The word itself seems dated, plucked from a murky, unenlightened past when people somehow didn't understand that what they were doing was wrong. But slavery isn't merely a historical phenomenon, according to a growing consensus of activists and researchers around the world. It's a grim reality faced by as many as tens of millions of people on virtually every continent.

"If you get a huge increase in the population and a lot of people are being pushed into economic vulnerability, both of which have happened in the Third World, you've got lots of people who are very poor and easily manipulated," says Kevin Bales, a lecturer at the Roehampton Institute in Surrey, England, and author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the G

Besides, the prospect of buying a person's freedom is irresistibly seductive to Americans weary of the Sisyphean struggle to rehabilitate the Third World. Would-be freedom riders sent to the Sudan by Christian Solidarity International Inc. have returned with blithe idealism comfortably intact. One Colorado schoolteacher told newspapers how thrilled she was to see a recently freed woman suddenly give birth under a tree. "What can you say when you free a woman and you know that this child was born in freedom?" she said. "She can say that she was born free."

"Slavery is not the greatest problem in the Sudan by far," says Jemera Rone, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who focuses on the country. "Almost two million people have died in the course of the current civil war. One expert was saying it was probably 50,000 at the most [who had been enslaved]. Unfortunately, 50,000 is not a lot of people to have been affected."

Bales says de facto slaves can even be found in London and Paris. Disposable People commences with an account of a North African woman who as a child was taken to France by a family who said they would send her to school in exchange for her labor. Instead she spent years being routinely abused and kept cut off from the world at large. "Although she was 22 and intelligent, her understanding of the world was less developed than the average five-year-old's," Bales says. "She had little understanding of time -- there was only the endless round of work and sleep. She is baffled by the idea of 'choice.'"

That hasn't deterred activists like American Anti-Slaver

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