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It’s not a secret, but modern slavery is a topic that hardly gets any national attention.

Women and children from Asian, African, and sometimes European countries are brought to the US by wealthy families to serve as housemaids, nannies, and sometimes objects for sex. The Associated Press wrote an in-depth piece about one young Egyptian woman sold by her family to pay off debt:

Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family’s crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.

For a year, Shyima, 9, worked in the Cairo apartment owned by Amal Motelib and Nasser Ibrahim. Every month, Shyima’s mother came to pick up her salary.

Tens of thousands of children in Africa, some as young as 3, are recruited every year to work as domestic servants. They are on call 24 hours a day and are often beaten if they make a mistake. Children are in demand because they earn less than adults and are less likely to complain. In just one city — Casablanca — a 2001 survey by the Moroccan government found more than 15,000 girls under 15 working as maids.

The modern slave movement has various tiers to it, one of which being sex trafficking. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to hear the testimony of a young woman who travelled with some of her friends to Cambodia to help young girls who were trapped in forced prostitution. Some of the girls were 9 and 10 years old.

I just watched a documentary on forced prostitution in the US, where pimps will literally kidnap teenage girls to work for them. In many cases, these kidnappings are dismissed as runaways. The film told the story of a father who knew where his daughter was being held, and called the police multiple times over the course of a few hours before he took a tire iron and went into the house himself. The father was charged with breaking and entering! (At that point my blood started to boil, but the narrator quickly explained that the charges were eventually dropped.)

The way I see it, it is poverty combined with the objectification of women that is fueling this crisis. Those are big words with many issues attached to them, but there are things we can do to help. Check out some of these relevant websites:

*NotForSaleCampaign.org
*Barnabas Institute
*StopChildSlavery.com