Claim:
A meme circulating in 2024 accurately stated 27 million Black people are currently enslaved in Muslim countries.
Rating:
False ( About this rating? )
Context:
The meme, which misrepresents actual statistics, is based on a report published in 2011 that encompassed people of all races and religious backgrounds enslaved globally — not just Black people and not just in Muslim countries. While more recent estimates in 2023 varied slightly, most international organizations agreed that there were around 50 million enslaved people worldwide, 28 million of whom were in forced labor conditions and 22 million in forced marriages. Of those, 14.6 million lived in Muslim countries, based on data from "Walk Free," an international human rights group based in Australia dedicated to eradicating modern slavery.
For years, a meme has circulated online claiming that 27 million Black people were held as slaves in Muslim countries, including this one ( archived ) from July 2024:
The same meme appeared on a public forum and Instagram . It also appeared in German, with a different number (30 million).
The meme, as we'll see, is incorrect.
In 2011, Reuters reported that then-U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca said there were an estimated 27 million people total living under slavery in the modern world, and that people fleeing violence from North Africa — a majority Muslim region — were most at risk for enslavement. The viral meme appears to have borrowed and twisted that piece of information.
Modern slavery, whose definition includes forced labor and forced marriage, is a major issue, according to various international human rights organizations focused on it — including the United Nations and Walk Free, an organization based in Australia. The estimated number in 2023 was roughly 50 million people , according a 2022 report shared by the U.N. Walk Free matched this number in its 2023 estimates, with a ballpark number of 49.6 million . According to Walk Free, 27.6 million lived in forced labor conditions, and 22 million were in forced marriages.
We calculated that the estimated number of enslaved people — both forced labor and forced marriage — in Muslim countries was roughly 14.6 million as of this writing. We obtained this number using Walk Free's data and adding the estimated number of slaves listed on the website for each majority Muslim country in Walk Free's interactive tool (you can find that tool here ):
(Walk Free)
The graphic above, generated by the website, includes 55 countries.
Walk Free further estimated that 1 in 4 enslaved people were children, a number that corresponded to around 12.5 million, and 54% were women.
The data did not include provenance and skin color of enslaved people, though it did include regional data for the prevalence of the problem. While the largest absolute number of enslaved people lived in Asia , Arab countries , which are majority Muslim, had the largest prevalence with 10.1 enslaved people per 1,000 people. Europe was second with 6.9 per 1,000. A breakdown by country showed that the five countries with the highest number of slaves per 1,000 people were North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Sources:
Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage . Sept. 2022, pp. 1–144, https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_norm/@ipec/documents/publication/wcms_854733.pdf .
'Up to 27 Million Trapped in Slavery Worldwide: U.S.' Reuters , 18 May 2011. www.reuters.com , https://www.reuters.com/article/world/up-to-27-million-trapped-in-slavery-worldwide-us-idUSTRE74H63V/ .
'Walk Free'. Walk Free , https://www.walkfree.org/ . Accessed 5 July 2024.
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