Child porn, sex trafficking modern forms of slavery

Living in Marin, it is easy to feel like we live in a beautiful bubble. But there is a difference between living in a bubble and living in willful ignorance. I am disheartened by the overwhelming silence that greeted the news that three Novato men were arrested for allegedly distributing child pornography this month (“Novato men arrested in child porn bust,” June 20).

The production of child pornography is often the result of the commercialized exploitation of children. It is a vile crime that involves both despicable perverts and the depraved human traffickers who practice modern-day slavery for profit.

At this point we do not know if the Novato men arrested this week were involved with human traffickers. But data suggests that the San Francisco

Bay Area has, in the last decade, become a hot bed of human trafficking.

The day before Marin County’s COVID-19 shelter-in-place order began I was working (as an unpaid volunteer) designing a fundraiser poster for a group that provides continuing care to juveniles rescued from commercialized exploitation. In other words, these children were rescued from slavers.

For the past month, I have been reading the fury in the local news over Sir Francis Drake’s involvement in the slave trade over 400 years ago. I have come to realize that Marin is sometimes a place where people create their own bubble and ignore modern victims in order to focus on historical victims.

If just half the people busily advocating for renaming a street in our county could devote a few hours each week to helping the victims of modern human traffickers, maybe we could do something real today to actually fight modern slavery.

— Sarah Nagle, Novato