Gary Craig's two-part, 360-page edited volume, Child Slavery Now: A Contemporary Reader, will be a significant resource for scholars, activists and advocacy groups on child labor exploitation, contemporary slavery and human trafficking. The two parts complement each other in examining the existence of the problem of slavery, while outlining and in some cases critiquing the strategies that are in place today. Originating in two international conferences, this volume aims primarily at the examination of the child slavery question, which was not adequately evaluated both at the first of the two conferences and in an edited volume resulting from it.

Child Slavery Now: A Contemporary Reader evaluates strategies as well as thematic attributes in case studies, issues and unique incidents of the varied forms of slavery today. On the one hand, it carves an important niche in elucidating the disconnection between the existence of abundant laws on child labor, slavery and human trafficking, and, on the other, the contextual realities of individual nations, which probably culminate in the lack of successes in the fight against human trafficking. Indisputably, many governments do not hesitate to ratify international conventions and subsequently adopt local laws, but several other structures capable of perpetuating exploitive conditions and the problems of trafficking remain apparent and critical. Various articles of these international conventions are either discussed or somehow alluded to in both Parts I and II of the reader. It seems legitimate, therefore, to concur with Craig that ‘What we probably need least of all are changes in the law. Virtually every country in the world – with the exception only of international pariahs such as Myanmar (Burma) – has either signed up to international legislation or protocols making child slavery illegal or has developed its own parallel legislative framework’ (p. 2).

This assertion is further given credence when, in responding to claims in the Afterword by Kevin Bales of abundantly available resources in the fight against contemporary slavery, the editor notes that resources are themselves not enough to address the problem and accordingly alerts us of the quintessential role of human involvement. As he puts it:

In view of the above, it is hoped that the new researchers and students of the subject matter, yet to familiarise themselves with these conventions and their associated acronyms, will find this collection of articles particularly useful. The contention of a world inundated with ineffective legislation on human trafficking and contemporary slavery is adequately exemplified in Part I where one reads the discussion of some relevant international conventions and protocols that are aimed at the protection of children. The reader is presented with a succinct yet enlightening overview of historical trends in slavery, labor exploitation in general and definitions of the concepts of child labor, slavery, servitude, debt bondage and trafficking. These three chapters are followed by Jonathan Blagbrough's chapter on child domestic labor. All these chapters (and several others in the book) clearly characterize definitions of these concepts in the conventions as inert, although probably more complicated and evolving, given their contemporary trends. Trevor Buck and Andrea Nicholson sum this up when they contend:

The user of this reader is also provided significant resources on structures and contexts within which child labor exploitation, slavery, and human trafficking thrive. The chapters by Blagbrough on child domestic labor as a global problem, Aarti Kapoor's chapter on ‘Clarity and consistency in understanding child exploitation: a UK perspective’, Evelyn Omoike's chapter, ‘Child domestic labour: fostering in transition?’, and Padam Simkhada's ‘Sex trafficking in Nepal’ all suggest this phenomenon is global and exists in both industrialized and industrializing nations. Equally informative are the chapters on ‘Routes to child slavery in Central America’ by Virginia Murillo Herrera, ‘Child slavery in South and South East Asia’ by Cecilia Flores Oebanda and on ‘Extreme forms of child labour in Turkey’.

Craig provides an excellent introduction that retains the reader's interest for the rest of the book. Nevertheless, repetitive contents in different chapters that do not necessarily complement each other and a general theoretical weakness observable in some of the articles may be problematic for a cross-section of scholars. The user is not provided with many statistical analyses, but the predominantly descriptive or narrative approach taken by the authors is, nevertheless, relevant and effective. The lack of quantitative matters is becoming normative for books on contemporary slavery and human trafficking, and that is due to the covert nature of this subject. To the student of contemporary slavery and human trafficking, this is an excellent resource. In fact, I am adopting it for my undergraduate class on contemporary slavery and human trafficking.