Of Human Bondage: U.S. policy and international sex trafficking.

Every year, at least 700,000 human beings are traded for profit like so much property. In his battle against this international human trafficking, Chris Smith -- a Republican congressman from New Jersey -- has undertaken retail rescue operations as well as wholesale policy reforms. Two years ago, La Strada, a Ukrainian group that assists victims of traffickers, appealed to Smith to help eight young women from Ukraine who had been recruited to work as waitresses in Montenegro. They were actually being forced to work in local brothels and were fearful of the local police -- who were apparently complicit in the operation, which was run by one of their former colleagues. He held the girls' passports after they were "sold" to him. Smith immediately contacted Montenegro's prime minister, who ordered a raid of the brothel that freed seven of the Ukrainian girls as well as a young woman from Romania. The eighth Ukrainian had disappeared, having reportedly been "resold" to an individual in Albania.

Hoping to rescue the tens of thousands of women held in similar sexual bondage, Smith wrote landmark legislation to pressure countries to end this barbaric practice. In the past, Smith's efforts were dismissed by a complacent international community, and opposed by the Clinton administration. But in 2000, when Smith's bill passed unanimously in the Senate (with the indispensable help of Kansas senator Sam Brownback), and nearly unanimously in the House, President Clinton took credit -- characteristically -- for the legislation his administration had strenuously opposed. Clinton's Interagency Council on Women (honorary chairman: Hillary Clinton) had lobbied unsuccessfully to narrow the definition of prohibited sexual trafficking to exclude "consensual" prostitution. The Clinton view that prostitution is a legitimate career option for women reflected the position of some feminists, notably Ann Jordan, director of the International Human Rights Law Group's Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons. Last year, Jordan offered an analogy, quoted in The American Prospect: "We don't support a woman's right to choose because we think abortion is a great thing, but because we believe fundamentally that women should have control over their own reproductive capacity. The same argument can be made for prostitution. Women who decide for whatever reason to sell sex should have the right to control their own body."

The Clinton administration's position -- pro-choice on prostitution -- met a firestorm of criticism from William Bennett and Chuck Colson, but also from Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland, and Eleanor Smeal. Critics on both right and left agreed that desperate women were unable to give meaningful "consent" to their own sexual exploitation, and would (in the words of an angry letter anti-prostitution feminists wrote to President Clinton) "shield many traffickers in the global sex trade from prosecution."

And the trade is thriving. The U.N. estimates that human trafficking reaps $7 billion a year. Even the watchdogs themselves bear watching: Members of the U.N.'s International Police Force in Bosnia, where sexual trafficking has become an international scandal, have been accused of transporting young girls from Eastern Europe to local brothels. And the traffickers are a domestic as well as an international problem: An estimated 50,000 trafficking victims, overwhelmingly women and children, are brought to the U.S. every year. In February 1998, there was a raid of brothels in rural south Florida where Mexican girls, some as young as 13, were forced to have sex with dozens of men a day. The evidence of beatings, drug addiction, and forced abortions prompted one federal judge to call this trafficking case "one of the most base, most vile, most despicable, most reprehensible crimes" he had ever encountered. A trafficking ring in Atlanta imported nearly 1,000 women from Asia who were forced to work in debt bondage as prostitutes.

Over President Clinton's objections, the 2000 law mandated a yearly assessment of countries' anti-trafficking efforts, and provided for sanctions against both destination and source countries that fail to meet minimal standards in discouraging trafficking. Last July, secretary of state Colin Powell released the first ...