One of the many misconceptions around modern slavery is that it doesn’t happen here in the United States. As so many of our friends in the modern-day abolitionist movement are showing daily, though, slavery is happening in this country and, like any crime, we need strong, clear and enforceable laws in place to end it.

That is why the report released today by the abolitionists at  Shared Hope International is so important. The Protected Innocence Initiative provides a comprehensive analysis of the sex trafficking laws of each state, with a particular emphasis on their application to protecting children. The report also provides recommendations for how such laws can be improved, and finally provides a grade to each state on the effectiveness of their laws in addressing child sex slavery.

The combined effect of Shared Hope International’s analysis, recommendations, and grading is, in their words,  “a comprehensive strategy to promote zero tolerance for child sex trafficking.” Deep and detailed analysis like this is the first step in changing laws to better address child sex slavery. The next is convincing lawmakers to strengthen these laws.

That is where we all come in. Look at your state’s report card. If you don’t like what you see, consider contacting your state legislators and referring them to this report.

There is a spark within each of us. Fan the Flame.

CNN recently established a new project called the “CNN Freedom Project.” Through this project, CNN aims to: end modern-day slavery and shine a spotlight on the horrors of modern-day slavery, amplify the voices of the victims, highlight success stories and help unravel the complicated tangle of criminal enterprises trading in human life. CNN also presents horrifying stories and facts about the current state of human trafficking. Here are some shocking facts:

1) According to Kevin Bales, the average price of a slave has decreased over 200 years. In 1809, the price of one slave was $40,000 (adjusted). In 2009, the average price of a slave was $90. This represents a 100% decrease in the value of slaves over 200 years.

2) Human trafficking exists in towns and cities across the world, including the US. Young women and girls are forced into prostitution in towns like Toledo, Atlanta, Wichita, and Los Angeles. Accounts of human trafficking victims have also been found in salons, restaurants, and hotels across the country (Amanda Kloer, Editor with Change.com)

3) Some of the products you use – jewelry, shoes, coffee – may have been made by human trafficking victims (Amanda Kloer).

4) Estimate number of slaves in the world? 10 to 30 million, according to policymakers, activists, journalists and scholars (Manav Tanneeru, CNN)

Takes a look at how people around the world are taking a stand against slavery.

What can you do to end modern-day slavery? Click here to access more than 100 different resources and anti-slavery organizations. CNN also provides an in-house team in place to assist readers and viewers with specific questions. You have a voice. Fight to end modern-day slavery!

There’s little doubt that the news media is becoming more aware of the crime of human trafficking.  As coverage expands, so should public awareness.

Typical of the way in which traditional media is now paying attention to trafficking is this weekend article in the Miami Herald, long considered one of the nation’s best newspapers.  The article profiles the plight of some 30 Filipinos who came to South Florida with the flimsy promise of good paying jobs in posh country clubs.

The story’s first paragraph sums up their treatment:

For up to 16 hours daily, (the Filipinos) worked at posh country clubs across South Florida, then returned to deceptively quiet houses in Boca Raton where they were captives — and in the most dreadful cases, fed rotten chicken and vegetables, forced to drink muriatic acid and repeatedly denied medical help.

(more…)

Following on the heels of the just-completed official state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao, his government’s semi-official English language newspaper, China Daily, reports that trafficking of women out of the country appears to be on the rise.

The report quotes a senior police officer in the government’s anti-trafficking office as saying that the victims are mostly from poor rural areas, who are trafficked into forced marriages or prostitution.

“. . .(T)here has been a growing trend for organized transnational human trafficking crime groups to target Chinese women for forced prostitution in foreign countries,” said the official, Chen Shiqu, director of anti-human trafficking office under the Ministry of Public Security.  “Many of the trafficked women were cheated by criminal suspects under the guise of overseas study or high-paid jobs and then forced into prostitution,” Chen added.

Chen didn’t offer any numbers to back up his claims, but he did refer to statistics from Malaysia saying a total of 5,453 Chinese women suspected of engaging in prostitution were detained by the end of November.  He also noted that Chinese police have cracked 9,165 trafficking cases and rescued 17,746 women since April 2009 when the Ministry of Public Security launched a special campaign.

What are careful readers to make of this interview?  On the surface, it appears that China is taking trafficking seriously, and is increasingly eager to let the world know that it is attempting to combat traffickers.  But according to many outside organizations, China’s efforts to protect its citizens, and to observe basic civil and political rights, remain weak.  One such conclusion, by the respected Human Rights Watch, was issued just prior to President Hu’s visit with the Obama Administration. It stated that China’s own efforts to conform with broad human rights protocols have so fair failed.

The China Daily report can be interpreted as a public relations effort to counter its poor international reputation on human rights.  Or, to be fair, perhaps the newspaper account is just what it is: a reflection of a huge nation’s growing concern about the trafficking of humans into forced labor and sex slavery.

Whatever the interpretation, the fact that China Daily sees fit to cover the trafficking issue is a positive step in a nation that is too often opaque to outsiders.

Among the 225 high profile people invited to Wednesday’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Hu, one stood out for anyone hoping to see progress from China on respecting human rights.

None other than Kenneth Roth, the President of Human Rights Watch — one of China’s most persistent NGO critics — got one of the treasured invites for the glittering event.  Less than a week ago, Human Rights Watch gave China a failing grade for showing a lack of progress in upholding citizen rights. The Obama Administration, hoping to show respect for the Chinese leader and, in return, obtain concessions, or at least the start of concessions, on a wide range of critical policy differences, rolled out the red carpet, the exquisite crystal glassware and cutlery, and a quintessential American menu.  In subdued and elegant formal wear, the two leaders proffered several toasts on prosperity, friendship and continuing dialogue.

It was an impressive, glittering evening, a carefully staged and highly public event in which nations communicate to each other in sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt language, all encased in pomp and circumstance.

The presence of Roth on the guest list was an umistakable message from our government to its Chinese counterparts:  get serious on curbing human rights abuses. Roth played his part to the hilt.  Asked why he thought he had been invited to the soiree, Roth replied, “I was invited as a statement to President Hu.”

None of this may may end up doing anything to cause the Chinese to ease up on the government’s restrictions on civil and political rights.  Up to now, the country has shown little inclination to even respond to its critics, other than to suggest, often with a sneer, that how political protest is dealt with in China is an “internal matter” that is no business of other nations.

Still, one can hope that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Administration’s China team have secured at least the start of a progressive step from the Chinese on human rights, and on a host of other issues in which Beijing often acts like a petulant teenager, according to many diplomatic observers. On human rights, Hu — for the first time — signaled a tentative willingness to at least consider respecting citizen rights.

In a report by the New York Times, Hu said at a White House news conference that China “recognizes and also respects the universality of human rights,” a palpable shift for a government that has staged a two-year crackdown on internal dissent and imprisoned a Nobel laureate. Until Wednesday, the Times report continued, recognizing credos like democracy and human rights as “universal values” had been all but taboo in Chinese political discourse, although China has signed the United Nations convention that enshrines the principle of universal human rights.

Words, of course, are easier than deeds. “I don’t equate new rhetoric with new reality in China,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar who was President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser on China issues. “But at least new rhetoric is better than nothing.”

All of this is encouraging, if it leads to a more open society in China, and among other reforms a crackdown on widespread human trafficking and forced labor practices within the vast nation.  A good starting point would be the release of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize laureate and political activist who languishes in prison as the leader of the Chinese government clangs crystal with the American President.

A human trafficking case described as the largest in U.S. history continues to grow.  Two more individuals were indicted in Honolulu last week for their alleged involvement in an illegal scheme to force more than 400 farm workers from Thailand into brutal work in Hawaii and throughout the nation.

Previously, six people were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for their role in luring the Thai workers with false promises of steady, good paying jobs, and then treating the laborers as little more than slaves.  The trafficking ring operated from 2001 through 2007, according to the Justice Department.

Whether it’s the largest trafficking case on record is not nearly as important as the lesson it provides in human trafficking 101.  All the elements of a classic forced labor exploitation are evident:  force, fraud, coercion and, apparently, big profits for the traffickers.

According to accounts of the ordeal as published in the Salt Lake City Tribune, the Thai workers agreed to pay an employment firm, Global Horizons, an upfront “recruitment” fee of $24,000 each, payable by taking out usurious mortgages (of up to 800% interest) on their rice farms in Thailand.

As more attention is paid to trafficking, the debate about its actual extent and impact is likely to continue to grow.  But whatever the actual data is, there is no doubt — as this case amply demonstrates — that trafficking exists, and that real people can and are its victims.

Today, January 11, 2011, is national human trafficking awareness day, and by anyone’s guesstimate, there is little doubt that awareness about contemporary forms of slavery is widespread and growing.  Compared to even a year ago, much progress has been made in the U.S. and elsewhere to elevate the public’s familiarity with the issue.

The Freedom Center certainly has been a significant factor in this effort.  Our exhibition on modern-day slavery and trafficking, Invisible: Slavery Today, opened in October as the first permanent museum installation on these subjects anywhere in the world.  It has drawn good crowds and enthusiastic endorsements from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, as well as movie celebrity and anti-trafficking activists Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

Across the country, there are more media reports about trafficking arrests and convictions, which is a reflection of growing law enforcement attention to the issue. Police training is accelerating in cities and states, and new laws are being passed to increase penalties for traffickers.  Ohio reflects the growing focus on the issue.  The Ohio General Assembly passed in December a new statute making human trafficking a 2nd degree felony.  The law passed virtually unanimously following several years of inaction, which shows that legislators are paying attention to the issue. A statewide commission to examine the extent of trafficking in the Buckeye state was created two years ago by Democrat Attorney General Richard Cordray.  There is strong likelihood that the commission will continue under his Republican successor, Mike DeWine.

In the meantime, businesses, especially those with large, labor intensive operations, are starting to assess their vulnerability to worker exploitation.  Several companies, including The Body Shop, Manpower, and Lexis-Nexis, have become prominently engaged in combating exploitation.

But a realistic assessment must concede that while awareness is surely growing, there is scant evidence that trafficking is declining around the world.  In fact, it may be increasing, as vexing economic disparities force thousands — if not millions — of desperate people seeking work to fall victim to trafficking gangs.  Nor is there any evidence to suggest that the demand for sex, which is fueling both the multi-billion dollar pornography industry, as well as prostitution and child sex trafficking, is doing anything but growing worldwide.

Which leads to the question: is awareness truly helping to decrease the crime of trafficking and exploitation?

It’s difficult to say.  In large part, trafficking remains a hidden, elusive (‘invisible”) phenomenon, and reliable data is scant.  For example, if you accept the widely repeated number that there are 27 million people enslaved in the world, then you’d have to be dismayed with the paltry number of trafficking convictions in 2009 — less than 5,000 globally.  It’s also accepted, especially in the back-and-forth chatter on Twitter and Facebook, that trafficking is a mushrooming, $32 billion industry that is growing even faster than the global illegal drug trade.

If true, those are sobering reminders that abolishing modern-day slavery is going to be a tough, years (if not decades-long) battle.

Accepting that it’s going to be a long-term struggle is really the first step in raising awareness of trafficking and exploitation.  It very definitely will not go away without much more attention by law enforcement not just in Ohio, but also in Moldova and Brazil.  More resources — i.e., money — will be required to do battle with traffickers, who are in the business in the first place because they can make a lot of money exploiting the work or service of vulnerable individuals. Better methods must be devised to reach and warn especially desirable targets, such as teenage girls, about the dangers of trafficking. Nations are going to have to crack down on corruption, which some experts believe is a major factor in the expansion of trafficking. Every nation in the world has a law outlawing slavery; it’s time, isn’t it, for governments to seriously begin enforcing the rule of law.

In other words, and self-evidently, we can’t wish away the crime of slavery with platitudes and public service announcements.  It really is going to take time, effort, money and commitment.

Here’s a good place to start.  The United States’ primary anti-trafficking law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), needs both Congressional re-authorization, and more program dollars. The Obama Administration and the new GOP-controlled House hopefully will work in bipartisan fashion to not only maintain TVPA, but strengthen it with higher levels of funding.  You can let your voice be heard on this critical matter by e-signing a petition directed to House Speaker John Boehner and Senate President Harry Reid, asking them to lend their support and leadership on anti-trafficking.  You can sign the petition here.

Perhaps the strategy for 2011 is as simple as this:  moving from awareness to action.

The Associated Press news service has released an interview conducted last April with a Chinese human rights lawyer, who told of beatings and torture at the hands of government police, but who asked that his account not be made public unless he went missing.

It sounds like a hackneyed Hollywood script, but it’s not.  The lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, has disappeared into the dark reaches of the vast Chinese official bureaucracy, and no one knows where he is, or even if he is still alive.

Gao, according to the AP, was held by Chinese authorities for 14 months in 2009-2010, and subjected to beatings, isolation and other flagrant civil and human rights abuses.  When he was finally released, he recounted his ordeal to the wire service, with the stipulation that nothing be reported unless something happened to him — like a letter from the grave that is the staple of dozens of espionage or mystery movies.

Two weeks after the interview, he disappeared again. His family and friends say they have not heard from him in the more than eight months since. Police agencies either declined to comment or said they did not know Gao’s whereabouts.

According to AP, Gao had been a galvanizing figure for the rights movement, advocating constitutional reform and arguing landmark cases to defend property rights and political and religious dissenters, including members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. His disappearance in 2009 set off an international outcry that may have played a role in winning his brief release last year.

Among democracy and rights campaigners, Gao appears to have been singled out for frequent, harsh punishment beyond the slim protections of China’s laws.

It’s a stunning revelation about life in a nation that is exerting its economic, political and military muscle on the world stage.  Reports of  human rights abuses, incidents of human trafficking and severe labor exploitation, emanating from China are increasingly commonplace. Yet the world — including the United States — is largely silent about these officially sanctioned practices.

Gao, apparently, is viewed as a threat to the Chinese government.  How else to explain his harsh treatment, which has gone on for years.

In his April interview with the AP, Gao said that police seemed intent on casting him into a limbo that kept him at their whim.

“Why don’t you put me in prison?” Gao said he asked Beijing police at one point. “They said, ‘You going to prison, that’s a dream. You’re not good enough for that. Whenever we want you to disappear, you will disappear.’”

The Public Security Ministry, which oversees police forces, did not respond to telephoned and faxed inquiries about Gao. Police in Beijing, Shaanxi and Xinjiang — locations where Gao said he was held — declined comment on his current predicament as well as his past treatment.

You’ve probably asked yourself, as you passed by one of those increasingly ubiquitous nail “salons” that are a staple of most shopping malls, who are these women — most of them Asian — and how did they end up in this place?

The hint of an answer can be seen in law enforcement charges of human trafficking against several people in Zanesville, Ohio this week. Those being sought or already arrested are Asian immigrants, police say. They are suspected of operating a multimillion dollar nail salon business in the Buckeye state, using women trafficked into the U.S. from Southeast Asia, who are given false papers and forced to work as indentured servants for little or no wages.

Not all nail salons are operated this way, of course.  Many if not most are legitimate businesses whose employees are paid and not compelled to work. But the nature of the business makes it ripe for exploitation, law enforcement officials say, because salons are labor intensive and profits depend on low operating costs.

There’s a bittersweet irony to the Zanesville human trafficking arrests. Zanesville, in east central Ohio, was a significant stop on the antebellum Underground Railroad, the secret network used to shepherd escaping slaves to freedom. The area was settled by pioneer settlers from New England around 1800. Many were strongly abolitionist, and became quickly involved in assisting escaping slaves. Today, the Putnam Underground Railroad Education Center (PURE) tells this history in a small but compelling and fascinating museum. Diagonally across from PURE Center is the Putnam Presbyterian Church where Reverend William Beecher (brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe) preached antislavery sermons. Another significant figure, A. A. Guthrie, the President of the Ohio Abolitionist Society, lived one block away.

One cannot help but wonder whether the women trafficked into Ohio are part of a perverse, 21 Century underground railroad that, instead of moving people to freedom, is transporting vulnerable individuals into slavery.

Anyone engaged in the anti-human trafficking cause today is bound to notice a certain sameness to the ongoing discussions about the issue. It’s no surprise that people are passionately against modern forms of slavery, abuse and exploitation, and it is certainly good that they communicate that passion at local meetings, regional and national conferences and especially by posting their outrage at traffickers and concern for victims in the social media world. I know, because I often do this myself.

Yet cumulatively, I feel a growing sense that modern-day abolitionists (again, myself included) are existing in an echo chamber where our thoughts, ideas and suggestions are repeated in a continuous loop, with very little that is new or insightful about the issue and what to do about it.

There’s a lot of conventional wisdom, as a consequence, that may actually be preventing us from seeing the issue clearly and objectively.

This point came home to me rather abruptly in an early December during a meeting with three visitors to the Freedom Center from Thailand. One runs an anti-trafficking NGO; the other two are police officers who deal with the reality of trafficking every day.

I asked about efforts in Thailand to raise public awareness about sex trafficking, which, as most everyone asserts, is virtually endemic in this south Asian country. All three, through their interpreters, gave me an insight about the situation in their homeland that I had not heard, or considered before. Yes, they said, sex trafficking is a major issue in Thailand. But forced labor was the the much broader and difficult trafficking issue. Thousands of men, women and children from Cambodia, Myanmar, Viet Nam, as well as Thai citizens, were working as virtual slaves in back alley sweatshops and isolated manufacturing plants throughout the country. This, they said, was Thailand’s trafficking nightmare.

What they said called into question my assumptions about Thailand. More broadly, their comments about what’s the real problem in their country was a reminder that it’s always helpful to question long-held assumptions about the nature and extent of trafficking in the world.

A similar reminder came from an article on Huffington Post about a person who’s engaged in the trafficking issue, but is an iconoclast who has no problem challening conventional thinking about the problem. Laura Agustin, who describes herself as the “Naked Anthropologist,” delights in going against the grain of the anti-trafficking establishment on her website, http://www.lauraagustin.com/ and in her controversial book, Sex at the Margins.

Agustin recently took part in a “debate” at a well-publicized anti-trafficking conference in, of all places, Luxor, Egypt.  The conference attracted the usual coterie of celebrity abolitionists, government officials and anti-trafficking leaders, but Agustin was apparently not on the guest list until the BBC asked her to participate in a debate on trafficking trends. Her presence set sparks flying, as recounted in the Huffington Post interview.

The point of all this is to say that while the anti-trafficking movement is still in its infancy, it would be a shame to cut off internal debate just because some may have already determined the parameters of the issue.

There’s much about trafficking and forced labor that we don’t know (because the data is so suspect and many of its victims remain invisible) and much that we don’t know we don’t know. Outliers like Laura Agustin provide a valuable check on reality. If we want to abolish slavery and trafficking — and we’re all agreed on that — let’s keep an open mind, and regularly tip over our apple carts of assumptions.

A new report in Britain claims that police inactivity — a consequence of inadequate training and indifference — is leaving traffickers free to ply their criminal trade with little fear of arrest.

According to a report in London’s Independent newspaper, criminals who traffic hundreds of children into and around the UK are not being adequately investigated or prosecuted, according to the country’s leading child-protection unit.

Vulnerable children could be at risk thanks to a lack of knowledge and resources to catch their traffickers, a study from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) reveals. The report says that public sector cuts could exacerbate the situation, with two specialist police units in effect already closed.

The CEOP report claims that as many as 287 children were identified as “potential” victims of trafficking in the UK in 2009-2010.  About one-third of the kids were trafficked into the sex industry, the report claims.

The study is viewed as another argument for Britain’s participation in a European Union-led anti-trafficking initiative, which the British government so far has refused to join.

Mexico, the United States’ troubled neighbor to the south, appears headed towards “failed state” status.  What does that mean?  A failed state is one in which the foundations of civil society are dysfunctional or non-existent. Failed states are countries in which government appears barely — if at all — in control of law, justice and human rights.  It describes a nation in which lawlessness in the form of drug trafficking, human trafficking and violence are widespread and growing.

Mexico is not there yet, but it is coming close. The latest example of Mexico’s widening chaos is a report that more than 15,000 people were murdered in 2010 alone in a rampaging drug war that the government of President Felipe Calderon is handling with increasingly brutal military tactics. It’s become so dangerous South of the Border that the participating schools in this year’s Sun Bowl football game have been warned not to cross in Juarez from El Paso, for fear of assault, robbery — or worse.

Calderon’s government says the situation is well under control. But a withering assessment by Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime analyst and professor at Mexico’s ITAM university, says that as much as 77 percent of Mexico’s economic sectors is under at least partial control by crime gangs.

“Political corruption at the highest level is the mother of all crime problems,” Buscaglia said.

In such an environment, violations of essential human rights are commonplace, and human trafficking thrives.  Police and government corruption, weak law enforcement, economic disparities and abject poverty — all in abundant presence in Mexico — are among the primary causes of exploitation and trafficking.

It is an unstable situation with important ramifications for the United States.  It will be interesting to observe how the Obama Administration and the new Congress handle this growing national security problem right next door.