchsafed by the Constitution.

Some slaveholders understood the moral sink they lived in. In Mozart’s

antislavery opera
Zaide,
the slave master Soliman sings: “I am as evil as

I am good.” That amazing book
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is deeply concerned

with the impact of slavery on the slaveholders—the decent, devout, and

highly conflicted Shelby family—and how it degrades and brutalizes

them as well as their slaves. When slavery was both legal and, for some,

morally and socially acceptable, slaveholders ran the gamut from kind to

cruel, dehumanizing to uplifting, sexually exploitative to tenderly affec-

tionate. Today we tend to lump all slaveholders together under the label

of “evil” and criminal. That they are criminal there is no doubt; that they

are committing evil acts is equally certain. That said, it is worth looking

to the past, to the time when there were millions of slaveholders in

America, to learn what we can about the motivations and mind-set of

slaveholders today. We need to look deeply into those minds if we want

to understand slavery in a way that helps us to truly eradicate it.

F I T T H E C R I M E ?

On those rare occasions when a victim escapes or is rescued, it falls to

the government to prosecute the slaveholders. As in Lakshmi’s case, this

is not always as immediate—or as successful—as it would seem at first

glance. Aside from the obvious impediments such as diplomatic immu-

nity, flight from the country, and the victim’s disappearance or refusal to

testify, the government faces certain legal issues that make conviction—

or even indictment on serious charges—far from certain. For one thing,

psychological coercion is extremely hard to prove. Despite years of

involuntary servitude involving humiliation, mental and physical tor-

ture, sexual abuse, and debasement, there is rarely enough hard physi-

cal evidence to support the charges that
should
be brought and that

carry the heavy penalties: rape, assault, kidnapping, torture. Instead, to

improve their chances of a conviction, the prosecutors frequently water

down the charges.

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The incongruity between the unthinkable offenses and the relatively

minor charges comes out in case after case. In 2005, a Saudi couple in

Aurora, Colorado, was arrested for “keeping a young Indonesian

woman as their slave—forcing her to cook, clean, and care for [their]

children. She was frequently threatened and repeatedly sexually

assaulted.”6 The woman was locked in an unheated basement room

when not working and slept on a thin mattress on the floor. The U.S.

government charged the couple with domestic servitude, forced labor,

and harboring an illegal immigrant. Separate charges of sexual assault

were brought by the state of Colorado. This case had several twists: the

government of Saudi Arabia provided $400,000 as bail for the hus-

band, who argued that he was the victim of anti-Muslim prejudice.

While the husband was given a lengthy prison sentence for the sexual

assaults, the wife received probation. All federal charges were dropped

after the couple was convicted on state charges.

In late May 2006, the Justice Department announced the conviction

of a Wisconsin couple for human trafficking. According to the charges,

they had “held the victim in a condition of servitude for 19 years, requir-

ing her to work long hours, seven days a week. . . . [The couple] threat-

ened her with deportation and imprisonment if she disobeyed them”

and forced her to hide in the basement when people entered the house.7

Nineteen years!
The government convicted the couple on charges of

forced labor and harboring an undocumented alien. In November 2006,

the couple were sentenced to each serve four years in prison, and their

thirty-one-year-old son received three years’ probation.8 Meanwhile,

where does this woman go to reclaim all those lost years?

In the same month, in Fort Myers, Florida, a man, his wife, and his

brother-in-law faced sentencing for “harboring a 13-year-old girl kept

as a sex slave and house keeper.” According to investigators, the man

had bought her from her parents for $260, after which “she was

enslaved, raped, beaten and impregnated.” All three pleaded guilty to

charges, not of rape or assault, but of harboring an illegal immigrant.9

The wife admitted to forcing the girl to help her prepare meals. The

man, who also pled guilty to a charge of sex trafficking, received only

sixteen months, the wife was sentenced to twenty-two months, and her

brother got ten months.

In 2004, Ellilian de Leon Ramos, a thirty-five-year-old resident of

Edinburg, Texas, paid a smuggler to bring two Guatemalan women

across the Rio Grande. Ramos and her husband offered them each $125

a week for domestic work. Once the couple had the women in their

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home, however, they refused to pay them, abused them, and threatened

them with deportation or worse if they complained or tried to leave.

Two years later, Ramos stood in court to face sentencing for human

trafficking; the judge gave her a four-year suspended sentence. Her hus-

band, who had been charged with “acting with the intent to promote or

assist in a crime,” was found not guilty.10 These four cases are not