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WEARING JASMINE flowers in her hair and dressed like she was going to church, 23-year-old Jyoti (not her real name) seems eager to please. At the same time, she appears agitated, anxious to leave a good impression. Jyoti doesn't remember her parents. She grew up in an orphanage in the coastal town of Pondicherry, in southern India. She failed her exams when she was 17, and the overseeing nuns forced her to drop out and take up cooking three meals a day for younger children in the orphanage.

"I was sick one day and refused to cook," she says. "The sister asked me to leave. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I took my bags and went to the beach. I sat there crying by myself. A lady and two men approached and asked what the matter was. I explained that I was alone. They told me they would find me a job as a maid. I said I needed a job and would do whatever they wanted."

Jyoti's story is typical and reflects the subtleties that make sex trafficking so difficult to grasp and yet so insidious. Traffickers prey upon women and children who, like her, find themselves vulnerable and afraid. They took her to a "lodge," which Jyoti later discovered was a brothel.

"Sometimes during sex the condom would tear and I was forced into it without a condom," Jyoti says. "I would be in a lot of pain. I didn't know anything called AIDS. When I complained, the ammas [madam] asked me, 'Why did you come here, then?' If I cried she'd say, 'Don't pretend to cry. Even if you cry your lungs out you can't leave.' One time I started vomiting after meals. The owner forced me to drink beer and use paan parag [chewing tobacco] while I was with men. I kept puking every time I had a drink. I realized I was pregnant. The amma told me I was a liar and that I had come to the lodge pregnant. She took me to a doctor for an abortion. He refused to perform one, saying that I was four months pregnant."

Any hour, day or night, Jyoti would be summoned when a "guest" would arrive. The amma would say, "Get ready and come down to meet him." She would then find herself behind a closed door, delivered to her tormenter, tricked, helpless, and alone. How does one measure that? How does one report it? What is the recourse for trust betrayed? What is the measure of a lost sense of self? Of perceptions of love? Of hope in God? Are these betrayals crimes?

They were crimes, but she was generally unable to report them. She was isolated in a world that had stolen her will and reduced her to flesh. She felt like an animal and was so treated. Her countenance had changed from naive hopefulness to drug-sotted lethargic despair. In most cases, women like her are incapable of self-rescue.

Sex trafficking is buying and selling human beings (usually women and children)—and recruiting, transporting, transferring, and harboring them—for sexual exploitation. It is illegal in most countries and violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which asserts that "everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person," and that "no one shall be held in slavery or servitude [or] … be submitted to torture." It is a vastly misunderstood crime, because many people tend to perceive prostitutes as willing participants in a "trade." And some gatekeepers of public morality—such as corrupt local police—often fail to defend, let alone rescue, the victimized women and children. Trafficked people are thus twice discarded.

Researchers estimate that two million people are enslaved by the international sex market (as opposed to the general slave labor market). Numbers in the U.S. domestic sex market reach the hundreds of thousands. "There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa," notes Kevin Bales in his book Disposable People (Univ. of California Press, 2000).

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11