Steve Skojec

I’ve heard for years that when it comes to the international sex-slave trade, America is among the top (if not THE top) consumers. My assumption has always been, without digging deeply into it, that young women who have been made slaves in other countries are brought here and forced into prostitution.

What I never, ever expected to read about was this:

A typical 16-year-old in a middle-class home in suburban Pensacola, Fla., Newell’s nightmare began innocently enough: A new friend she had met in high school asked her to come to her home for a sleepover.

Newell’s mother, Lisa Brant, didn’t like the idea, but after weeks of lobbying by her daughter, Brant met with the girl and the man she said was her father to make sure her daughter would be safe.

But the girl’s “father” was really a convicted felon, and the girl, who had a record of prostitution in Texas, was an accomplice in the abduction. “Her dad took us to this house and said he’d be right back and he left us there,” Newell recounted in a taped interview. “And I asked for some water because I was thirsty. And I drank the water and I blacked out.”

The water had been laced with a drug. When she woke up, Newell was groggy and couldn’t move.

“My legs were being held down, and the guy that was raping me was holding my hands back,” she said in a quiet voice. “I kept screaming, ‘Stop, please don’t do this. Leave me alone.’  But I was so weak, I couldn’t fight them off. Like I was, I was so really out of it.  And I blacked out a few times and I kept coming back to. And I was still being raped every time I woke up.”

Left alone for a moment, Newell managed to call her mother.

“My cell phone rang. And all I heard was, ‘Mommy, help me,’ ” Brant said. “And the phone went dead. And I freaked!”

She called police, but they told her that Newell had probably run away from home, and they wouldn’t be able to treat it as a missing-person case until 72 hours had elapsed.

“He was like, ‘Oh, well, you know, there’s nothing I can do. You know teenagers,’ ” Brant said.

This is insane - both the way it happened and the response of law enforcement. Considering how seriously police take it when you’re going 12 miles an hour over the speed limit, you’d think that in an instance like this a parent could get more than what amounts to an outright admission of disinterest.

This shouldn’t be happening in our country. Abortion, porn, sex slavery - when does it end? It’s barbaric.

And the sad thing is, this is still probably a better, safer, more moral place to live than just about anywhere else.