The international campaign against sex-slave trafficking in Germany at the World Cup is gaining momentum online, where one group has generated a petition with 20,000 signatures of protesters outraged at the practice, and other non-governmental organizations are offering aid for the exploited young women.

Last week U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the fight against the forced sex trade the "great moral calling of our time," as young women, kidnapped or lured with false job offers from Ukraine, Hungary and Poland are forced to perform sex acts for pay against their will.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., long known for his pro-life stance, held a hearing last week in which he noted that the German government facilitated the prostitution rings, run by the criminal underworld, when it legalized the sex trade in 2002. Smith noted that at the World Cup, sex entrepreneurs have set up temporary wooden cabins on the streets of Berlin, called "performance boxes," where the soccer fans are cavorting with prostitutes, some as young as 14.

Sites on the Internet advertise even more elaborate brothels, including the storied four-story "Artemis," located near the Olympic Stadium, which Worldcupweb.com describes as "ready for the hordes of mostly male soccer fans from around the world who are flooding the city."

Fans reportedly pay $90 for access to an array of 50 prostitutes, who are "outfitted with thong bikinis with a soccer ball motif," the Web site said. Rather than show porn videos to stimulate the men, however, the movie screens in the bordello are displaying the latest soccer matches.

"If you Google the term 'World Cup prostitution,' you will return hundreds of hits," said Austen Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a non-governmental organization with offices in Washington and New York. "There is a lot of outrage over this. The U.S. has complained to Germany. There was a hearing in the U.S. House last week."

Ruse's organization, founded in 1997, is also fueling the fury against the exploitative practices allowed by the German government. At www.c-fam.org, the NGO has posted a petition for concerned folks to add their names to in order to protest the German policy. By Gene Koprowski

It's interesting - when the administration put slavery on the agenda, they totally excised all mention of non-sex slaves, who outnumber sex slaves. There are more slaves working today than ever in human history. There are some 50,000 slaves in the USA, brought here mostly by gangs. Many are in the sex business, but there are a lot working in agriculture, sweatshops, restaurants, and as domestic servants (maids).

I guess Bush and Rice are okay with plain old field-slaves, kitechen slaves, and workshop slaves. After all, that's like, a big part of American history. Nope, don't want to bring up the labor aspect of slavery (which is the ENTIRE POINT of slavery). Each slave works hard to make over $100,000 for every slave owner.

After all, if you start thinking about the money, you start to see a connection to the thousands of prisoners who are working for under 10 cents an hour to do factory labor for American corporations. That's pretty close to slavery, to have a lot of jailbirds put in for being in a gang and selling drugs.