Slavery, Its Not Just History

            This weekend we celebrate the gift of human freedom as we have known it here in this country.  The Biblical account (Gen. 24) of how Abraham arranged for Rebekah, his kinsman Laban’s sister, to marry Isaac reminds us that many people, women especially, have not always enjoyed the freedoms we cherish.

            Theft of the gift of human freedom takes many forms, and human trafficking, slavery, is perhaps the most pernicious. Human trafficking is alive and thriving, and yet only recently has garnered even a modicum of publicity. It has been identified as the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. It takes the form of bonded labor, otherwise known as debt labor, where victims are required to labor to repay amounts owed, but find that the interest on the loan rises faster than they can ever hope to pay it off. It takes the form of  forced labor, where workers are imprisoned and forced to work under threat of physical coercion. And it takes the form of sexual exploitation.

This year, UNICEF estimates that 1.8 million children will be sold into the commercial sex trade. India is perhaps the world’s sex slave capital, and we know of Thailand’s and Cambodia’s reputations as havens for the commercial sex slave trade. But human trafficking thrives here in our own country as well, at times taking the forms of imported Russian and Mexican girls that are kept locked up in brothels, but more often in the form of the mini-skirted runaway on the streets of our cities.

Nicholas Kristoff writes, “Typically, she’s a 13-year-old girl of color from a troubled home who is on bad terms with her mother. Then her mom’s boyfriend hits on her, and she runs away to the bus station, where the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp. He buys her dinner, gives her a place to stay and next thing she knows she’s earning him $1,500 a day.” (NY Times, 4/24/11).  And we respond by treating her as a criminal, not a victim, prosecuting her while the pimp goes free, the customers go unnamed.

So what to do, here in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave? Here today, some 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 235 years after the Declaration of Independence, we could do worse than listen, really listen, to the voice of Rebekah, calling to us, asking only for freedom for those deprived of this basic human right.

            Friends, here in our time, and at our doorstep, Rebekah calls. Will we listen?