[Erin] Modern day slavery

The FBI has made a series of arrests involving prostitution and has helped free a number of minors from the sex-selling business:

Mueller said this week's sweeps bring to 433 the number of child victims recovered in the five years since the FBI began its Innocence Lost initiative. The program was designed to combat a growing problem of underage prostitution.

"These kids are victims. They lack the ability to walk away. This is the 21st-century slavery," said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

A University of Pennsylvania study found that an estimated 300,000 children in the United States are at risk of being sexually exploited for commercial uses, according to The Associated Press. Most of those children are "runaways or thrown-aways," Allen said.

Allen said that about 1.6 million children run away from home each year, although most quickly return unharmed. Boys as young as 11 and girls as young as 12 are often targeted by prostitution rings

He praised the FBI and Justice Department for increased attention to fighting the problem, which he said is vastly underreported.

In another case involving modern day slavery, a Long Island, NY couple faces sentencing today and tomorrow for their convictions on twelve counts, including forced labor:

Working from home and selling fortified-strength fragrances to customers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Sabhnanis made millions. "It started in our basement and just kind of grew from there," said Pooja Sabhnani, 23, the oldest of their four children. "My parents worked incredibly hard."

Eventually, they brought servants from Indonesia, where Varsha Sabhnani had been raised. On May 13, 2007, the police were called to a Dunkin' Donuts in Syosset, N.Y., where one of the domestic workers had turned up. Her face was bruised and she wore only pants and a towel.

When the Dunkin' Donuts employees tried to talk to the 51-year-old woman, identified as Samirah -- like many Indonesians, she uses only one name -- she made gestures of hitting herself and uttered what sounded to them like the word "master."

Immigration officials who searched the Sabhnanis' house found Samirah's co-worker, Enung, then 46, hiding in a closet.

Speaking through an interpreter, the two women described for authorities an existence on Long Island that sounded very much like slave labor. They spoke of starvation, beatings and torture. Their compensation of $100 a month for working 17-hour days with no days off amounted to a wage of roughly 20 cents an hour.

It's almost shocking to contemplate the continued existence of slavery in the twenty-first century. We tend to think of it as something that can only occur in backward nations far from our own, whether we're thinking of sex-slaves in Asia or children forced to work without pay or even fight as soldiers in third world countries. But slavery exists right under our noses; though it is illegal people are still keeping their fellow human beings in states of bondage, indentured servitude, and other subhuman conditions which are a terrible violation of the intrinsic worth of a person.

I've never yet heard someone make the argument, "Look, people are going to keep practicing slavery no matter what we do, so we should figure out a way to make slavery safe, legal and rare." We don't argue this because we understand that depriving an innocent human being of liberty and dignity is an affront to every value and measure of goodness which we seek to live by, as a standard. The fact that some will practice slavery no matter what we do has not stopped us from seeing slavery as an evil and seeking to eradicate it wherever and whenever it occurs.