Modern-day slavery

The story of Shyima Hall, who was brought to this country as a slave at age 10 and forced to work from dawn to midnight in the home of a wealthy Egyptian family living in Irvine, has been told around the world. According to news reports, the child ironed clothes, mopped floors, made beds and groomed the family's hair. She slept in the garage. She did not attend school or have any days off.

Now 19, Shyima had been leased to Amal and Nasser Ibrahim by her mother when they lived in Egypt. She was to work for $45 a week, for 10 years. Her enslavement ended in April 2002 after an anonymous call to Orange County's Department of Child Support Services prompted an investigation. But Shyima's story and its unusual setting -- a gated community in Irvine, far from the plantations once associated with slavery in this country -- has refocused attention on a subject long believed to have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

The business of buying and selling and indenturing human beings has, of course, been updated. Now it's done with phony documents and computer records and false identities. But it's still the slave trade. The Department of Justice estimates that 14,000 to 17,000 people are brought into the United States as slaves each year, mostly to metropolitan and border regions, including Southern California. Locally, victims most often are brought from Mexico, El Salvador or South Korea. The sex trade remains the driving force of international human trafficking, but slave labor is a significant component.

A sad event takes place Monday; Jan. 11 is the second annual Human Trafficking Awareness Day, established in 2007 by the U.S. Senate. Even more depressing is the fact that this issue is reemerging two centuries after the United States formally ended its participation in the slave trade.

In 1808, the U.S. followed in the footsteps of the British, who had taken the same action a year earlier. Britain's rejection of human smuggling was, initially, far more genuine than that of the United States. Britain committed its Royal Navy to the extermination of the odious trade and launched a 52-year war on those who engaged in it. The slavers, deemed pirates by the British and therefore subject to execution, did what smugglers do: They fought back and adapted, turning to faster ships, including American-built clippers.