Freeing Four Generations of Inherited Slavery Reveals the Depth of Pakistan’s Human Rights Emergency

Earlier this month, Aaron Hutchings, a Christian man from the United States, traveled to Pakistan and paid approximately $4,000 to liberate a family trapped in bonded labor for an extraordinary 140 years; four complete generations whose lives had been consumed by inherited debt at a brick kiln in the Kasur region.

The family’s enslavement began in the 1880s when an ancestor took out a loan, unwittingly condemning his descendants to generations of unpaid labor. This tragedy illuminates Pakistan’s brick kiln industry, where an estimated hundreds of thousands remain enslaved across more than 20,000 facilities, despite bonded labor being outlawed in 1992. The system operates through “peshgi”—advance payments or loans given by kiln owners to workers during emergencies, for weddings, or medical bills. With extremely low wages, arbitrary fines, manipulated accounts, and crushing interest rates, repayment becomes virtually impossible. These debts become family obligations passed down through bloodlines, with children as young as four or five beginning work to “repay” ancestral obligations they never incurred.