E. Benjamin Skinner recorded the following conversation inside a brothel in Bucharest, Romania. Listen as a pimp offers Skinner and his translator a handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car.

From the archive:

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

And from earlier this week (or, rather, from 1902):

The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

And from farther back, and farther afield:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

The Price of Life