The new movie “Amazing Grace” tells the story of Brits in powdered wigs voting to take their country out of the slave trade 200 years ago.

But slavery is far from eradicated. The movie is drawing attention to how prevalent it still is – as many as 27 million people, by one estimate.

It’s called “human trafficking” these days; the old bills of trade that recorded ownership of another human being are gone. But forcing people to work for no pay, under threat of violence, is a practice that generates $32 billion in profits a year to the exploiters, said Jolene Smith, executive director of Free the Slaves, an advocacy agency.

These slaves are brickmakers and gravel crushers, and rice and cocoa farm workers in the developing world, Smith said.

They are girl prostitutes and abused domestics in the United States and other wealthy countries.

They are young boys forced to join rebel armies in places like Uganda, according to the 2006 “Trafficking in Persons” report by the U.S. State Department.

Lies, poverty and brutality make all this happen.

An exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, for example, tells the story of Rose, whose family in Cameroon happily sent her as a teenager to Maryland as housekeeper to a Cameroonian couple who promised her a salary and schooling. Instead, she was sexually abused, occasionally starved, and forced to sleep in the kitchen. And there was no school and no pay.

The State Department said another common trap is “employment fees” of $4,000 to $11,000 that traffickers charge desperate people for promises to transport them and place them in good jobs. Instead, the traffickers use the debt as a reason to hold the victims in indentured servitude after their arrival.

In a variation on debt bondage in India, business owners lend money to poor families and then force them to work – sometimes through several generations – on terms that make it impossible ever to repay the money.

The Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights have helped several women find safety in that state, one a domestic slave in Lebanon and another a “bush wife” to Sierra Leone rebels, said Michele Garnett McKenzie, the agency’s attorney.

The State Department estimates that 15,000 to 18,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year – almost half sent into prostitution, another quarter into domestic servitude, and the rest mostly to farms and factories, Smith said.

“We’re not talking about sweatshops where people are treated horribly at work but then they can go home at night,” Smith said. “We’re talking about people held against their will, under threat of violence, and paid nothing.”

Ohio is a nexus point, according to Freedom Center curator Terrie Puckett. The boats come into Toledo, then traffickers use the conveniently criss-crossing Interstate Hwys. 70, 71 and 75 nearby to send their human cargo throughout the whole country, she said.

The United States prosecutes the crime under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Puckett said.

The problem is that slavery is so far from the minds of many police and ER doctors, she said, that they often arrest or treat an enslaved prostitute, for example, only to release her back to her exploiter.

But “Rescue and Restore,” a program by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is training first responders to be alert to the possibility of slavery, she said.

There are hopeful developments, elsewhere, too, Smith said. She described a program in India that goes into the poor, remote villages where traffickers often take children by lying to their families about great opportunities. Program workers, sometimes with former child slaves, spread warnings and help set up community vigilance committees that report traffickers to police, she said.

For more information on the face of contemporary slavery and the fight against it:

• Free the Slaves: a Washington-based nongovernment organization campaigning against slavery around the world. www.freetheslaves.net

• “Invisible: Slavery Today”: an exhibit through March 11 at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. www.freedomcenter.org

H.J. Cummins is a workplace columnist and reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. She can be reached at [email protected].