Benjamin Skinner describes the persistence of slavery - News

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By Clare Churchill-Seder

News | 3/2/10
Posted online at 11:43 PM EST on 3/1/10

"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," E. Benjamin Skinner, a journalist and senior fellow at the Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism, told an audience of faculty and students at a Feb. 22 lecture.

Skinner spoke as a part of the Social Justice Leadership Series about his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Skinner said that modern slavery is defined by humans who "are forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence for no pay above subsistence."

Skinner explained that modern-day slavery is different from slavery of the 1800s. Whereas slavery had been a visible part of society in the 1800s-there were public auctions-most people know next to nothing about its modern-day counterpart, Skinner said. Yet according to Skinner, approximately 27 million humans across the globe are still being held as slaves.

The highest concentration of human enslavement is in South Asia, where the vast majority of slaves are working to pay off debts-often debts from previous generations, according to Skinner. He recalled a man he had met in India who was being forced to work because of a 62-cent debt his great grandfather had failed to repay; the man's family has been enslaved because of the debt ever since.

But slavery is not contained to South Asia, Skinner explained. Often acting undercover, Skinner witnessed slavery in 12 different countries including Haiti, Romania and even the United States. "If I'm talking here for half an hour, on average, one more person will become a slave on U.S. soil within that half hour," he said.

Skinner told the audience that Haiti, right off the U.S. coast, has one of the highest concentrations of slaves in the world and that there is no law against human trafficking there. Skinner recalled that on a trip to Haiti to investigate A Crime So Monstrous, "There were several men standing in front of this barber shop, and one of them came over and said, 'Do you want to get a person?'" The asking price for a 12-year-old girl who would do domestic labor and serve as a "partner" was $100, Skinner said. He easily negotiated the trafficker down to $50, which, he told the audience, illustrated both the simplicity of bartering with slave traders and the devaluation of human life in desperately impoverished countries like Haiti.

Skinner reassured his audience that he had not followed through with the negotiations, as paying for a human life is "giving rise to a trade in human misery." But he said that buying slaves to rescue them has been a solution adopted by some. According to Skinner, while these kinds of simple fixes are appealing, they are often ineffective. Slaves rescued in this manner often find themselves re-enslaved because the circumstances that led them into slavery have not changed, he said. Legal structures need to change to make slavery more identifiable and punishable, and the circumstances that precipitate the slave trade also need to change, Skinner said.

The event was received positively, especially in reaction to Skinner's ability to relay the realities of slavery.

Event attendee Jacob Peeples '13 told the Justice that the most significant part of the lecture to him was "increased awareness of the atrocities of modern slavery."


Benjamin Skinner describes the persistence of slavery - News