The representation of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther has parallels with the cultural memories, histories, and materialized pain of African(a) girls and women across time and space, from the Persian Empire, to subsequent slave trade routes and beyond. Trafficking Hadassah illuminates that Africana female bodies have been and continue to be colonized and sexualized, exploited for profit and pleasure, causing adverse physical, mental, sexual, socio-cultural, and spiritual consequences for the girls and women concerned. It focuses on sexual trafficking both in the biblical book of Esther and during the transatlantic slave trade to demonstrate how gender and racism intersect with other forms of oppression, including legal oppression, which results in the sexual trafficking of African(a) females. It examines both the conditions and mechanisms by which the trafficking of the virgin girls (who are collectively identified) are legitimated and normalized in the book of Esther, alongside contemporary histories of Africana females. This important book examines ideologies and stereotypes that are used to justify the abuse in both contexts, challenges the complicity of biblical readers and interpreters in violence against girls and women, and illustrates how attention to the nameless, faceless African girls in the text is impacted by the #MeToo and #SayHerName social movements. This book will be of particular interest to those studying the Bible, religion, gender, theology, and sex trafficking. It is also an important book for those in the related fields of Africana Studies, Trauma Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Diaspora Studies, Critical Race Studies, as well as to the general reader.

Human trafficking is the trade of people for forced labor or sex. It also includes the illegal extraction of human organs and tissues. And it is an extremely ruthless and dangerous industry plaguing our world today. Most believe human trafficking occurs in countries with no human rights legislation. This is a myth. All types of human trafficking are alive and well in most of the developed countries of the world like the United States, Canada, and the UK. It is estimated that $150 billion a year is generated in the forced labor industry alone. It is also believed that 21 million people are trapped in modern day slavery - exploited for sex, labor, or organs. Most also believe since they live in a free country, there is built-in protection against such illegal practices. But for many, this is not the case. Traffickers tend to focus on the most vulnerable in our society, but trafficking can happen to anyone. You will see how easy it can happen in the stories included in "In Chains." **WARNING** This book contains graphic details and statements that some may find very disturbing.

“The best book ever written on human trafficking for sexual exploitation”—the basis for the feature film, Trafficked, starring Ashley Judd (Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves). Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world’s most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such “processing,” and can be repeatedly “consumed.” In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his four-continent journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all. The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves. “Sex trafficking is more of a problem than most people realize. Read this well-written book and find out.”—Kirk Douglas

This title examines one of the world's critical issues, human trafficking. Readers will learn the historical background of this issue leading up to its current and future impact on society. Various forms of modern slavery including debt bondage, child labor, prostitutes, sex slaves, and child soldiers are discussed in detail, as well as risk factors for trafficking such as poverty, violence, and cultural, traditional, or religious views. Also covered are the physical, psychological, and spiritual impact trafficking survivors experience, laws intended to combat human trafficking, the tier system, and organizations such as the United Nations and UNICEF. Engaging text, informative sidebars, and color photographs present information realistically, leaving readers with a thorough, honest interpretation of human trafficking. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, Web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Essential Issues is a series in Essential Library, an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company.

"Sex worker rescue and rehabilitation programs have become a core focus of the global movement to combat human trafficking. Manufacturing Freedom offers an ethnographic exploration of two American anti-trafficking organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production to women migrants in China and Thailand as a path out of sex work. Activists brand this jewelry a "slave-free good" and then sell it to consumers in the United States, generating racialized circuits of commerce and morality centered around promises of freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers-whom these organizations universally label as victims of trafficking. Workers, by contrast, often contest the trafficking label and object to the moral and disciplinary processes that ensnare them in a pernicious global web of anti-trafficking rescue. In this novel study, Elena Shih argues that these anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption, thereby generating a transnational moral economy of low-wage women's work that obfuscates relations of race, gender, national power, and inequality"--

Human trafficking has captured worldwide attention as a crucial moral and political issue, but perhaps nowhere more than in the United States. Since they were signed into law in 2000, U.S. federal laws and policies on human trafficking have been understood as concrete expressions of the civic values of personal and political freedom. Yet these policies have also been characterized by a marked preoccupation with regulation, and especially sexual regulation. Yvonne C. Zimmerman offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between freedom and sexual regulation in American anti-human trafficking law and policies. . She argues that the religious values of American Protestantism have indelibly shaped the federal government's approach to engaging human trafficking, and that the trajectory of the U.S.'s anti-trafficking efforts cannot be fully grasped without understanding the unique ways in which sex, morality, and freedom are connected in Protestant Christian configurations of morality. Zimmerman shows that particularly under the George W. Bush administration, the U.S.'s anti-trafficking project expressed a vision of freedom whose structure and logic is thoroughly Protestant. . Her analysis challenges the assumption that combating human trafficking necessarily entails sexual regulation, and reveals the extent to which the preoccupation with sexual regulation has functioned to discourage alternative understandings and practices of freedom, particularly for women. Other Dreams of Freedom demonstrates that if opposition to human trafficking takes the promotion of freedom as the point of departure, then freedom must not be identified strictly with religiously and culturally Protestant understandings, but ought also permit other understandings of how freedom is constituted, practiced, and maintained.

As seen on The Today Show When she was fifteen years old, Leslie King ran away from an abusive home, looking for a better life and longing for real love. What she found instead was a man who wooed her just long enough to trap her in a life of prostitution. She became one of the many thousands of trafficked individuals in the United States, a number that continues to rise—in the biggest cities and in the most idyllic towns. As is true for so many in similar situations, life was nothing but brokenness and pain for Leslie. After years of hopelessness, she finally decided to take her own life. And then God spoke. With his promise that he was with her and had mighty things for her to accomplish ringing in her ears, she got off the streets, got clean, and got to work on the mission to which he'd called her. Now Leslie is a passionate and heroic advocate for other trafficked women and teenage girls in her community and across the country. More than a gritty, no-holds-barred deliverance story, When Angels Fight includes powerful advice from Leslie and those she's encountered in her work—police officers, judges, and other advocates and activists. She also shows you what YOU can do to make a real difference in your own community. Her call from God includes marshaling others to the cause and equipping them to fight alongside her and the angels who battle for God's children—just as they once fought for her.

"Trafficking thrives in the shadows. And it can be easy to dismiss it as something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. But that is not the case. Trafficking is a crime that involves every nation on earth, and that includes our own."—US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2009 Human trafficking is as old as slavery and continues to be practiced in the modern world. Victims of human traffickers include workers in restaurants and in garment factories, maids and nannies in the homes of wealthy families, child sex workers, beggars on the street, boy soldiers, even infants kidnapped for foreign adoptions. Women and children are more likely to be coerced or seized than men and boys, especially if they are poor and uneducated. Traffickers sell their victims for their bodies or for their labor and reap an enormous profit. Human trafficking is estimated to be a $30 to $45 billion industry on an annual basis, rivaling weapons and drug trafficking as one of the most profitable criminal undertakings in the world. Up for Sale takes a hard look at human trafficking, identifying perpetrators and telling the stories of victims through their own words. You'll discover why some people become vulnerable to trafficking and you'll read about what their lives are like on a daily basis. You'll also meet some of the courageous individuals and organizations working to free people from lives in bondage so that, in the words of US president Barack Obama, each person can "forge a life equal to [their] talents and worthy of [their] dreams."

Since the 2005 publication of the highly acclaimed first edition of Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered, human trafficking has become virtually a household phrase. This new edition adds vitally important updates related to recent developments. A new introduction considers the term 'sex trafficking' and its growing use amongst feminist researchers. In a new chapter Ratna Kapur looks at changes in anti-trafficking legislation especially under the Obama administration. Jyoti Sanghera reports from her experience as a UN Human Rights commissioner and Bandana Pattanaik examines feminist participatory research on 'trafficking'. The book concludes with a list of relevant websites, organisations, and publications useful for students, researchers, and activists.

“In The Third Daughter, Talia Carner ably illuminates a little-known piece of history: the sex trafficking of young women from Russia to South America in the late 19th century. Thoroughly researched and vividly rendered, this is an important and unforgettable story of exploitation and empowerment that will leave you both shaken and inspired.” —Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris The turn of the 20th century finds fourteen-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family endless pogroms. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairytale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon she discovers that she’s entered a waking nightmare. Her new “husband” does indeed bring her to America: Buenos Aires, a vibrant, growing city in which prostitution is not only legal but deeply embedded in the culture. And now Batya is one of thousands of women tricked and sold into a brothel. As the years pass, Batya forms deep bonds with her “sisters” in the house as well as some men who are both kind and cruel. Through it all, she holds onto one dream: to bring her family to America, where they will be safe from the anti-Semitism that plagues Russia. Just as Batya is becoming a known tango dancer, she gets an unexpected but dangerous opportunity—to help bring down the criminal network that has enslaved so many young women and has been instrumental in developing Buenos Aires into a major metropolis. A powerful story of finding courage in the face of danger, and hope in the face of despair, The Third Daughter brings to life a dark period of Jewish history and gives a voice to victims whose truth deserves to finally be told.