In “Winning the Fight” (Spring 2009), Kevin Bales, one of the leading observers on human trafficking, addresses the much-needed grand strategy for abolishing slavery today. He aptly emphasizes both the debt used by traffickers to ensnare and subjugate victims and the necessity for business to play a key part in the solution. To break the invisible but very real chains of today’s slaves, from brick kilns to brothels, our grand strategy must achieve three balances.

First, the biggest lesson of my tenure as anti-trafficking Ambassador is the imperative to address sex and labor slavery with equal vigor. In their concern about the uniquely degrading and violating nature of sex slavery, some anti-trafficking activists de-prioritize the immense global sweep of slave labor. Others feel that sex trafficking has been overemphasized, and seek to avoid debates about volition among prostituted people. To read Kevin Bales’ essay, one might think sex trafficking is a minor element of slavery in the world today.

Second, we need a balance between our focus on poverty as an impetus for slavery—Bales’ focus—and other causes, such as the absence of a rule of law, demand for labor, and ethnic prejudice. We need data, as Bales stresses, but the success fighting slavery by fighting poverty will not be measurable.

As for prejudice, Bales estimates that there are 27 million enslaved today, and 10 million in debt bondage in South Asia alone. In the practice of human trafficking, certain categories of humans, such as children, women, migrants, minorities, and castes, are exploited as subhuman species. The Dalit people are a striking example. In the Gulf Region, women and migrants are each treated as less than human, and women migrants are doubly vulnerable (such as the Indonesia maid I met in Kuwait whose female employer covered her with bite marks).

Finally, we need a balance between corporate social responsibility and corporate social accountability. Bales is wrong to imply that businesses are doing more than governments today to fight slavery; they need to, but aren’t. The vaunted initiative of businesses who claim to address child slavery in cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana is a glass half empty. It has taken years and years to survey half the farms for child slavery, and systemic change is far away.

Similarly, the Brazilian government’s exemplary “dirty list,” which temporarily cuts off public and private financing for businesses using slave labor, lacks the fuller accountability of thorough prosecution.

Boycotts might harm small cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire, but if we are to turn labor demand from a cause for slavery into a force against it, boycotts must remain an option worldwide. US and British businesses shunning cotton from Uzbekistan due to forced mobilization of children, college students, and staff to harvest cotton is a model of selective use of market forces to make slavery unprofitable.

Businesses are also key to eradicating sex slavery as labor slavery. This means not only that hotels must fight johns and sex tourists, but also that titans of the Internet, the new frontier of sex trafficking, must play their part. Websites such as Craigslist create the enabling environment for slavery with a dedicated erotic services section of ads. Corporate accountability requires shutting down the Amsterdam of the Internet as too hazardous for minors, migrants, and other potential victims.

We must and can abolish slavery…again. It will be a long struggle. But we will not free slaves soon if we downplay sex slavery while rightly attacking forced labor. We must acknowledge other causes of slavery than the diffuse problem of poverty, and we must demand a kind of corporate intervention that has more teeth than self-congratulatory smiles.