Land of the Free, Home of the Slave.
For the first time in its history, the Trafficking in Persons report (issued annually by the US State Department) included the United States in it’s analysis. The report demonstrated that victims of human trafficking in the United States are most often victims trafficked for forced prostitution rather than for labor.
Pat Robertson makes an important observation at the end of the above clip: the term “trafficking” sounds tame compared to the word “sex slavery.” The term human trafficking has been likened to the nineteenth century euphemism “peculiar institution.” In the linguistic battle to parse out the actual definition of crimes, there is more than semantics at stake. If human trafficking is nothing more than political-speak for modern-day slavery, then putting the United States in the TIP report is an admission that, more than 150 years after the Civil War, and fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement, slavery still exists in America today.
