Not For Sale – the book

The introduction of Not for Sale opens with these words:

Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today.  Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug loom sheds of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa.

Go behind the facade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings.  You may even find slavery in your own backyard.

Should you read this book?

“We traded our three-year-old son for this color television.”

We didn’t, but a family in Albania did.  Consider the following paragraph:

Abolitionists fighting sex trafficking in both Southeast Asia and Latin America report that parents commonly sell their kids so that they can make an improvement on their home or purchase a vehicle or other consumer item.  These stories align with a report in the New York Times that parents in Albania sold their children to traffickers so that they could buy a color television.

That paragraph is from the book Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade — and How We Can Fight It, written by David Batstone.  The New York Times article that is referenced in that paragraph can be found here.