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When I was seven years old, every time my sister Sonia and I went out on the street, our mother warned us to stay away from the child-snatcher, an old woman, well known in our neighborhood, who stole girls. She would entice girls by offering them candy and then she would kidnap them and sell them off to strangers. Of course, the word kidnapper refers to the snatching of people of all ages, not just children. Forty years later, I discovered that the lesson of my childhood, which could have been taken from Charles Dickens, has now become one of the most serious problems of the twenty-first century. Society in general tends to consider trafficking in women and children as a throwback to a time when the white slave trade was a small-time business run by pirates who kidnapped women to sell them to brothels in faraway countries. We thought that modernization and strong global markets would eradicate this type of slavery and that the abuse of children in the darkest corners of the underdeveloped world would simply disappear through contact with Western laws and market economies. My research for this book shows the exact opposite. There is a world-wide explosion in organized-crime syndicates that kidnap, buy, and enslave women and children; the same forces that were supposed to eradicate slavery have strengthened it on an unprecedented scale. All over the planet, we are witnessing a culture that considers the kidnapping, disappearance, trade and corruption of young girls and adolescents as normal. They become sexual objects for rent and sale, and our global culture celebrates this objectification as an act of freedom and progress. In a dehumanizing market economy, millions of people assume that prostitution is a minor evil. They choose to ignore the fact that what underlies prostitution is exploitation, abuse, and the tremendous power of organized crime, exercised on a small and large scale around the world.