"Imagine that a mother has to give her young child away to somebody, a total stranger, who is going to take this child far away and she may never see him again. Or imagine a father who has to sell his underage teenage daughter, 12 years old,and marry her to another 17 years old boy in another continent, and he may she never see her again. And the tragedy of that is that even if she was in trouble and needed help and ask of his help, he is unable to take her back. This is part of what we call modern day slavery. And slavery exists, it exists now. In the age of wonderment that is my question: in the 21st century why are we allowing slavery to exist? It exists in a big way. They are at least 27 million slaves in this world today. That is far more than the slaves that were transported out of Africa over a period of 400 years East and West. It is the fastest growing organized crime in the world right now. It is even ahead of drugs. Human beings are being sold, and resold, resold and resold. It fetches 32 billion dollar a year in revenue. The problem with this is that it goes under the name of human trafficking. And human trafficking does not does justice to the kind of brutal and dehumanizing things that slavery brings with it. And we don't see it. It is a hidden crime."
Faridoun Hemani
