Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.
I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.
Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can legally confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
> "African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
> When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.
They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...
> When an employer can confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
This happens in Europe as well.
It is not legal, but it is the only way the Scandinavian berry market works at all. You don’t even need a huge market for this to be allowed to happen. You just need _a_ market and workers that are desperate enough to be tricked.
Passport confiscation is a common sign of modern slavery.
"he was lured in with the false promise of a well-paid job in the UK"
"The gang confiscated the passports of all their victims"
It's not legal. There are definitions of "Modern Slavery" and descriptions of the practices and warning signs because it is still an issue in contemporary times, including in Europe.
No, it's real. Every year, there are several news articles about berry pickers being abused, at least here in Sweden (not sure about the other Scandinavian countries). Here's [0] just ONE of the myriad of articles I could find, but there are so, so, so many more (and even worse ones) [1].
Similar situation in Finland. There have only recently been some consequences for the berry companies and reforms are underway. The pickers would come mainly from Thailand with tourist visas. This year a majority of the visas have been denied and the berry companies are throwing tantrums.
They've been engaging in illegal proce-fixing, too.
I suppose using this logic, murder is legal, because of self defense. Theft is legal because of tax laws.
Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.
If someone is abducted against their will and forced to do work without (fair) compensation and without being allowed to exercise their human rights, is that person not a slave because they were neither born into it nor bought or sold?
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy"
Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
> It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.
In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.
That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).
I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.
Stupid people also assume there are not exceptions to every rule. But you can't build your systems (or your arguments) around edge cases, because that would be ignoring the vast majority of use cases.
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
Inequality is a big factor. Story says the woman in this case felt she was compensated. Like feeling 'lucky' to enjoy (some) perks of living in a rich household. If that family had been as poor as her (or her mother), that stops being true. Then it becomes hard to keep a slave from walking away without resorting to violence.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolate from outside).
Point is there's a lot of grey area between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Logically-speaking, poverty can't exist without inequality. It's a condition of "want" that requires others to "have".
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
The terrible labor laws exist because of the inequality. The people with servants write the laws and, in their magnaminity, don't let the servants vote.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
Would you say USA is a developed country, considering for example Los Angeles slums? And there's a bigger inequality between Elon musk and a well paid software developer than between a poor person in a developing country and a rich politician from that country.
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)
I grew up with servants (in SubSaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Those things are a symptom of an involved economy. It harkens back to a time of less development where there were more hands than jobs and much of the labor was manual. Not to excuse the practice in modern times but go back a few generations and that was the reality of the world -everywhere.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
This is probably the same line of thought the families involved in the story have had.
Yet, the end result is still quite similar to slavery. Why do you suppose the servants stay, instead of living a life of their own? I think you’ll find the answer there.
This used to be quite common in Chile as well. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore, but it was very interesting to see the synergy some families built after decades of cohabiting with a "service person" (don't really know what word to use). I met a lot of people that widely regarded their service lady as a mother, they were pretty much raised with them around, so the bonds run deep. I have no doubt some times the compensation might not exactly be the best, but I have met quite a lot of people that are well happy with this arrangement.
The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.
Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.
> “The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.
Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.
systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
The problem that often the victims also have not educated, have no worldly experience, often have no idea about money handeling beyond small items.
This can result in them being exploited again by even more unscrupulous people. The articles clearly mentioned how difficult these cases are to deal with. While they do not go into detail, the above is why.
Its very easy to gain peoples trust when they have no sense of normal anymore, and can you sign this paper, o, we need to go to a friendly notary to help with it. and before you know it, the people just handed over their apartment / or whatever.
There are a lot of good people with will want to help but it only takes one rotten apple to destroy peoples live again. Recently in Europe there was a case of a helper that took elderly their IDs and helped herself to their money. She made 100s of victims. Now imaging that type of person with somebody who probably did not have any proper education and normal independent life experiences that we all had the luxury of having.
In a ideal world, we have proper state funded solutions, with proper oversight to help people integrate into society. Reality is that if any services exist, they are underfunded, often lacking oversight and people fall into the often chasm of cracks.
These type of stories are never clean white and black, but a mix of gray sludge, where we all hope for the perfect ideal solution but often there are not many options. And naivety tend to often do more harm then good.
It is not anti-White racist, but facts. It is white abusing black, not the other way around. How can you have the skin so thin with something like this? For fuck sake.
Selective capitalisation of different races (white cf. Black) is a common dog whistle employed by anti-Whites.
Are you sure you want to start using statistical assumptions as "facts" in crime reports? That is going to backfire very badly for your disproportionately black offenders...
Statistical inference is not established fact. I'm not defending parent comment above, but to be clear, it's not actually established as a fact that "Maria" was black, right? "Maria" isn't even her real name.
It very explicitly guesses that she is black, based solely on statistical inference.
From TFA: "Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
To read this as established fact is analogous to asserting as established fact that if you roll a six-sided die, you will certainly get a number <= 4. Probable, but not fact.
A careful read also reveals that none of the woman's actual identifying information was revealed, including her name, for her own privacy:
"We’ll call her Maria, the most common female name in Brazil, because authorities have not disclosed her real name in order to protect her identity."
Follow-up edit: thank you for your correction, I appreciate the epistemic humility and good-faith dialogue.
> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.
I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
Probably the entire adult population gets away with hundreds of offenses per annum on average (judging by the total amount on the books).
Even the most law abiding and most humble decile of Brazilian adults probably still get away with dozens of offenses per annum. That nobody cares to enforce at all.
Between the two of you only one is violating the guidelines. Their comment at least asks a question their are curious about. Yours just nags and tries to shut down discussion.
We didn't get to the point of being disrespectful yet, except perhaps to slave owners, so this intervention seems a little early. Decorum doesn't add much meaning (it means don't swear, for instance?), and I get the impression that HN is irredeemably mature and nothing can change that.
To whatever degree this site isn't a cesspool, we owe it to Dang, not the bad word police. They didn't swear at you, so there's no reason to get bent out of shape about it.
It's ironic you're taking this stance on an article about a respectable family that literally kept a slave.
There's a difference between superficial trappings of respectability, and actually treating people with respect.
Dang (and the other dude) do great work, but still I disagree. The GP comment was extremely low-effort. and while "complaining that HN is turning into reddit" is against site guidelines, I still agree with the critical comment. It's not the profanity alone, but the reddit-ism of the OP using the site as a complaint board (that's a large portion of reddit, especially local subreddits), and then making a 0-effort comment that any reasonable person will automatically agree with. The whole equation taken together is the formula for Reddit's echo chamber. The only people who tolerate that here are the noobs that are stepping outside their reddit coccoon and bringing the stink with them.
I don't agree with the critical comment at all, particularly because the OP is incredibly guilty of making drive-by comments in their very recent post history that don't actually add anything to the conversation. People will complain about the site 'becoming reddit' while making inane posts that are clearly against the rules or don't actually bring anything to the conversation. People don't practice what they clearly preach.
In either case, this post and thread are entirely off topic. At least GPs comment was somewhat relevant as opposed to this entire set of pedantry.
> The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/
Well, taxation is not “most of your earnings.” Not even remotely close. If we’re talking theft, maybe look at the companies reaping profits off your labor without sharing it.
I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.
Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.
Slavery is "illegal".
I'm convinced that the absolute modernity is only a sideshow attraction for the ultra-wealthy to visit Dubai. The real show is the servants.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50228549
> "African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
> When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.
They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...
This happens in Europe as well.
It is not legal, but it is the only way the Scandinavian berry market works at all. You don’t even need a huge market for this to be allowed to happen. You just need _a_ market and workers that are desperate enough to be tricked.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2kdg84zj4wo
[0]: (In Swedish) Berry entrepreneurs suspected of trafficking Thai nationals, (2025). https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasternorrland/barforetag-...
[1]: (In Swedish) Berry pickers (Topic). https://www.svt.se/nyheter/om/barplockare
Both are from SVT, the public broadcaster in Sweden.
They've been engaging in illegal proce-fixing, too.
It is still legal in the case of prisoners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.
there is zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates
did I mention disenfranchisement of the imprisoned?
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy"
That seems…unlikely.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.
In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.
That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).
I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.
Stupid people always say nonsense like this as if no person in prison is innocent.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolate from outside).
Point is there's a lot of grey area between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
Those servants will be richer in a few decades but will still be in that situation.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
Would you say USA is a developed country, considering for example Los Angeles slums? And there's a bigger inequality between Elon musk and a well paid software developer than between a poor person in a developing country and a rich politician from that country.
The downside is that they get no benefits.
For the owner or the servant?
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
Yet, the end result is still quite similar to slavery. Why do you suppose the servants stay, instead of living a life of their own? I think you’ll find the answer there.
So not only but a start.
Maybe public humiliation is better, release names and address.
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
This can result in them being exploited again by even more unscrupulous people. The articles clearly mentioned how difficult these cases are to deal with. While they do not go into detail, the above is why.
Its very easy to gain peoples trust when they have no sense of normal anymore, and can you sign this paper, o, we need to go to a friendly notary to help with it. and before you know it, the people just handed over their apartment / or whatever.
There are a lot of good people with will want to help but it only takes one rotten apple to destroy peoples live again. Recently in Europe there was a case of a helper that took elderly their IDs and helped herself to their money. She made 100s of victims. Now imaging that type of person with somebody who probably did not have any proper education and normal independent life experiences that we all had the luxury of having.
In a ideal world, we have proper state funded solutions, with proper oversight to help people integrate into society. Reality is that if any services exist, they are underfunded, often lacking oversight and people fall into the often chasm of cracks.
These type of stories are never clean white and black, but a mix of gray sludge, where we all hope for the perfect ideal solution but often there are not many options. And naivety tend to often do more harm then good.
Are you sure you want to start using statistical assumptions as "facts" in crime reports? That is going to backfire very badly for your disproportionately black offenders...
>facts
Statistical inference is not established fact. I'm not defending parent comment above, but to be clear, it's not actually established as a fact that "Maria" was black, right? "Maria" isn't even her real name.
From TFA: "Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
To read this as established fact is analogous to asserting as established fact that if you roll a six-sided die, you will certainly get a number <= 4. Probable, but not fact.
A careful read also reveals that none of the woman's actual identifying information was revealed, including her name, for her own privacy:
"We’ll call her Maria, the most common female name in Brazil, because authorities have not disclosed her real name in order to protect her identity."
Follow-up edit: thank you for your correction, I appreciate the epistemic humility and good-faith dialogue.
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
Idk how the prosecution system even functions without credibility.
Probably the entire adult population gets away with hundreds of offenses per annum on average (judging by the total amount on the books).
Even the most law abiding and most humble decile of Brazilian adults probably still get away with dozens of offenses per annum. That nobody cares to enforce at all.
It's ironic you're taking this stance on an article about a respectable family that literally kept a slave.
There's a difference between superficial trappings of respectability, and actually treating people with respect.
In either case, this post and thread are entirely off topic. At least GPs comment was somewhat relevant as opposed to this entire set of pedantry.
heh look at the low effort shit that gets through and encouraged as long as it rides on a popular hatewagon or whatever:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880604
From the article.
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.
Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.