Days of slavery are not over

Two hundred years after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, has slavery reached our shores with men as its final customers? asks my That's Men for You column in today's Irish Times. The question is prompted by the announcement that Scotland Yard has set up a unit to combat sex slavery in Britain, just half an hour's flight away. The column is part of the Irish Times' premium content so I can't reproduce it here.

In Britain it is believed that about 4,000 women and girls are working as sex slaves, it says. Most have been trafficked into the UK from Eastern Europe, duped into believing that they have been recruited for normal jobs.

This is a men's issue because these women are forced to work in brothels and massage parlours whose customers are men. If you included these women as part of society then you would have to say that society is morally damaged by this trade. I would have thought this was true regardless of one's beliefs concerning women who choose to go into the sex industry.

There's more on this issue in this article from The Guardian.....