QUESTION: When did human slavery end?
ANSWER: It hasn't.

In fact, it is cheaper to buy a human being today than ever before. Human trafficking and slavery is an international issue that's growing. Selling children, women, and also vulnerable men for domestic labor, agricultural labor, factory labor, harvesting of organs, or the sex trade has remained invisible for many decades. Human trafficking and slavery is highly profitable, and, it occurs in almost every single country in the world... including here, in the United States.

It's only in the past few years that this issue has come to the attention of the media and to the attention of caring people around the world. Trafficking of human persons is an issue with economic, political, social, medical, and moral implications.  It is a complex issue, but not one against which we are powerless. In fact, by working with millions of others, we are helping to build a New Underground Railroad that makes emancipation and freedom possible for the more than 12.3 million children, women and men who are, at this very moment, slaves in our  global community.

In response to an international mandate of the Sisters of the Divine Savior in 2002 to address the issue of trafficking, the US Province of the Sisters of the Divine Savior (SDS) established a national Anti-Trafficking Committee that includes Salvatorian Sisters, Salvatorian Priests and Brothers, and Lay Salvatorians. Several individual Salvatorians have made this issue a focus of full-time or part-time ministry. In 2006, the Salvatorians officially launched SAVE: Salvatorians Advocacy for Victims of Exploitation, an umbrella program coordinating efforts in response to the issue of human trafficking and slavery. Today, thousands regularly receive Stop Trafficking!, a publicly available, electronically published magazine edited by Sister Jean Shafer, SDS. Thousands more, from across the world, have visited the Slavery website, hosted by the Sisters of the Divine Savior at www.sdssisters.org/slavery. And, in locations across the United States, parishes, faith communities, law enforcement  personnel, social service and health care providers and concerned people like you are participating in seminars and workshops to become aware of the slavery and trafficking that occur just beneath the surface of our society. They are making choices to respond.

In the 1800's, the Underground Railroad helped thousands of slaves reach freedom, often against incredible odds. We invite you to work with the Salvatorians, and millions of others, to build this New Underground Railroad, an abolition movement in our times that, in spite of complexities and challenges, commits to the changes needed to free those sold and held against their will, with force and coercion, in slavery in the United States and across the world. Your gift will support this critical ministry, and will help us to continue to work for abolition.

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