Slavery still exists in our world. It exists in the form of human trafficking.

Isn’t that strange? We glorify how the world we live in is totally and completely free, where everyone is allowed to worship, to think, to speak, to do as he or she would like; we feel fortunate to live in a world such as ours.

But if we do follow that mentality, that false, blind mentality, we are a long way from world peace and a world of goodness and righteousness.

Let me first define human trafficking. Human trafficking, according to the Polaris Project, is: a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.

Human trafficking is a crime under US law (think the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution, along with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000) and international law (Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children). But you need not be a lawyer to figure out how horrible of a crime it is.

In India, sex trafficking is horrific. Girls as young as thirteen are forced into prostitution. Many women are forced into prostitution through deception or for lack of a choice: they have no other way to support themselves.

A woman named Beenu, according to the international women’s rights organization, Equality Now, is one such person. Beenu was befriended, drugged and taken to a brothel by another woman. Beenu turned to prostitution because she had no other way to support herself or her son (at thirteen, Beenu was married and had a child; after three years, her husband kicked her out). As of May 2008, for as little as $1.25 “per ejaculation,” Beenu’s body was being sold. Each day, she made about $2.50, half of which was given to the brothel madam. Beenu often tried to commit suicide, by poison, cutting or putting her head on railroad tracks.

Sex trafficking exists in the United States too. In 2006, ABC’s “Primetime” aired a segment on the subject, featuring an FBI estimate that over 100,000 children and young women, ranging from nine to nineteen years old – on average about eleven years old – are trafficked. Most victims are not runaways or abandoned children, but people who are manipulated and coerced by clever predators.

In one case, a fifteen year old girl named “Debbie” was kidnapped from her driveway when a friend came by to chat, with two older men in the car. They abducted Debbie, who was found over a month later in an apartment. She had been tied up and crushed into a drawer under a bed.

Other young women, such as nineteen-year-old Miya, are lured by predators with enticing offers of modeling and other economic opportunities.

It doesn’t take much imagination or morality to denounce this issue. Imagine a child, a child as young as eleven going through such a terrifying ordeal. The way I see it, sex trafficking is a crime against humanity. It is a form of slavery: it breaks down a person; it breaks her spirit and will to live.

When I first read about it, my insides began twisting, and I felt myself about to vomit. I could not imagine the type of person you would have to be to survive such a horror, or the type of person who would put a fellow human being through it.

I wonder why I write this article, what its purpose is. I know: because I am not just an American citizen, but an American woman, a woman of this world. I am a woman and an assault such as this on people, women like me, is beyond evil.

Enslaved women cannot speak freely, so it is up to the rest of us to take their stories to the law and to raise their shattered tales for all to see; to ensure that no one else will have to endure what they did. Americans don’t give up. I will never give up.