Trying to derail the worst trafficking: human

Young Estonian women were brought to Boston on the promise of good jobs, then forced to work at an erotic massage parlor in Brighton.

A nanny from India charged that the Middle Eastern family that employed her denied her pay, fed her table scraps, and allowed only supervised trips outside the family's Brookline home.

Those local stories are among hundreds of cases involving allegations of indentured servitude and forced labor on farms, in factories, and in the sex trade being prosecuted nationwide as part of government efforts to quell so-called trafficking in persons.

Such forms of modern-day slavery have grown into a $10 billion a year shadowy international business, according to UNICEF, which estimates that half the victims are children.

How to spot human trafficking and help its victims will be the topics of a training conference at the International Institute of Boston tomorrow. Social workers, attorneys, law enforcers and mental health counselors will be on hand to raise awareness of the problem and provide information about government and private services available to help victims break their bondage and start new lives.

''It's pretty underground, pretty invisible. It may be happening next door, but it might not be apparent that things are amiss," said Carol Gomez of Cambridge Health Alliance, who said she has seen more than two dozen cases in Massachusetts in the last 18 months.

''There are no quick-fix solutions. We have to think carefully around each case," Gomez said.

Victims, she said, are often recruited to come to this country with the promise of good jobs and better lives only to find themselves trapped in deplorable and dangerous conditions far from home, Gomez said.

Tomorrow's daylong training will be run by the International Institute, the Alliance's Victims of Violence program and Jewish Family and Children's Services. It's the first of several similar trainings the three organizations plan with funding from the Department of Justice.

The groups won the money last year after law enforcers and social service workers say they began to see a Massachusetts connection to this international crime.

Marina Livshits, a mental health counselor with Jewish Family and Children's Services, said she started working on the issue about two years ago, when she realized that more than half her patients were mail-order brides brought to this country from former Soviet countries by international matchmaking companies.

''They come looking for a new life and a good marriage but find themselves in completely different conditions," said Livshits. Often, she said, victims are forced into domestic and sexual slavery by spouses who threaten to have them deported if they don't do as they are told.

Since Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act five years ago, federal officials have stepped up law enforcement efforts to stamp out modern-day bondage.

The Department of Justice has identified victims from at least 46 countries.

There are 212 open trafficking cases under investigation currently, and federal officials have won convictions in 88 cases in the last 18 months, according to the department.

Prosecutions have increased threefold since 2001, but represent only a fraction of the estimated 14,500 to 17,500 people trafficked in the United States annually, according to the department.

People ''think it happens in California and New York, where there are masses of immigrants," Livshits said. ''It's hard for people to believe that something as terrible as modern-day slavery is happening in Boston."