Even after the abolition of slavery, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked in modern times, which is a particular problem in developing countries.
[3][4] Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about a woman a slave owner bought to breed children to sell.
Scholars noted, "age and physical capacity, as well as the degree of dependence, set the terms of children's integration into households".
[7] Opposing scholars argued that slave children had their youth stolen from them, and were forced to start performing adult duties at a very young age.
[6] It was reported by scholars that, "this distinctive status shaped children's standing within familial households and left them subject to forced apprenticeship, even after emancipation".
[8] Slaveholders in northern Virginia, however, usually only permitted an average lying-in period of about "two weeks before ordering new mothers back to work".
According to the Anti-Slavery Society, "Although there is no longer any state which legally recognizes, or which will enforce, a claim by a person to a right of property over another, the abolition of slavery does not mean that it ceased to exist.
It points out that there are countless others in other forms of servitude (such as peonage, bonded labor, and servile concubinage) that are not slavery in the narrow legal sense.
[12] "The handmade woolen carpet industry is extremely labor-intensive and one of the largest export earners for India, Pakistan, Nepal and Morocco."
[13] Many children in Asia are kidnapped or trapped in servitude, where they work in factories and workshops for no pay and receive constant beatings.
An Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman said that child enslavement and trafficking was "an existing problem and could easily emerge as a serious issue over the coming weeks and months".
[22] More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labor, often sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty[23] such as in restaveks in Haiti.