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The deal sounded good enough. A friend’s former professor needed a dog sitter for the summer, while he and his family traveled abroad. They lived in Hawaii. Sure, the dog was old, they told me, but his arthritis was managed with vitamins, his energy kept up with a special diet. He was, they said, “the best dog in the world.”

Great. In exchange for free rent, I’d live in the house and take care of him. I boarded a plane in San Francisco with thoughts of the beach, time to write, and an affable canine companion.

That picture began to distort on Day 1. The dog, who sometimes passed for a “cross between a wolf and a bear,” struggled to stand on his 15-year-old legs. When he walked, he sounded like something coming at you down a dark ally in a nightmare; kids ran out of the way. “He’s the boss,” the owners said. They showed me a photo album of his life since puppyhood. I got it: even though they had a one-year-old human, this dog was their baby.

Next, they showed me how to prepare his food—a labor-intensive mash of roast chickens, piles of steamed vegetables, pots of brown rice. They showed me the diaper he might need to wear. On cue, the dog had some type of seizure, stumbling and wheezing and peeing all over the floor.

Two days later, the owners left me with a typed handbook of detailed instructions and a yoke of duty and dread. The dog looked up with milky, knowing eyes.

Easy Targets for Human Traffickers

After college I lived in Cambodia for a year and a half. There, naked street kids swam in monsoon puddles and I heard stories about mob killings, and rural families sharing one roasted rat for dinner. Every morning on my way to work, I passed slapped-together shelters with red lights glowing in the back. Girls with hard expressions leaned in the doorways and followed our van with their gazes, as it lumbered by in Phnom Penh traffic.

In Cambodia, human trafficking wasn’t so difficult to imagine. “Unsuspecting victims,” I wrote in an informational brochure for a non-profit, “are lured with false promises of jobs or marriage, then forced into sex work or exploitative labor situations. Controlled with threats, lies, drugs and physical force, victims of trafficking are often held in slave-like conditions, unable to escape.”

The threats and lies and drugs part can be hard to understand. As journalist Nicholas Kristof — arguably one of the best known, and sometimes controversial, crusaders against human trafficking — has figured out, victims aren’t always kept in locked rooms with bruises on their bodies. After Kristof notoriously bought and “freed” two trafficked girls from Cambodian brothels in 2004, one returned to the brothel after only a few days back in her home village.

Traffickers are smart. They look for vulnerable people who will take that initial risk others won’t — cross the border, cross the country, cross town. Ignore the warning signs and hope for the best. They use nuanced tactics to maintain control — stolen passports, language barriers, social stigma, psychological manipulation, drug dependence.

Mess with someone’s mind, and that’s the most powerful thing.

Barely Hanging On

The dog’s health slid from bad to worse. After more seizures, I took him to the vet, who said he’d wanted to euthanize the dog months ago. Maybe it was neurological, maybe cancer. I looked at a graph on the wall. A dog of his size, it said, was the equivalent of 65 human years at age seven. This dog was roughly 140.

The owners, on a crackly phone line from across the world, called the vet Dr. Doomsday. They emailed more instructions and the address of a new vet.

Over the next couple months, the dog’s body parts failed one by one. I was changing his diaper every few hours, feeding him the homemade mash with a spoon, administering Chinese medicine to stop internal bleeding. When he slept, my heart pounded as I waited to see if his chest would rise again. Dr. Doomsday had said to prepare myself.

One afternoon, I came home to find the dog immobilized on the floor in a puddle of pee, terror in his eyes. I broke.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I told the owners. “I feel like you’re taking advantage of me.”

The professor got angry. He said, “Don’t you know what kind of pain we’re feeling over here? We think about him all the time.”

I was crying. “But he’s dying,” I said. “He’s dying, he’s dying.”

“Would you kill your grandma?”

Chills of shame shot up my spine. Then I realized: “Why would you leave me with your grandma?”

His wife got on the phone. She said now I was the only thing the dog had in the world.

Understanding Some of Human Trafficking’s Complexities, on a Smaller Scale

To be clear: I’m in no way equating what I went though in a three-bedroom condo at the foot of the Koolau Mountains with sex slavery, or those stories I’ve heard of Cambodian men who get worked to the bone on Thai fishing boats, then shot in the head and dumped overboard. My experience with the dog was a far cry from human trafficking.

But after this summer I do better understand some of the small-scale complexities that enable human trafficking to flourish globally. Raking in $32 billion a year, according to the anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project, human trafficking is the world’s second-largest criminal industry. As recent local farm laborer cases demonstrate, it takes place everywhere — in the United States, in Hawaii, down the road from where you live. Street kids and roasted rats not required.

Last month, Polaris Project identified Hawaii as one of the country’s worst states in terms of trafficking laws and policy. Hawaii was one of just six states that hasn’t “addressed the crime of human trafficking at all.”

In July, Gov. Linda Lingle vetoed a bill that would have changed that. Granted, the bill’s vague wording may have rendered it problematic. But a state law is needed; as Polaris Project argues, federal laws aren’t enough to combat an industry so pervasive, hidden, and clever.

‘It happens in other places, to other people’

I wanted to leave. The dog now required 24-hour care, which was taking a large physical and mental toll on me. Ask the neighbors for help, my mother said, and I did, although in the close-knit, “Desperate Housewives”-esque housing development, I didn’t know who was aligned with whom. I wanted to speak freely about the situation but felt wary as an outsider. So I smiled and put on a capable face.

If I left, where would I go? My friend didn’t have much extra space in her apartment. Other close friends and family were across an ocean. My ticket back was non-changeable, my funds low. And there was the dog, wasting away but still with those wet, knowing eyes.

I saw it through until the end. When I did begin to trust those around me, pouring out everything to kind-eyed neighbors and the new vet, they became allies, helping to advocate for euthanasia. Two and a half weeks before they were scheduled to return, the owners agreed to put the dog to sleep. He had stopped eating and spent a lot of time staring into the middle distance.

“I want to ask that you be there with him,” the owner said. So I stroked the dog’s face and held his gaze until that knowledge slipped away.

Again, I know this experience was nothing like sex slavery or forced labor. But I did feel trapped in a stranger’s house doing crazy-making work that I didn’t want and never agreed to do. I struggled with feelings of powerlessness. How did I end up here? I thought back to my work in Cambodia, and could understand some of the tactics of traffickers with new clarity.

• Enticing initial picture – I have a great job in the city for you, a trafficker might tell a village girl. Waiting tables. Cleaning hotel rooms. Although she’s heard of scams, of people who come from the city with lies, the girl wants so badly for this job offer to be true, she ignores the warning signs. I did, too. A 15-year-old dog about to lose his family—I could have predicted he’d go downhill. But I wanted to spend my summer in Hawaii. I ignored the cautionary voices in my head, and boarded the plane with stubborn optimism.

• Isolation – A person in an unfamiliar place, without regular support structures, is instantly more vulnerable, easier to control. If a person is in a foreign country illegally, that vulnerability multiplies. Language barriers, fear of authorities, and stolen passports are key tools for a trafficker. And, as I experienced, even potential allies can seem threatening and untrustworthy when you are the odd one out, under stress and without any bearings.

• Social stigma – Evoking shame and engaging a person’s sense of morality, of right and wrong, are other effective tools. What kind of person will I be if I abandon this dog? If I advocate for his death? I’m killing my grandma. A huge challenge for sex trafficking victims is dealing with the social stigma of prostitution. Victims may believe they’ll never overcome that shame; their only option is to stay at the brothel. This is where trafficking awareness and laws can help. With the right laws and training in place, trafficked people are recognized as victims—not arrested as criminals.

• Financial debt – In response to the dog’s early seizures and incontinence, the owners emphasized my use of their home: We hope you’re enjoying the breezes. Enjoy the mountains and quiet. They knew that I couldn’t afford to live there otherwise, that as someone trying to make it as a writer my financial resources were limited. Traffickers target those who are poor and then use a convoluted system of indebtedness to convince victims they are always behind in what they owe.

• Drug dependence – This wasn’t a factor in keeping me at the house, but I could certainly see how, in a forced sex or labor situation, drugs would be an attractive way to dull the pain, blur reality, escape. “Drink a glass of wine,” the vet told me when I was particularly stressed, and I sure did. When I managed to get out and meet friends, I drank more than a glass. Once a trafficked person is addicted to a drug, the trafficker gains more control as his or her supplier.

Human trafficking can seem too horrifying, too distant, to truly grasp or care about. We think of it as taking place through the window of a van in a developing country, or in a news article. But we all get into situations (albeit probably less horrifying—a job, a relationship, an agreement) from which we’d like to break free, but, for many reasons, can’t.

One obstacle to combating human trafficking in the U.S. is the idea that it happens in other places, to other people. Public perception and law enforcement misunderstand or fail to recognize what constitutes human trafficking in the first place. Victims are arrested as criminals; traffickers go free. Why didn’t she just walk out of there, if prostitution wasn’t her choice? No one was holding a gun to her head. It’s rarely so simple.