Editorial: Stopping the slave trade

Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

W hile it is clear there is a global business in human trafficking, no one truly knows the extent of it.

That is largely because governments have not made human trafficking - the sanitized term for modern-day slavery - the priority it should be.

The United Nations and the United States, among others, have documented that people are being moved, either against their will or by being tricked, from poor countries to richer countries where they are forced into slave labor or sexual slavery.

Last year the Justice Department gave Metro Police nearly $370,000 to form a task force to understand and address the problem. In conjunction with that, the Justice Department will give the local Salvation Army nearly $450,000 over three years to set up a support network to help victims of human trafficking. In a story in Monday's Las Vegas Sun by Sam Skolnik, Metro Capt. Terry Lesney said there is a huge and growing sex-oriented trafficking problem in Las Vegas.

The federal government has given money to 42 task forces, and each has a big job. Estimates of how many people are brought into this country and into slavery range up to 20,000 a year.

The United Nations tried to gain an understanding of the problem, but in a report issued last April found it impossible to draw a clear picture, partially because of the "hidden nature of the crime" and largely because of the "lack of systematic reporting by authorities."

Lesney and the Las Vegas task force's civilian chief Terri Miller said that this has never been a top priority for law enforcement and statistics are lacking. They are now training officers to look for signs of human trafficking.

The Las Vegas task force is moving ahead quickly with its work, which is a good start. Police and prosecutors must aggressively work to stop human trafficking. As Antonio Maria Costa, the chief of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said, "The fact that slavery - in the form of human trafficking - still exists in the 21st century shames us all."