Tackling the sex slave trade with prayer

BY TONY LOBL

"Sex slave ," a PBS documentary, captures the horror of the entrapment and relentless abuse suffered by young women trafficked from their home countries in Eastern Europe to places where they are used as sexual slaves. It provides evidence of the frequent failure of justice systems to deal with the traffickers.

Some progress has been made in places like Nigeria ("A stop sign for human trafficking," The Christian Science Monitor, June 19, 2009), and in the United Kingdom the nationwide Newsquest group of newspapers has taken the costly decision not to publish any "adult ads" in their papers. To reduce demand for such services, others are turning down commercial incentives to promote "adult entertainment."

Nevertheless, the sex slave trade flourishes. In an op-ed article for The Washington Post, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote: "The United Nations estimates that at least 12 million people worldwide are victims of trafficking. Because they often live and work out of sight, that number is almost certainly too low. More than half of all victims of forced labor are women and girls, compelled into servitude as domestics or sweatshop workers or ... forced into prostitution. They face not only the loss of their freedom but also sexual assaults and physical abuses" ("Partnering against trafficking," June 17, 2009).

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