Ending Modern Slavery, One Village at a Time

Peggy Callahan thought Abraham Lincoln had taken care of slavery. Then Callahan, a former television journalist and filmmaker, learned that millions of people around the world still lived in bondage.

Callahan went on to co-found Voices4Freedom with a mission to eradicate slavery and human trafficking within our lifetime. An estimated 50 million people worldwide live in slavery today in brothels, factories, mines, and farm fields, with women and girls making up 54 percent of victims. The organization has helped 12,799 people reach sustainable freedom and educated 6,516 children through 72 schools in northern India. 

In the villages where they work, slaveholders trick financially desperate families into thinking they are being offered a fair job. Instead every member of the family is forced to work 14 to 16 hours a day in punishing heat. Children are not allowed to go to school. Women and children are often subjected to rape and sexual violence.

“Families are kept trapped by threats and violence. Those who try to leave can face brutal punishment,” says Tawney Bevacqua, Voices4Freedom’s creative director and donor relations lead.

Educating Children, Empowering Adults

Voices4Freedom sends in frontline workers who quietly enter villages and ask families about their lives: Do you get paid? Do you know this is illegal? Voices4Freedom then establishes a school that educates and feeds children while giving adults a place to meet, organize, and learn their rights. 

Puja, 13, was born into slavery. “I used to dig soil, carry sand, and load bricks at the brick kiln,” Puja explains. Now in school, she says, “I am learning to recognize words and write. I am learning to write my name.” 

Puja hopes to become a teacher so other children in her community can receive an education. 

Seeing that possibility of education for their children helps motivate parents to take the risks necessary to challenge their own enslavement, Callahan says.

While the children study, frontline workers help their parents gain the courage to stand up to their slaveholder, obtain identification documents, and access government programs for housing, employment, and small loans. They are helped to find paid work or start businesses to support their families. 

Callahan says that within three years everyone is sustainably free and every child has transitioned into a government school. 

Bevacqua says 187 formerly enslaved people have won election to local government. Other villagers enter neighboring communities and ask families the same questions that once helped them recognize their own enslavement, extending the work beyond the villages Voices4Freedom can reach.  

“We have a very predictable, methodical model,” Callahan says. “We don’t just hope we’re making a difference. We can prove it.”