The Borg as Human Traffickers

In a class one day last week, we talked about the problem of slavery in our world today, and later I watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager that suddenly seemed very similar. For those who don't know, the Voyager character Seven of Nine was a human child named Annika Hansen who was with her parents on a sort of anthropological (xenological?) expedition to study the Borg before much was known about them. After two years, they were assimilated, and she grew up with few memories of anything but being Borg. When Voyager rescued her, she was furious. The Borg were her people, her family, and she felt kidnapped, not rescued. Eventually she came to embrace her humanity and to see the Borg for the nasty chaps they were.
Then she was taken by them again, but they didn't assimilate her, because they wanted her perspective on humanity as a human so they could better assimilate humans (having already failed in First Contact, the movie). The Borg Queen keeps trying to convince her that she belongs with the Borg, not with humans; she criticizes her appearance, since they removed most of her Borg technology and made her look human again. The Queen says, "They've made you over in their image," trying to get Seven to see humans as the bad guys.
And I suddenly remembered something about human trafficking, especially sex slavery. When people are taken when they're quite young and made into slaves, they're made to believe they're worth nothing but what their bodies can do for their owners. In essence, they are assimilated into their roles as objects, brainwashed just as surely as any Borg assimilation. And sometimes, when they're in it long enough, they come to fear anything else. This situation is horrible, but it's all they know, it's all they are fit for. Outside the situation is the frightening unknown, and if you drag someone out of that situation, you'll often find them obediently going back into it, because as bad as it is, it's known. I suddenly saw this Borg Queen as the trafficker, the one saying, "They may have cleaned you up and given you a different profession, but this is really what you're made for, and you will never be anything more than this. You shouldn't even want anything different. This is better." And Captain Janeway, determined to rescue Seven, was the one saying, "No, you're worth more than that."
In class that day, we talked about how that's why Jesus and the Holy Spirit are so essential to this work. Only Christ can get inside the lives that have been assimilated and transform them, so that people realize they are worth something better and there is more for them than they ever imagined. Fascinating parallels.