The Australian Walk Free Foundation has released its Global Slavery Index 2013, which revealed that tens of millions of people are still living in slave-like conditions across the world, including Canada and the United States.
Kevin Bales, Walk Free index researcher and professor at the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull told CBS News, "What slavery is ... what slavery's always been; It's about one person completely under the control of another person, and violence being used to maintain that control and the whole point of that control being exploitation."
Bales continued, "The rule of thumb is that if a person cannot walk away, even into a worse situation, because they literally have no free will and no free movement... those are the criteria that have been used to define slavery all throughout history."
The report estimates there are 29.8 million enslaved people across the world, with India, China and Pakistan being the worst offenders.
TIME reports that India has nearly 14 million people who are slaves. Some are result of bonded labor, which was outlawed in 1976, but is still quietly practiced.
Mauritania, in Africa, is the worst in terms of population percentage, with about 150,000 enslaved out of 3.8 million.
The report looked into 162 countries and ranked them on their use of forced labor, human trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices. Western Europe, Canada and the United States appear very low on the list, but are still housing thousands of slaves.