Benjamin Skinner describes the persistence of slavery - News

Cover via Amazon

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

IOL: Child sex slaves 'easy to find'

Image via Wikipedia

Keith Ross
February 01 2010 at 07:45AM

It is "terrifyingly easy" to find children trapped in prostitution in South Africa, says an American author, Benjamin Skinner, who has researched the problem in this country.

He said it was also easy to buy child "sex slaves", some of whom were on offer in South Africa for as little as R45 each.

Skinner is the award-winning author of a book, A Crime so Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery.

He also recently wrote an article for Time magazine, South Africa's New Slave Trade and the Campaign to Stop It, about children forced into prostitution.

The article was researched during a visit to South Africa, where he spoke to teenage victims and also to some of the "monstrous traffickers" who sold them into sex slavery.

He has now spoken of his experiences when taking part in the SAfm Radio discussion programme, the After Eight Debate, on the issue of human trafficking.

Skinner said it was hard to gauge the extent of the traffic in South Africa.

"These are not people who stand in line, raise their hands and wait for a census to be taken," he said.

"This is a hidden population. Unless there is aggressive police work to go out and find this population and protect them, they will not be found and will continue to suffer in silence."

He said some organisations close to the problem had put the number of child prostitutes in South Africa at about 38 000, but the number could be higher.

"When I hit the ground in South Africa this summer I knew I could not go out to every single child held in prostitution. What I could do was go out and find a few and tell their stories."

He did some research in Bloemfontein, at the invitation of Pastor Andre Lombard, of the Christian Revival Church, who has been working on a project to help child prostitutes.

Together they interviewed child prostitutes, one of whom, a 15-year-old, was dying in a Bloemfontein hospice.

"She had full-blown tuberculosis, full-blown Aids and was about three months' pregnant. And she died a week later. That is the end game for these children."

Skinner even posed as a potential buyer and spoke to a child trafficker, named only as Jude, a Nigerian.

Jude promised to get him two 15-year-old girls for R45 each.

"I made it clear I wanted them to work for me in a sex club, in a prostitution club, in a brothel.

"At a certain point he said: 'I will be pulling these girls off trash heaps where they are currently digging to survive around Johannesburg.'"

Skinner said two of the sex slaves he interviewed told of how they were duped into coming to the city and then forced to work as prostitutes.

"They were beaten if they did not perform to standard or did not come with the minimum amount of money they were required to earn every evening."

He was led in his research by Pastor Lombard, who told the debate that his church had launched a project in 2006 to help the girls.

"We have seen girls from the age of 13 being exploited, being sold by people."

Lombard said some were lured by job offers in newspapers and then forced into prostitution.

"They have a target they have to meet every night. If they do not make that target they will get the consequences."

He said there were 300 to 400 prostitutes on the streets of Bloemfontein at night and 50 to 70 were under 18.


IOL: Child sex slaves 'easy to find'

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sex Trafficking in South Africa: World Cup Slavery Fear (starting-points.blogspot.com)

Wrong chains unbroken - BostonHerald.com

By Geoffrey J. Haber / As You Were Saying...
Friday, January 1, 2010 - Added 1d 2h ago

We may look upon slavery as something our ancient ancestors experienced, but irrelevant to our lives. But, truth be known, today the slave trade is larger than ever before.

New Year’s Day marks the anniversary of a seminal date in American history. On that day in 1863, many slaves were set free under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Over the next two years, millions of slaves would experience freedom for the first time in their lives.

Yet while slavery was abolished in the 19th century in the United States, it lives on across the globe. Its continued existence abroad is every bit the threat to our society that slavery in America was, as it runs counter to the principles of a democratic society. In essence, it limits our very own freedom.

And just as we as a nation will not stop in our quest to end terrorism wherever it may live, nor should we stop short of committing ourselves to doing what we can to stop slavery in foreign countries.

Slaves live as servants in the Sudan. In India, children are forced to work without rest spinning fabric on looms. In Asia and Eastern Europe, teenage girls are enslaved, sent overseas in inhumane conditions and forced into prostitution.

According to Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest human rights organization, millions of people throughout the world are in bondage. Some are simply born into it. Others are forced into it for economic survival or to get medical care for an ailing loved one. And yet others are victims of trafficking, where they are sent away from their homelands to be exploited either for labor or for sex.

Members of the Jewish community understand what slavery is. The Haggadah read at Passover proclaims: “Now we are slaves/Next year we will be free.” We tend, however, to look upon slavery as something our ancient ancestors experienced, but irrelevant to our lives. It is a quaint memory that we recall when telling the Passover story. But, in truth, today the slave trade is larger than ever before.

Benjamin Skinner, author of “A Crime so Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery,” exposes one of the great evils of our time: That there are more slaves in the world today than at any time in history. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, also writing about modern slavery, reports that “At this moment, millions of men, women, and children - roughly twice the population of Rhode Island - are being held against their will as modern-day slaves.”

To many, modern slavery is perceived as workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working conditions, which of course is deplorable in and of itself. But modern-day slaves differ from the lowest wage workers in developing countries because they are actually held in physical bondage - shackled and held at gunpoint.

Let’s remember today’s historical relevance in the United States. Moreover, let us resolve to take action to free the millions of people who are enslaved across the globe.

Action can be as simple as writing your congressman and senators and asking that they work to help people abroad be freed from the bonds of slavery. Or it may mean taking steps to get educated about the issue of slavery, such as going to anti-slavery Web sites, and then educating others and advocating for change.

Eliminating slavery in all its forms will not come easily. It will require hard work and activism on the part of many Americans to demand change. We will need to use our economic power and bully pulpit to fight for freedom so that those enslaved can rightfully say, just as Jews do when reading the Haggadah every Passover, “Now we are free.”

Geoffrey J. Haber is the rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill.


Wrong chains unbroken - BostonHerald.com

E. Benjamin Skinner at Brookdale: global slavery flourishing | APP.com |

Cover via Amazon

By NINA RIZZO • FREEHOLD BUREAU • December 10, 2009

MIDDLETOWN — E. Benjamin Skinner has witnessed the sale of human beings on four continents. He ventured to the underworld, where modern-day slaves are kept hidden by violent traffickers and cruel masters, in order to tell their heart wrenching stories.

Skinner, an independent journalist who wrote "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery," talked about his first book to a large gathering at Brookdale Community College Wednesday night as part of the college's Visiting Writers Series.

Skinner said he infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels to find his subjects. He even went undercover in Haiti to negotiate the sale of a 12-year-old girl who would serve as a domestic and sexual slave. The price was settled within two minutes, he said, for $50.

"I know it's not an easy subject to talk about, but it is greatest human rights challenge of our generation," he said.

Skinner noted the International Labor Organization — a function of the United Nations — estimates there are 12.3 million forced laborers in the world today. He believes the number is closer to 27 million, the estimate provided by Free the Slaves, a Washington-based nonprofit group that works to liberate slaves around the world.

Undisputed, it seems, is that there are more slaves today than at any other point in history, although they represent a smaller percentage of the world's population than in the past.

"Although it's miserable to talk about and the scale seems overwhelming it's a problem we can overcome in our lifetime," he said.

Skinner tells one story of a man named Gonoo who was born into slavery. He was forced to work in a quarry in India because his grandfather couldn't repay a 62-cent loan. If he tried to leave, Gonoo said he would be beaten or killed if recovered by the master.

When asked why he didn't try to leave, Gonoo answered: "Where would I go? Where would I eat?"

Skinner said understanding the co-dependent relationship between master and slave is critical to eradicating bondage.

Slavery, he said, continues in places where corruption thrives and poverty and isolation are left to grow.

"The end of slavery can't wait until the end of poverty," he said, noting that 1.1 billion on the planet live on less than $1 per day.

In South Africa, Skinner met a group of girls who were forced to work as prostitutes near the World Cup stadium. They were given only enough food to stand and enough clothes to cover their bodies. When one of the girls got sick, she was cast aside.

Skinner met the 17-year-old sick girl in a hospice, where she was three months pregnant and suffering from tuberculosis and full-blown AIDS. She asked Skinner to take care of her body when she died because her family didn't know where she was. A week later she was gone.

A woman from a neighboring village had sold this girl and her best friend to Nigerian traffickers for $35 and a bag of crack.

Skinner said he was able to intervene and save the 15-year-old friend from a similar fate. She was the only one of that group of eight girls who wasn't HIV positive. She is now back with her family and attending school, he said.

"It's not just a question of liberation. It's a question of enabling slaves to become survivors," he explained, adding that they can then become good citizens who can develop into abolitionists who lead the charge to end slavery.

'We must listen to them. We must break the cycle of slavery for those still held in bondage," he said, adding that Free the Slaves spends an average of $400 to free and rehabilitate each slave. "It's a profound moment in human history when we have a chance to end slavery."

Skinner, 35, was raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria, where his father had served as a British colonial administrator. He came from a long line of abolitionists and first learned about slavery as a child in Quaker meetings, according to his Web site.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, Skinner is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He now lives in Brooklyn.


12/11/2009 12:02:07 PM

http://www.app.com/article/20091210/NEWS/91210115/Author-at-Brookdale-says-global-slavery-flourishing

E. Benjamin Skinner condemns price on human life

Cover via Amazon

Stephanie Vermillion - News Editor
November 12, 2009

Day one of your new job and the nerves of what to wear, how to act and which briefcase to carry have you stressed out to the point of illness. Consider yourself lucky.

As many as 27 million people worldwide have never faced such a situation because they are victims of modern-day slavery. Most are taken into it unknowingly. They think they're on their way to a new career and a better life. Instead of the doors of success swinging open for them, the doors of vehicles filled with human traffickers sentence them to a life that can only be described as hell.

E. Benjamin Skinner, author of the book "A Crime so Monstrous" addressed a full Sears Recital Hall audience Monday about his book, which examines modern-day slavery. Instead of writing as an outsider looking in, he immersed himself in this monstrosity by travelling around the world and talking face-to-face with human traffickers about their "careers."

In Haiti, Skinner learned how one trafficker used the hope for a new life to entice families to hand over their children. Little did these families know that signing away their children wasn't promising them a bright future, it was putting a price on an offspring's life.

"He would go to desperately impoverished families and find those who in many case had eight, nine or 10 children and say he knew they couldn't feed and care for them, and he could give them a better life," Skinner said. "I didn't find mothers or fathers who sold their children; I found parents who made the choice between watching their children slowly starve or die of disease or giving them to a trafficker."

Sharla Musabih, founder of the City of Hope shelter in Dubai, joined Skinner on stage and told the story of a 21-year-old woman who would have given anything for a business suit to be the greatest challenge for her first day on the job.

"She was told she was going to have a job at a hotel, so she came to Dubai, landed and there were two Russian men waiting with a car," she said. "They put her in the car and they took her. Four years she was kept in slavery. During that time customers would be coming and going for her, she had no access to the outside world or anyone. She ended up getting pregnant. She managed to stay alive as well as keep the baby. When the baby was 15 months old, she was able to find a piece of metal around the fence, loosen the bars and escape."

No guards chased her, however. The human traffickers let her go, but not out of the kindness of their hearts. They let her escape because to them, these humans are commodities, not people. If they had chased her, it may have led police to investigate their trafficking or possibly close their businesses. To them, her life, valued at $50, wasn't worth it.

Skinner witnessed firsthand these criminals pricing human beings, most of them still young enough to be considered children. In Haiti he drove up to a barbershop well-known as a hub for human trafficking to be greeted by a man offering him a child for servitude. Skinner had the choice between buying a young child to work in the house, one to be his sexual partner, or for under $100, he could get a two-for-one deal.

"I was negotiating for human life as if I was negotiating for a used stereo in the broad daylight on the street," he said. "The asking price for this child was $100, and the negotiated price within five minutes was $50 U.S."

Throughout his journey into the cold heart of human trafficking, Skinner came face-to-face with multitudes of stories so gruesome they are unbelievable to an outsider. He witnessed a young blonde with physical signs of Down syndrome being raped for under $8 per person. The traffickers covered her face in makeup, but her tears made the mascara run down her face and blood seeped from scratches on her arms.

He met a girl sold to a Nigerian crack dealer who had begun dabbling in the sale of humans because it offered greater profits. She was forced to work on the streets of South Africa, having unprotected sex just eight blocks from the 2010 World Cup soccer stadium. Within a year she had AIDS, tuberculosis and was three months pregnant.

In another inside look Skinner was taken to a hotel in which the fourth floor was an abortion clinic and the fifth floor was a trading hub where girls slept four to a mattress, were raped, and if they resisted, were thrown from the window.

As horrific as these cases are, they are only five of the 27 million worldwide. The fight against human trafficking needs to target the traffickers themselves. Laws against trafficking in countries such as South Africa, which has none, need to be established and enforced, Skinner said. Governments need to be willing to make this issue a priority.

Bringing an end to human trafficking won't be accomplished by one person; everyone must accept a role against this monstrous crime. Skinner challenged the audience and the entire UD community to an easy task.

http://www.flyernews.com/articles/volume/57/issue/16/id/5334/category/news

"Simply tell others," he said. "I hope you all get engaged some way, and one way is to commit to telling 10 people about modern-day slavery."

Or you can get involved even more actively. For ideas, contact Sharla Musabih at UnitedHealthSharla@gmail.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• AUDIO: Students for a Better Society Bring Human Trafficking Awareness to SMU (smudailymustang.com)
• US Officials Begin Push Against Human Trafficking (abcnews.go.com)

Human trafficking subject of conference at UD

Cover via Amazon

Smaller type

By Dave Larsen, Staff Writer 12:11 PM Monday, October 19, 2009

Dayton Daily News

DAYTON — The FBI has identified Ohio as a source, route and destination for human trafficking.

“A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons,” released in February by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said that a country with at least 100 reported cases of human trafficking is considered to have a serious problem with the modern-day form of slavery.

“Ohio probably has 100 cases,” said Mark Ensalaco, director of the University of Dayton’s Human Rights Program, on Monday, Oct. 19. If Ohio was a country, “we would ... qualify,” he said.

As many as 17,000 persons are trafficked into the U.S. each year from Asia, Central and South America and Eastern Europe, and are exploited for commercial sex, including prostitution, stripping and pornography, or exploited for labor in domestic servitude, sweatshops or migrant agricultural work, according to U.S. State Department figures.

“It’s everything maids to exotic dancers to prostitutes on the streets to, who knows, people working in commercial agriculture even in this area,” Ensalaco said.

UD on Nov. 9-10 will host the Dayton Human Trafficking Accords Conference, university officials announced Monday in a meeting with the Dayton Daily News editorial board.

The event will feature a talk on the evening of Nov. 9 by Benjamin Skinner, winner of the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction for his book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern Day Slavery.”

On Nov. 10, the conference will include working sessions for area law enforcement officials and victims advocates to assess the extent of human trafficking in Ohio and what is being done for victims, Ensalaco said. Attendance to the working sessions is by invitation only.

The public session, “Trafficking is Slavery,” will include a forum with former trafficking victims, a screening of the film “Playground” and a conversation with filmmaker Libby Spears.

“The idea is to make the University of Dayton available as an academic resource to the community and see what we can do moving forward,” Ensalaco said.

For more information on the conference contact UD’s Human Rights Program at (937) 229-2765 or visit academic.udayton.edu/HumanRights/Trafficking%20Conf.htm.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/human-trafficking-subject-of-conference-at-ud-354286.html

Related articles by Zemanta

• Inquiry fails to find sex traffickers (guardian.co.uk)
• Prostitution debate rages worldwide (nationalpost.com)

Modern slaves | Salon Books

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/03/27/slavery/print.html

---

Modern slaves

Hardly a thing of the past, slavery thrives in our world. Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner tells Salon the shocking truth about human trafficking.
By Hannah Wallace

Mar. 27, 2008 | During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.
"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," writes Skinner, citing a recent estimate that there are currently 27 million worldwide. One hundred and forty-three years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865 and 60 years after the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade worldwide, slavery -- or, as it is euphemistically called, human trafficking -- is actually thriving. It is, as Hillary Clinton has said, "the dark underbelly of globalization."
That slavery in its many forms -- debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution -- still exists is, indeed, shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don't know where to look for it. Skinner's great achievement is that he shines a light on the international slave trade, exposing the horrors of bondage not only through assiduous reporting and interviews with modern-day abolitionists and government officials, but by sharing the stories of several survivors. These poignant tales -- of people like Muong, a 12-year-old Dinka boy from southern Sudan, who is abducted (with his brother and mother) by an Arab slave driver; Tatiana, an Eastern European woman who is tricked into slavery when her boyfriend of six months finds her an "au pair" job in Amsterdam; and Gonoo, an Indian man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who inherits a debt from his father and spends his days working it off at a stone quarry -- illustrate the harsh realities of slavery while also offering some hope that former slaves can rebuild their lives.
Salon sat down with Skinner to talk about modern-day abolitionists, what's wrong with redemptions (also called "buy backs"), and why he's optimistic that slavery can be eradicated.
You infiltrated many dangerous underworlds to get these stories, often putting your life at risk by chatting up child slave brokers and negotiating to buy young women from a Russian mobster in Istanbul who'd just been released from prison. Which situation, in retrospect, was the most harrowing?
There were definitely some moments where I felt I'd made a mistake in terms of personal safety. At this point, though, I have to say that the people who are most in danger in these situations are the slaves themselves. My greatest concern going in was not "Am I going to come out whole?" but "Is there going to be some retaliation against the slaves if my cover is blown?"
I had a principle that I would not pay for a human life. You buy a human being and you can't just set them free and dump them on the economy with no resources, no support system, no rehabilitation.
When I was offered this young woman in trade for a used car at the Romani brothel in Bucharest, I could have done one of a few things: I could've paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could've fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could've gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.
Very unsatisfying, that. You want to rip this guy's head off, right? I was shown this woman who had scars all over her arm -- she was clearly trying to kill herself to escape daily rape, and she had Down syndrome. I was so in shock. I was undercover and I had this moment where I thought, "What would my character be doing in this situation?" So I tried to smile. And I physically couldn't. I was so horrified. I looked at my translator, who had not done this kind of work before, and there was just sheer horror on his face as well. To see somebody who is in such a condition. They had put makeup on her and her makeup was running because she was crying so much.
Did the police do anything?
The response from the police was, "These are the Roma, they have their laws, they have their blood." The Roma are this incredibly oppressed and marginalized community within Romania -- and have been for centuries. That's why, I think, the major human traffickers in Romania over the past several years have been Roma.
I kept thinking of Samantha Power's book as I was reading this because you describe the reluctance of government officials to use the term "slavery" to describe what is obviously exactly that. (Power describes the same studied avoidance of the word "genocide" in "A Problem From Hell.") Colin Powell didn't use "slavery" in 2001 when he released the first Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. Even the major piece of U.S. anti-slavery legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, doesn't use the word "slavery."
There are over a dozen universal conventions and over 300 international treaties that have been signed banning slavery and the slave trade. We've all agreed that this is a crime of universal concern and it requires a robust response to stop it.
The U.S. has actually gotten better at using the term "slavery" when it's appropriate. One group that has not gotten better in this regard -- they've taken baby steps -- has been the U.N. They are so tepid and afraid of offending member states. Even in a case like Sudan, which was as egregious a form of slavery and slave raiding as you've had in the late 20th century. In 1999, at the height of slave raiding, the U.N. Human Rights Commission said, "OK, we will no longer refer to slavery, we will refer to intertribal abductions." And if you talk to U.N. officials behind the scenes, they'll say that the logic behind this is that in order to move the issue forward, we had to be diplomatic and reach this middle ground. The problem with that logic is that you lose all leverage. Abduction is not a crime against humanity -- slavery is. If it's a crime against humanity, you get hit pretty hard.
How would you get hit very hard?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4, says slavery and the slave trade are banned worldwide. But actually, you're bringing up a good point. In terms of enforcement, the U.N. doesn't have the kind of systems built into it which can really deal with this, and that's a problem.
The U.N., which has, as part of its original mandate, the eradication of slavery and the slave trade, finds itself now at a stage where there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. And it really makes you question the viability of the model and the strength of the system.
There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a "ripple effect" with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.
Nonsense.
But how do you explain this myopia? You cite so much research that shows that the other forms of slavery are even more prevalent -- in the U.S., you say, less than half of American slaves are forced prostitutes.
I don't think enough reports have come out and the ones that have come out haven't been in the right places. I think when you start getting the 700 Club talking about how the slavery of a young man in a quarry in India -- or in a brick kiln or on a farm -- is equivalent to the slavery of the Israelites and you start quoting Bible verses, then maybe we'll be getting somewhere.
Another philosophical divide among modern-day abolitionists has to do with the role of poverty. The late Senator Wellstone, who co-sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, was adamant that poverty was a central factor but Horowitz disagreed, vehemently. Why do you think that is? It seems so obvious that poverty is the very reason so many people are forced and hoodwinked into slavery.
Paul Wellstone's view of this was basically that you can't address slavery without having targeted anti-poverty programs. When I presented this to Horowitz, he slammed his desk and said something to the effect of "The Paul Krugmans of the world would love for this to be a means for me redistributing my income to Sri Lanka." And I'll give him this: I understand his point that the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. That's not what I'm calling for and I don't think that's what Senator Wellstone was calling for.
But if you don't recognize that the primary driver of slavery today is the nexus between withering poverty of extreme marginalized communities with unscrupulous criminals, and you don't address both sides of it -- the criminal side and the socioeconomic side -- you're not going to solve this problem. As long as there's a ready source of people who are so desperate for survival that they will sell their children into slavery, as long as you don't address that, you will always have slavery. And I fundamentally feel that slavery can be ended.
Do you think the TVPA's three-tiered anti-slavery system, which evaluates countries' efforts to eradicate slavery and imposes non-trade sanctions on those who don't do anything to abolish it, works?
I think it's a good thing, but I honesty feel it has outlived its usefulness. You can only slap a country lightly on its wrists so many times and have them notice. After a while it totally loses its effectiveness.
Let's talk about the practice of Redemptions. Are these still going on and is it a viable way to chip away at slavery, buying a slave's freedom one at a time?
There's a long history of it, and not all of it is bad. I find it a very imperfect and unjust way of freeing people. You are essentially acknowledging the right of property in man, by buying them. In recent history, I can't think of any instances where it has worked and been unproblematic.
It's mostly happening in Sudan, right?
New York Times columnist Nick Kristof did it, of course, in Cambodia where he went in and bought two girls in a brothel. And he went back a year later and found that one of the girls was back in the brothel and hooked on methamphetamines.
To take our own history, Lincoln had contemplated buying all slaves from their masters and then setting them free in either Haiti or Liberia. But I think at a certain point -- and I defer to civil war scholars on this -- he realized that this was very much an imperfect justice and what needed to happen was the remaking, through force, of a society that would acknowledge that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which was the initial promise, of course, of the Declaration of Independence.
What you have in Sudan are these evangelicals coming over with tons of hard currency in the middle of a war zone, going to one of the combatants -- in particular, one small faction of the combatants -- and saying, "OK, here's a ton of money, now go get us some slaves."
Basically funding the militia.
Exactly. And even if every one of those people was a slave and everything was on the up and up ... the devil is in the details.
You'd think that the hardest part would be freeing slaves. But once they're free, their lives are never easy. At one point in the Sudan section you say "free, but free to starve." What seems to you the best solution for helping former slaves deal with their new-found freedom?
Giving them some access to credit, healthcare, property rights and education. And psychological help.
In many of these far-off places where I was, the arbiters of law -- the people who set the rules -- are people who are benefiting from a slave economy. As long as that's the situation, you need to break the grip of those people over the system.
In your epilogue, you say, "George W. Bush did more to free modern-day slaves than any other president." However, you also criticize the Bush administration for focusing on sex trafficking to the exclusion of other forms of bondage.
The bar isn't very high. Only at the end of the Clinton years was there a recognition on the part of the executive branch that this was really an issue. But Bush deserves credit. He did more to free slaves than any president in modern history. But history doesn't grade on a curve on the subject of abolition. And he could have and should have done much more -- there's no question. The fact that there was such a narrow focus really hamstrung his efficacy on this.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has called trafficking "the dark underbelly of globalization."
Which presidential candidate -- Clinton, Obama or McCain -- do you think is most passionate about abolishing modern-day slavery?
Listen, I'm not going to give Obama a pass on this. It's not clear to me that he cares about modern-day slavery -- he hasn't said a word about it. And Hillary has, certainly in the last couple of years. Though not on the trail.
But I think it is a mistake to make this a campaign issue. I think it has to be a big piece of our American foreign policy platform. It needs to be fundamentally a central piece of any meaningful new American foreign policy.
And what about John McCain?
Well, he blurbed my book. John McCain is very close with John Miller, the former head of the TIP office, which is a good sign. But no, he hasn't been a leader on this.
One of the things I found hopeful about the book is that while it's important to make policy changes and create tough anti-slavery laws, NGOs and individuals clearly play a vital role in exposing slavery. People like Rampal in India (the activist who runs Sankalp) and the Amsterdam taxi driver who helps Kayta, a sex slave, buy her freedom. So the role of the individual is important.
It is, it's extremely important. If there's a critical thing from that U.S. chapter that I was trying to get across, it's that this doesn't have to be some kind of neo-McCarthyism where you are spying on your neighbors, but just be aware of what's going on in your community.
I talk about three things that individuals can and should do. The first is becoming conscious of the reality of slavery -- becoming more attuned to the signs of what may be a trafficking or slavery situation. A key part of that is getting educated about slavery. The second thing is pressing elected officials and candidates for office on what they're going to do about it -- what creative approaches they have for combatting modern-day slavery and ending it within a generation. The third things is supporting groups like Free the Slaves (Kevin Bales' group) and Anti-Slavery International.
Abolishing slavery is clearly an all-consuming issue, something that often drives people who are involved with it to burn out or go crazy or both. How have you kept your sanity during the four years of researching this book?
The question is really how these people that operate at the pointed end of the spear keep their sanity. And the people who run trafficking shelters in Romania -- who have weekly or monthly threats from traffickers -- how they keep their sanity. For me it was much easier. You go into these situations and certainly it stays with you. When you meet somebody like this young woman in the Bucharest brothel or Gonoo or the trafficker in Haiti who offered to sell me a child for $50.
What drove you to take on this project?
You could say that abolition is in my blood. My great-great-grandfather fought with the Union Army in the Siege of Petersburg [Va.]. His uncle was a rabble-rousing abolitionist in Connecticut. And I was raised Quaker. The Quakers were the heart of the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century, early 19th century.
Fast-forward to 1999. I read Kevin Bales' "Disposable People," which is an incredibly good, earnest take on modern-day slavery worldwide. Bales' estimate of total number of slaves was 27 million -- a staggering number. The one thing that I wanted to do was to put a human face on that: to tell the stories of the slaves, the slave masters and the slave traders. And to tell the stories of those who try to free them.

-- By Hannah Wallace

Related articles by Zemanta

• Three arrested in Edmonton 'slavery' case (nationalpost.com)