In June, the Internet was taken by storm after social media personality Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate were arrested and charged in Romania for rape, human trafficking, and the forming of an organized crime ring to sexually exploit women.
The indictment claims that Andrew Tate and his brother, as well as two other defendants, formed a group in 2021 to commit human trafficking in countries including Romania, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Seven alleged victims were recruited after the Tate brothers falsely promised them love and marriage—only for them to instead be taken to buildings in Ilfov county, Romania where they were forced into debt, placed under constant surveillance, intimidated, and forced to take part in pornography that was shared on social media.
Andrew Tate, a controversial rightwing social media personality, has garnered a concerning level of fame by appealing to emotionally insecure and angry young men. After being kicked off of the reality show Big Brother in 2016 for a video that appeared to show him attacking a woman, the self-proclaimed misogynist went viral for online rants preaching male dominance and female submission. Tate was banned from all major social media platforms, yet was reinstated by Elon Musk after Musk purchased Twitter (now known as X).
Tate’s alleged crimes are beyond horrific, but they are part of a much larger human rights crisis — modern slavery. According to the most recent assessment, there are an estimated 50 million victims of modern slavery, an umbrella term that constitutes all forms of sex and labor trafficking (such as bonded labor and other forms of forced labor), as well as forced marriage. Human trafficking is now the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world.
Tate’s arrest has helped bring attention to the issue, yet, with forced labor existing in supply chains across the globe, most people are still not aware of how disturbingly common modern slavery is. If you’ve ever purchased clothing or textiles, electronics, seafood, produce, coffee, tea, shoes, or chocolate, chances are you’ve bought a product made, at least in part, by forced, unpaid labor.
In one example, the clothing brand Shein recently came under fire after it sponsored an influencer trip to a supposed clothing factory in Guangzhou, China. Shein is one of the most popular fast fashion outlets, worth $100 billion in 2022, but those gains have been accompanied by a sharp criticism of its supply chain. A recent Congressional report found an extremely high risk of Shein clothing being made by forced labor.
Migrants fleeing conflict, natural disasters, and economic and political instability are disproportionately vulnerable to this crisis.
Additionally, a separate report by Bloomberg News found that Shein products sold in the United States had supply chains tied to Xinjiang, China—a region where members of the Uyghur ethnic minority are being detained in forced labor camps to make products that are shipped overseas. Beyond exploiting their workers, Shein has also been found to sell products that contain high levels of dangerous toxic chemicals.
To counter the allegations, the Shein-sponsored influencer trip was designed to paint a “positive” view of the company’s working conditions. Destene Sudduth, a social media personality, claimed in a video to her four million followers that “upon interviewing the workers, a lot of them were really confused and taken back with the child labor questions and the lead-in-the-clothing questions . . . they weren’t even sweating, we were the ones who were sweating.” The video provoked a sharp backlash, with many claiming the factory to which Shein brought its influencers was staged.
Shein’s attempt to cover-up human rights abuses in their supply chain, instead of addressing them, is deeply concerning. As forced labor around the world grows, many of the corporations we support in our everyday lives continue to rake in hundreds of billions of dollars using an exploited workforce.
While modern slavery occurs in practically every country, the highest rates of forced labor are found in low-income countries. Yet through intricate supply chains, most of what is produced by forced labor is exported to high-income nations. In 2021, G20 countries imported $468 billion worth of goods at risk of being produced by forced labor, with electronics, garments, palm oil, solar panels, and textiles among the most affected industries.
Migrants fleeing conflict, natural disasters, and economic and political instability are disproportionately vulnerable to this crisis. So are women and girls, and those living in extreme poverty. Modern slavery has also been exacerbated by climate change, through the creation of climate refugees and the destruction of livelihoods.
As the founder of the International Coalition Against Modern Slavery, as well as someone who has spent years advocating against this human rights crisis, I strongly hope that both Andrew Tate and the companies that continue to make obscene profits off of forced labor will be brought to justice. I hope that instances like these will be a wake-up call to communities and governments that modern slavery is more prevalent than ever—and that if no action is taken, the scale of extreme exploitation, which exists all around us, will only continue to grow.