Even after the maid’s employer attempted to rape her and locked her in his basement for 40 hours, denying her food or water, the 34-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh was afraid to flee. When the employer unlocked the door and kicked her out of his house, she spent the night sleeping under a tree on the lawn.

“I held onto his feet and I pleaded,” the immigrant, who now has a special visa for victims of trafficking, told state senators yesterday at a hearing on human trafficking. “I was very scared of the police because I didn’t have a green card.” Yesterday, speaking through a translator in her native Bangla on the condition of anonymity, she told senators about her saga, which brought her from a small town in Bangladesh to a factory in Dubai to unpaid servitude in Teaneck, N.J.

The woman’s profound fear of authority illustrates the challenge of prosecuting human trafficking cases, where the victims often are not in chains but are as fearful of coming forward as they are of those keeping them captive, law enforcement authorities and community organizers testified.

After Florida and California, New York is considered the major hub of human trafficking crime, which the Central Intelligence Agency estimates claims nearly 18,000 victims annually. It’s also big business: The United Nations estimates criminal groups take in $7 billion annually on trafficking.

Although law enforcement officials said they could not provide figures on persons trafficked in New York, the director of criminal justice for New York, Chauncey Parker, said the state “is presumed to have a large trafficked population.” As proof, he pointed to several recent cases: 69 Peruvians held in indentured servitude in Long Island, forcedagricultural laborers uncovered in Buffalo, and a family sex-trafficking ring that operated between Mexico and Queens.

“Here in New York City, we have documented cases of people trafficked into debt bondage, restaurant labor, begging, street peddling, and domestic workers,” the director of the Immigrant Women and Children Project of the New York City Bar Association, Suzanne Tomatore, said. While she said most of the cases she sees are domestic workers, with many trafficked by United Nations or consular officials, there is no single type of victim, as “human trafficking is a series of human rights violations and may not always be obvious or clear.”

Other organizations that work with trafficking victims, such as Safe Horizons and the New York Association of New Americans, also testified that most of the victims they encounter are held in domestic servitude or forced labor, followed by those forced into sexual labor. Safe Horizons alone said it had dealt with more than 200 victims of human trafficking since 2000, from more than 50 countries. One victim never left home in more than 10 years in America.

The commanding officer of the vice enforcement division of the New York City Police Department, Deputy Chief James O’Neill, described New York as a cog in a major wave of human trafficking crossing international borders. In an effort to better “identify victims and get them out of these desperate situations,” Mr. O’Neill an nounced the NYPD, with funding from the Department of Justice, is creating a new team dedicated to combating human trafficking.

Albany is also focusing on the issue, with state senators yesterday vowing to push through a bill they passed last year that would make human trafficking into first- and second-degree crimes.The legislation follows the lead of various other states, including Texas and Florida, which have provided state authorities with additional powers to prosecute trafficking crimes. The legislation would supplement the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which significantly strengthened criminal enforcement against traffickers and created new protections for victims.

“I am confident that the state Assembly leadership will join us and come together to create legislation that will give our law enforcement professionals the legal tools to put these purveyors of flesh behind bars where they belong,” state Senator Martin Goldman, a Republican of Brooklyn, said.