At the end of 2024, a number of well-known celebrities were accused of human trafficking, from music mogul Sean Combs (known as P. Diddy) to Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries. Neither case has gone to trial, but in 2022, R&B superstar R. Kelly was found guilty of sex trafficking dating back decades. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Sex trafficking, like forced labor, is a contemporary form of slavery. I am an academic studying the mindset of slave owners to more fully understand their rationale for what they did, in the hope of finding better ways to eradicate modern slavery.

Early thoughts on owning slaves

Many respected figures throughout history supported slavery.

The ancient philosopher Aristotle reasoned this way in his book Politics, written around 350 BC: “It is not only necessary but also expedient that some should rule and others should be ruled "Submission, others rule." "

Aristotle believed that some people, such as those with intellectual disabilities, were inferior to those with higher intelligence. He believed it was part of the natural order. According to Aristotle, slaves could be viewed as public goods, used by the elite to increase social productivity.

This idea continued to the founding fathers of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson denounced slavery and warned of its dangers, saying in 1820 that enslaving humans was like "pulling a wolf by the ears." Yet Jefferson insisted that blacks were inferior to whites and owned hundreds of slaves. He repeatedly raped an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, with whom he fathered six children.

Jefferson's ideas and actions were characteristic of American slaveholders before the Civil War. As scholars Elizabeth Fox-Ginonis and Eugene D. Ginonis explain, although many antebellum slave owners were religious, they used their faith to justify the American slave trade.

The mentality of a modern slave owner

Today, more than 50 million people around the world are enslaved, trapped in sex trafficking, forced marriage and various forms of involuntary labor.

Many enslaved people lived in countries in the Global South and worked in industries ranging from electronics to seafood to agriculture. Their free labor provides rich countries with cheap goods and services. Their slaves may be individuals, criminal gangs or families, but large multinational corporations are often complicit. Several Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, Samsung, Nestlé and Nike, have been accused of or admitted to using slave labor.

Academic research on the mentality of modern slave owners is limited.

Sociologist Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick's analysis, perhaps the most comprehensive yet, focuses on India, where an estimated 11 million people were enslaved, many of whom worked in agriculture, textiles, Brick kilns and quarries were heavily in debt.

Choi-Fitzpatrick found that Indian slaveholders tended to be paternalistic. They considered slaves part of their extended family. Slave owners believed the myth that without their help, slaves were as helpless as children.

“Just as a shepherd knows his flock, we know our laborers,” one slave owner said in Choi-Fitzpatrick’s 2017 book.

Part of this mentality may stem from India's caste system, in which members of higher castes view themselves as superior to those of lower castes.

News reports also found that Korean slave owners had a similar mentality.

Novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux reported in 2015 in the documentary series Unreported World that dozens of disabled people were enslaved in South Korea's saltworks.

South Korea's social welfare system lags behind other major developed countries. People with disabilities can end up on the streets, homeless and are easy prey for criminal networks that trap them in debt bondage, forcing them to pay off unpayable debts in saltworks.

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However, Theroux's report found that Korean slave owners often believed they were doing their slaves a favor.

"My wife and I were like his real parents. In fact, people say we were closer to him than we were to our biological sons who ran away from home," one slave owner said of his relationship with an enslaved laborer relationship.

American Slavery

In the United States, people were also enslaved. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center documents forced labor and sex trafficking cases and has identified 197,000 trafficking victims since 2007.

After his death in 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Tizon published a bombshell account of how he grew up with a domestic slave named Lola in the United States. Big story.

Tizon's grandfather purchased Lola in the Philippines as a gift for Tizon's mother, who later immigrated to the United States. Lola was enslaved in the Tizon family for 56 years until her death in 2011. Despite his misgivings about slavery, Tizon praised Lola as "a sacred figure in the Philippines." (his) extended family. "

The United States has laws prohibiting such conduct, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. But slave owners found ways to circumvent the law. Coyotes and other middlemen who smuggle people into the country have found a lucrative market for their victims' forced labor.

Buying slaves today is not expensive. A domestic helper from Haiti can be purchased for about $50 and provide the necessary forged documents to bypass immigration. The price of an Eastern European slave was about $500.

This relatively cheap price stems from globalization and the global population explosion. In the words of scholar Kevin Bales, humans are disposable.

Survivors such as Rachel Lloyd and Holly Austin Gibbs have given testimonies of being trafficked in Germany and the United States respectively. Their narratives give us some insight into the mentality of modern slave owners.

Slaveholders, they wrote in their memoirs, viewed the people they enslaved as economic commodities and cared little for their emotional well-being. In their experience, slave owners were manipulative and violent. Their purpose of selling young girls is just to make profit.

This view is in a sense reminiscent of Aristotle's idea that slaves are tools to be used by others.

More research is needed

The field of contemporary slavery studies is relatively young. Data and research on modern slavery only began to emerge about two decades ago, and this work has focused on the systemic causes of slavery rather than individual perpetrators.

Given that the unique cultural underpinnings of slavery varied around the world and over time, scholarship is far from forming a general theory of what slaveholders thought. There isn't much research on their mindset.

However, as the global population continues to explode, millions more may become slaves in the coming years. Slavery will continue to take familiar forms, from forced labor to sex trafficking, while the internet and social media provide new venues for online recruitment and cyberslavery.

If 2025 is anything like 2024, this year will see more high-profile cases of celebrities accused of human trafficking.

I believe that a better understanding of the mindset of slave owners is critical to combating contemporary slavery. Breakthroughs in understanding the minds of other criminals, such as serial killers, can help law enforcement better analyze suspects, understand their minds, and develop better strategies and toolkits to apprehend them.

A fuller understanding of those who dare to enslave others could allow law enforcement around the world to better stop this crime against humanity.

This story has been updated to reflect Rachel Lloyd's trafficking in Germany and to correct an error introduced during the editing process.