Imagine your 13-year-old daughter being forced to have sex with grown men in a country far from home instead of doing her math homework in the other room.
Picture your 12-year-old son being compelled to spend his day making bricks instead of playing a game of pickup basketball in your driveway.
U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has spent a good deal of time thinking about and looking into those kind of issues, which go on in America and across the world. And the international sex and labor slave trade -- currently entrapping 27 million men, women and children -- is something he wants to remedy.
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Today, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will introduce legislation that would create a nonprofit organization, the End Modern Slavery Initiative Foundation, that would employ programs with demonstrated success and best practices to free and sustain the recovery of victims of modern slavery, prevent people from becoming enslaved and enforce laws to punish individual and corporate perpetrators of such slavery.
One of those successful programs Corker has cited is the International Justice Mission, which parlayed a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant into a reported 79 percent drop in the number of minor girls working in the sex trade in Cebu, Philippines. The program reported 225 girls rescued and 77 perpetrators jailed.
The legislation calls for $251 million in U.S. seed money over eight years and anticipates an additional $500 million from foreign countries and $750 million from the private sector.
Importantly, the bipartisan legislation sets clear, defined, measurable goals, has an overarching goal of a 50 percent reduction of modern slavery in targeted populations, and requires the Foundation to "remain focused on achieving a significant reduction in modern slavery within a period of seven years."
Unlike with most government programs, though, it states that Foundation projects that fail to meet goals will be suspended or terminated.
Those are the givens. What isn't a given is whether the program will end up being funded in the way officials hope it will.
What's also worrisome is that since much of the focus will be on countries where reporting and enforcing human trafficking are low, will money in those countries find its way into the right hands, and will more money and influence in those countries actually translate into enforced laws that will remove the enslaved from mines, factories, brothels, fishing boats and even private homes?
Sad to say, the legislation Corker will introduce will never completely end the problem. That, too, is a given, because there always will be people attempting to enslave others.
But that's no reason not to try.
Rebuilding Europe seemed a big task after World War II, but America led the way with the Marshall Plan. Creating interstate highways across the country appeared to be a monumental task in the 1950s, but the Eisenhower administration took it on. Similarly, it may have seemed a fool's errand to attempt to squelch the worldwide spread of AIDS, but President George W. Bush made it one of his signature projects.
To date, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has provided HIV testing and counseling to more than 56.7 million people. Even more significantly, the number of AIDS-related deaths in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 10.5 percent between 2004 and 2007, according to a 2009 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Would Corker take a 10 percent drop in slave trafficking over the first three years of his program? You bet, but the results-oriented senator probably would like a bigger and faster drop.
The U.S. Department of Defense says human trafficking is the world's fastest-growing crime, having steadily increased for the past five years. Forced labor accounts for 74 percent of victims, and forced sexual servitude accounts for the remaining 26 percent.
Women and girls are 54 percent of the victims, and children under the ages of 18 make up 26 percent. Picture, again, your own children trafficked in such horror.
Corker, who's got his hands full dealing with the Obama administration's request for authorized use of military force against the Islamic State, needn't have dirtied his hands with human trafficking at this time. No one would have blamed him if he hadn't. But he has seen firsthand the countries in which this is occurring, and not doing anything about it would be unthinkable to him.
We hope congressional approval will be swift and the international and private-sector response will be a resounding amen.