Slavery is illegal around the world, yet it persists. Estimates put the total enslaved population at somewhere between 27 and 40 million people. Statistics like this make the problem seem daunting and unknowable, but stories of slaves make the problem unforgettable.
In A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-face with Modern-day Slavery, E. Benjamin Skinner tells the stories of slaves in Eastern Europe, Haiti, and several other countries. Their individual narratives reveal the complexity of the problem, and Skinner’s analysis of the United States government’s actions to oppose slavery show the complexity of solving the problem. For the purposes of A Crime So Monstrous, Skinner borrows Kevin Bales’ definition of slavery: “a slave is someone who is forced to work, through fraud or threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.”
Reading accounts of how slaves live is sickening, but they bring lofty statistics into focus. A handful of unique narratives reveal the different sides of slavery.
Going undercover, Skinner negotiates with a trafficker to buy a restavek, a child slave, in Haiti. He meets slaves and slave redeemers in Sudan. He follows the recruitment route of sex traffickers in Eastern Europe. He goes to a brothel in Dubai and an Indian quarry worked by slaves held in debt bondage. Skinner even meets a Haitian girl held as a domestic slave in Miami.
While revealing the severity of slavery, Skinner touches on a host of other humanitarian issues– including poverty, education, and heatlh– that can’t be separated from this tragedy. In Haiti, a child’s education is substituted for slavery, because her family is poor. War and corruption turn slaves into pawns. Freed slaves lack the food, health and infrastructure to live.
Skinner also describes the U.S. government’s efforts to combat human trafficking and slavery. He covers the work of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, which produces the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and Ambassador John Miller, the office’s director for part of the George W. Bush administration. The office’s work, and the broader fight against human trafficking and slavery by the U.S., is often frustrated by foreign policy considerations and funding barriers.
But Skinner’s description of diplomats and officials who dedicate their lives to abolition is inspiring. For all the challenges of defining slavery, much less ending it, I was reminded that there are people who are passionate about this issue and who have sacrificed to fight it– both in the U.S. and abroad.
Solutions to human trafficking and slavery, in all its forms, are understandably complex. Fighting slavery requires poverty alleviation. This might happen through social entrepreneurs and the free market, but ending slavery will also require governments to enforce the laws. Skinner points to the success of American pressure on major chocolate companies to eradicate forced labor in the industry– but since the book was published, those companies have yet to make any meaningful progress towards that end. Skinner also mentions the potential of preventative abolition— when individuals and businesses take actions to protect and support those who are at risk of being trafficked or enslaved.
Modern-day slavery is a broad and complex issue– but understanding it is the first step in ending it.
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