Halloween for my family is a celebration of playful childhood. Wearing fanciful costumes, visiting and being visited by loving friends and eating chocolate are all embraced.

Now, chocolate that is tainted by slavery and oppressive labor conditions has to go, for I have studied 1991 BBC documentary which first broght this matter to public attention, the Knight-Ridder series and much more.

The memory of my sons as delighted firemen, happy in clown suits with honker noses so much more is not marred by today's knowledge.

It is today that I know.

It is today that both the secular ethics and faith require of me one quietly raised voice and the action I can bring to bear against the slavery, near-slavery, below-poverty wages and unsafe conditions.

Matters have apparently changed very little in the half decade since Mali's Save the Children Fund director, Salia Kante, spoke to BBC of child chocolate workers:

"People who are drinking cocoa or coffee are drinking their blood.It is the blood of young children carrying 6kg of cocoa sacks so heavy that they have wounds all over their shoulders. It's really pitiful to see."

Earlier this year in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Save the Children Canada CEO David Morely wrote:

But still, not much has changed for most children working in the cocoa fields. Recent visits by Save the Canada staff to cocoa farms in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean found low bean prices, low wages, demanding and hazardous work, few heath and education services. We have given these findings to industry leaders with our offer to work with them to change child labour practices in growing and harvesting of cocoa.

As a first, small step, the only chocolate and coffee I'm buying has the fair trade label.

That will not stop the traffic of kidnapped children into slavery on the West African cocoa farms, and the employment at sub-poverty wages under what in this country would be criminal conditions of a great many others.

Changing those conditions is a complex matter.

Being choosy about my chocolate and coffee is simply an honest start, while I decide how this one Southern man can best address the politics of the issue.

              

From Melissa Rodgers via the Biblical Recorder's Baptist Planet I learned of Women religious form global network to combat human trafficking

The Catholic News Service reports of 30 nuns in 26 nations launching "International Network of Religious Against Trafficking in Persons" during an Oct. 15-19 conference on human trafficking in Rome.

Once upon a time, the notion of human trafficking "was a kind of global family secret," said Msgr. Pietro Parolin, Vatican undersecretary of state. But now, he said, thanks to public awareness campaigns, more people know about this $12 billion business, which in 2005 was built on the forced labor of at least 12 million people.

News stories can be so wonderfully understated:

"People."

Yes. People. A great many of them apparently young women, right at the dawn of adolescence. And children.

Yes.

The little children, and let us disabuse ourselves of the colonialist notion that enslaving children is a practice simply of inadequately industrialized foreigners. Two blonde girls with whom I attended high school were compelled by their father for a time to spend part of their weekends selling their bodies. It began before high school and I was not alone in my knowledge, and I suspect I was not alone in seeking out an adult I knew would act on it.

Were they not slaves, until those of us who learned of what they were enduring found a way to stop it?

There are among us other adults who will not speak aloud of it but who were at some risk of being sold on the modern, domestic market in human beings. There are alive those who were, and escaped it, usually because someone saw and put out a helping hand.

Yes, people around us.

Perhaps people you know. For I have talked for hours to console friends who wept bitterly after learning their own recent ancestors had sold family members.

Like the others, this evil is not some pale, weakling, distant foe to be put off easily and required to show its passport to visit us. It is and has for at least my lifetime been a resident evil -- one that is to my mind as horrific as the overwrought movie by that name.

Yes, I admire the nuns. They are confronting the beast where they find it; where they live. Not easy and not safe. Ready violence defends this profitable enterprise.

Shall we join them and confront it here?

It is here. Not just in my memory of childhood conversations on the school bus and adult conversations with close friends.

Atlanta, one of 14 cities flagged by the FBI where children are most at risk of being exploited, and enslaved.

Yes, here. I have talked with others (kinfolk) in North Carolina who gave every indication of knowing. Yet lacked either the courage or (I weep) the heart to step forward.

Here. Next door?

How carefully have you looked? How long have you pondered the value of a single, helping hand, the moral authority of one raised voice? Yours.