Apr 09 2008
There-for-that
It only took Benjamin Skinner about five hours to find a slave to buy when he left U.N. headquarters in New York. At the end of this experiment that tested the ease with which someone, even a New Yorker, can wake up some morning and decide to buy someone, he found himself facing a child trafficker in Port-au-Prince, Haiti who wanted to know his preferences: just a child for domestic labor? Or a child who could be whipped up into an able cook, servant, and sex toy, or “la-pou-sa-a”:
“there-for-that.”
To most Americans, this is inconceivable, but as Skinner’s new book, A Crime so Monstrous, proves– the purchase of humans for money is, for much of the world . . . normal.
Acceptable.
Convenient.
And even in the U.S., often heartily practiced.
Skinner is a journalist who was initially inspired to investigate the personal anguish at the heart of the global slave trade by Kevin Bales’ Disposable People: New Slavery and the Global Economy. Bales’ book focuses on systems of slavery around the world, from Thailand to Mauritania to Brazil.
But while much of the literature on human trafficking out there focuses primarily on stories of victims, Skinner’s book offers a rare kind of insight into the minds and processes of slaveholders. An insight that just as often as not, spooks him. Sometimes irretrievably.
In a recent interview with wnyc.org, he described negotiating with a slaveholder at a Romanian brothel — in exchange for a used car, he was offered a hastily made-up girl with Down Syndrome. The make-up, despite her scars, made her “salable.”
“There’s a point as a journalist where you cross the line and you get involved. And honestly I don’t feel bad about it,” he says in the interview, pointing to one time where he intervened for a dirt-poor Haitian mother to buy back the daughter she hadn’t seen in three years
And why should his readers care?
“This is an American issue . . . It is a U.S. burden to fight slavery worldwide,” he said, citing Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000
Whether we know it or not, we’re signed on as part of it.
See Benjamin Skinner speak about modern-day slavery on his current book tour.
25% of U.S. royalties from the book go to the not-for-profit Free the Slaves
