Living from the forced labour, or unwill-ingly provided sexual services, of vulnerable people is a horrific business, and more should be done to punish the perpetrators and succour the victims. That is a sentiment to which almost all governments readily assent, even in the (quite large) slice of the world where links exist between officialdom, the police and the shady types who trade in flesh.rnAnd at least in principle, cross-border trafficking is acknowledged to be so manifestly dreadful that every civilised state must be seen to help correct this wrong. As one sign of this feeling, a Council of Europe convention on trafficking went into force this year; 17 countries have ratified it. The American government has for the past eight years been mandated by law to wage a many-fronted struggle against human trafficking, at home and around the world. And some hard arguments are now raging in Washington, involving politicians, lobby groups and rival government agencies, about whether the struggle should be escalated.
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