Slavery is Still With Us
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Every day, thousands become slaves for the first time.
"The plight of Majlinda is both heart-breaking and courageous. While we took great comfort in the fact that Majlinda is a fictional character, her vividly told story is a very real one which plays out again and again throughout the world today…
River of Innocents is a story which could be the story of our mother or sister or father or brother or daughter or son or friend. For this very reason, Majlinda’s story should stand as a global call to arms in the fight against trafficking."
-Anti-Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Unit,
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
A hundred and fifty years ago, Uncle Tom’s Cabin worked to free the slaves. One novel, the story of a remarkable man facing the terrible reality of slavery, brought a tremendous fuel to the abolitionist movement in the time leading up to the American Civil War. One book helped to free the slaves, by making the slave human to the world.
RIVER OF INNOCENTS is an Uncle Tom’s Cabin for today’s world, where slavery is still very much alive. Today there are thousands of women on our shores and hundreds of thousands more overseas who live as slaves. They are real people, flesh and blood and beating hearts, and more of them are sold in a decade today than were sold in the entire 400-year-history of the African slave trade.
In a world of stolen children and broken dreams, the seventeen- year-old Majlinda struggles to hold on to her humanity. She has no control over her life or even over her own body, yet where people are disposable, where rape is part of the normal day, and where guards watch her every move, Majlinda strives to create a family out of the stolen children around her and to give them hope when all they know is fear.
RIVER OF INNOCENTS is a novel about that hope and that terrible fear, about ideals in the face of despair, about the strength we find in ourselves when others need us, and about slavery as it is. If we are to end today’s slavery, we must first know of it; here is the story of Majlinda’s long struggle to be free.
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