whakahekeheke

Freedom, being unknown, is hard to imagine. The choices available in freedom are completely alien to the bonded. For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.

For other slaves — those who have been enslaved after living in freedom — it is not usually necessary to think their way to freedom. Their challenge is to overcome the crushing violence, the stunned shock, of the total control over their lives. How does one bring about freedom when the problem is not apathy or indifference to the continued presence of slavery, but ignorance of or ever tacit desire for it?

~ K. Bales, Understanding Global Slavery