There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from Africa in the time of the transatlantic slave trade. Put another way, today's slave population is greater than the population of Canada, and six times greater than the population of Israel.

Slavery is theft - theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne.

Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life.

Yes, twenty-seven million in slavery is a lot of people, but it is just .0043 percent of the world's population. Yes, $23 billion a year in slave-made products as services is a lot of money but it is exactly what Americans spent on Valentine's Day in 2005. If humans trafficking generates $32 billion in profits annually, that is still a tiny drop in the ocean of the world economy.

It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.

Throughout all of human history slaves have been expensive capital purchase items. And today they're disposal inputs like styrofoam cups to an economic process.

For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.