(Image source from: Dallas Morning News)

The sex slavery has been busted recently on Morris Street, in West Dallas. The house on the street looked like every other house on the block, except that its protected doors and windows hid a dark secret.

The news came of a law enforcement bust and the secret spilled onto the street, that the house was a hub for sex slavery. For about three years, women were locked up in the 672-square-foot home, narcotized, sexually assaulted, beaten and constrained to carry out sexual acts for money. Video equipment's monitored their motion and one of the traffickers allegedly slept by the front door with an arm to deter running away. The bravery of a passing ice cream vendor to help woman's flight to freedom finally shut down this house of horrors.

The two accused traffickers, Desmond Kintwana Bethany and Bailey Jane Hance now face federal charges of conspiring to engage in sex trafficking.

According to a study by the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the University of Texas, as a community, we should be repulsed by this contemporary day slavery, which entraps 313,000 Texans, including 79,000 children, at an astonishing $6.6 billion cost to society, The Lone Star state ranks second in human trafficking, behind California, and the best available approximates tell us that hundreds of children are exploited for sex day and night in Dallas.

Traffickers target vulnerable people, including American kids who've run away from abusive homes, undocumented immigrants, and others who fall into their grip. Traffickers frequently create emotional dependency, destroy self-worth and isolate their victims.

At the Morris Street house, at least one woman who had fled was lured back by a woman working for Bethany. In other instance, women at the house were blindfolded and taken to Miami where the sex traffickers allegedly used now-shuttered Backpage.com, a site linked to trafficking, to bespeak customers.

By Sowmya Sangam