Traffickers who subject women and children to prostitution and forced labor are engaged in one of Europe's most lucrative crimes — a euro2.5 billion a year, modern-day slave trade whose victims are growing by 50 percent annually, a United Nations agency said Tuesday.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that more than 140,000 people are currently controlled by organized gangs. Many victims are tricked into leaving lives of poverty in eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America with bogus promises of work.
"Europeans believe that slavery was abolished centuries ago. But look around — slaves are in our midst," UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa said in a statement accompanying the report.
Costa said one big problem is that governments in industrialized countries have only recently passed tougher laws to crack down on trafficking in people. "It is a very recent recognition of a very old problem," Costa said later to the Associated Press, adding that arrests and convictions of traffickers are rare. "I could count them on one hand."
Worldwide, his agency estimated several million people have fallen victim to traffickers.
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