Each week the Freedom Fund compiles the most insightful and timely news stories about modern slavery.

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Check out what we’re reading in this week’s roundup of top slavery articles.

UNICEF says child marriage rates are finally dropping
Fast Company, 7 March 2018
Global child marriage rates are dropping at long last, according to a new report from UNICEF. A decade ago, the global annual number of child brides was 37 million. Today there are 12 million underage girls married each year.

‘Progress and persistent abuses’ in Thailand’s fishing industry, says U.N.
Thomson Reuters Foundation, 7 March 2018
Fishermen in Thailand remain at risk of forced labour, and the identity documents and wages of some continue to be withheld, despite pressure from major retailers to clean up the industry, the International Labour Organization said this week.

What’s life like for kids mining cobalt for our gadgets?
CBS News, 6 March 2018
Tens of thousands of children are still working in African cobalt mines, according to a CBS News investigation. A reporter followed an 11-year-old boy home from a mine to understand the challenges he faces as his family’s main provider.

Their forefathers were enslaved. Now, 400 years later, their children will be landowners
The Guardian, 5 March 2018
A rare victory for Brazilian poor, as the governor of Pará state signed a document giving land titles for more than 220,000 hectares of Amazon forest to an isolated community populated by descendants of enslaved people who escaped centuries ago.

A routine abduction of a 13-year-old girl
BBC News, 4 March 2018
Activists say that as many as 500,000 children go missing in India every year. A BBC correspondent met the family of a 13-year-old girl who was walking along a road with her mother when she was pulled into a car and driven away. 

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Photo credit: DFID/Wikimedia Commons