Slavery is long from over in this country. People are no longer forced to spend laborious hours on a plantation in bondage (at least not at the same rates), but thousands of women and young children enter the United States each year in an equally disturbing form of slavery.

With globalization, global migration is on the rise. And through intricate, underground and international networks, women and children are taken around the world to serve in brothels. Often "travel agencies" promising a new life in the United States and Western Europe persuade young girls to make the move. However, what they find when they leave their countries is far from promising.

Many are forced to work as prostitutes until they pay off a $40,000 debt for travel costs, which requires sleeping with hundreds of men. However, the unluckier ones are kept in bondage until they are murdered or incapable of working. Some of these girls make more than $30,000 per week for their owners, yet spend most of their time starving.

According to the United Nations, 700,000 women, girls and boys are trafficked each year into forced prostitution. The conditions they find themselves in are what Peter Landesman from The New York Times describes as the "land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship."

They live cramped in tight rooms with germs and disease. They are regularly drugged and beaten. This life permanently destroys a person's mind, and most of the women slowly accept their fate.

Most realize the extent of this problem in poorer countries, but this crime is rampant in the United States as well. In 2003, the CIA found that at least 18,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year.

Although Mexican women comprise a large majority of sex slaves, women throughout the world are imported into the United States through the Mexican border. Five thousand Chinese women are living in Los Angeles alone. The exportation is huge throughout Eastern Europe and East Asia.

This problem is even serious in our very own Seattle. Just last August, nine men were arrested for participation in the sex trade. The Seattle Times reported 40 Asian sex slaves worked briefly in Seattle-area brothels from June to August.

In recent years, the federal government has begun to acknowledge sex trafficking in this country. President Bush called the act a "special evil" at the U.N. and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was the first law to acknowledge the sufferers of sex trafficking as victims, rather than illegal immigrants.

However, action has not followed words. Laura Lederer, a State Department official, told Landesman, ''We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them.''

Common perception in the United States since the end of antebellum slavery has been that people have the choice to do as they please. The same perception holds for police officers who rarely see trafficking as a serious problem. Rather, it is perceived that women are working voluntarily as prostitutes and living illegally in the United States.

LaShawn R. Jefferson of Human Rights Watch critiqued the State Department's report on trafficking arguing, "The report gives undue credit for minimal effort and ignores government practices, such as summary deportation and incarceration, that effectively punish trafficking victims."

Furthermore, the girls rarely find help for their conditions. Andrea, a girl who began in the sex trade at age four and was interviewed by Landesman, had been raped by police officers and a child psychologist. Who can they go to if the people who are supposed to protect them participate in their persecution?

As a result, this heartbreaking problem continues. Rape should be equivalent to murder, yet in some states, rapists serve less time than drug dealers do. Dehumanizing a person through abuse, rape, drugs, violence and many more incomprehensible acts is like murder. Could you live a happy and complete life if you were raped at five years old, and can we expect the thousands who meet this fate to move on without assistance?

How can we take pride in our country when thousands continue to live in despicable slave-like conditions and thousands of women are taken from their families to be raped each year? In the land of the free, many continue to toil in their inhumane bonds, and too many defenders of this country have been too quiet for too long.

Reach columnist Brooke McKean at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.