Laura Lederer - Selected Quotes

Selected Quotes

"I am happy to be here, on Law Day, to talk with you about human trafficking. For the past few years I have been calling human trafficking …a contemporary form of slavery. When I first made the comparison, I took some heat. Critics said that "slavery" was too strong a term. That it referenced a particular period in our country's history…that true slavery doesn't exist today. as I examined it further, I became convinced that the comparison was apt. In a previous century, Africans labored in the tobacco fields, and slaves were bred for strength and endurance. The fields have been replaced by brothels and sex shops, and the new trade is in young women and children. Yet even with these changes, the similarities are striking:

• As were African slaves, these young women are tricked, deceived, lured, induced, kidnapped, and coerced into bondage.
• They are taken from their native homelands and moved vast distances to foreign countries.
• In these new places, they do not know the language, the culture, the laws. They are separated from family and friends. They have no identification papers, no passports, no visas. Strangers in a strange land, they have no way to escape.
• As were slaves of earlier times, they are under the complete control of the people who have enslaved them. If they don't do what they are told, they are held without food or water, beaten and raped, their families threatened.
• And perhaps most important, as were the slaves of earlier times, they are forced to do someone else's bidding for someone else's financial gain.