By Piyawan Rungsuk

USF professor David Batstone was stunned when he learned his favorite Bay Area restaurant, while serving-up excellent Indian food, was also involved in the dark world of human slavery.

"It was a real shock when I picked up my San Francisco Chronicle one morning and I saw that my favorite restaurant, that I had been going to for a couple of years, was the center of a human trafficking ring that had brought over 500 teenagers from the country of India into the United States for the express purpose of involuntary services, forced labor.”

The revelation was enough to move him to take action, and in 2007 he founded the Not For Sale Campaign, a human rights organization.

Today in the Bay Area, and in major metropolitan and rural areas across the country, a modern-day slave trade is booming.

It is not limited to listings in the darker corners of Craigslist ads, but can be found on otherwise quiet residential streets and in the tight-knit farming communities of the Central Coast.

Modern-day slavery is a diverse and complicated business, and Batstone estimates that at least 150,000 victims in the United States are currently caught-up in its insidious grip. However, much of the activity goes unnoticed, even in the sleepy suburbs of the Bay Area.

"The biggest problem is its invisibility to most North Americans," Batstone said. "We estimate that 17,000 new people are being brought into the United States each year for the purposes of slavery, and San Francisco is one of the major destinations of the traffickers.”

In the Bay Area, traffickers were believed to be working in large cooperative teams, Batstone said.

They have both walk-in clients and online customers, and their captive workers are often confined in secure premises. Batstone once staked out such a location but is careful to point out that he specializes in observation and research and leaves enforcement to the professionals:

"We noticed that there were no young girls ever coming out of this place, only men going in late at night, and we'd watch the trafficker and a security guard lock the girls inside," he said.

More… An estimated 50 percent of the victims trafficked into the Bay Area are involved in the sex trade. However, manual labor and domestic servitude are other common industries where trafficking occurs.

This topic is also gaining the attention and support of prominent celebrities like Lucy Liu, whose new movie 'Red Light' tackles the subject. Meanwhile, Jeremy Affeldt, a San Francisco Giants pitcher, donated $5000 plus $100 for every strikeout he threw this year to the Not for Sale Campaign, advocating that all kids should be "free to play."

Support has also come from Sacramento, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently signed AB17 into law, providing stiffer penalties for those involved in trafficking. At the same time, the national 'Hidden in Plain Sight' campaign has erected three new billboards in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, Batstone and his students continue to monitor suspected human slavery sites in the Bay Area.

One of the recent cases David and his team found was in the residential area of Ocean Avenue. In this example, a number of young women were being kept as prostitutes in a motel-based sex business.

“We give an indication that we want to buy this girl Allie, so what happened is they direct you to the hotel by the beach. When you arrive outside the hotel, you call again, and they will say the room number for you.

“I was on this particular case when I walked in and I said to the young woman, she was about 23, she was Chinese-Vietnamese.”

“I am not here to buy your service I just want to let you know there is help if you need it, and let me know if anything that I can do to help yourself or your family.”

“You better get going if you not going to pay me for my service because [the trafficker] will call in and make sure everything is working out”, the woman told David.

The trafficked girl said she has been in this place for the last two weeks, and in a hotel in Los Angeles for four weeks before that. All she does all day is wait for customers to show-up and buy her services.

The traffickers keep moving their locations, so before an investigation gets started, they may have already moved to the next city. This is all many of these young women see of America.

Further information about the Not For Sale Campaign can be found at www.notforsalecampaign.org.