I am just thrilled to tell you about this! We are making our membership opportunities even better and would love to hear from you what you would like to see happen at JANERA (& when you let us know, you’ll get an awesome gift…read on!)
Please take a minute to complete our membership survey. Just by taking the 5 minutes to fill this out, you will get free admission to our second annual Dance For Freedom party (scheduled for mid-June).
Last year’s party was held at the Chelsea Art Museum with journalist Benjamin Skinner, musician Peter Buffett, DJ Fabian Alsultany, awesome drummers, and an open bar sponsored by Diageo and Brooklyn Brewery. 300 of us danced late into the night. This year’s dance party, which will again shine a spotlight on modern-day slavery, will be even better, with celebrity speakers, gift bags, and a silent auction.
We are very excited to be building a platform where we not only discuss the world’s most important issues but also where we create space for interesting people to meet in fabulous locations. As a JANERA member you’ll be part of this close-knit global community of gamechangers and influencers—people who, like you, operate at the forefront of their game, be it social or professional.
With your feedback we will amp up the membership a few notches and make it truly sparkle.
Tell us: which perks would you like to see included? What kind of events are important to you? Would you be interested in taking concrete action to help solve the issues on which we shed light (like human trafficking, education for girls, climate change)? How important is meeting new people? How important is accessing the speakers?
2009 has been intense for us here at JANERA. We talked to established world leaders, provocative thinkers, and bold innovators, all of whom are tackling the biggest issues of our time. See below an overview of our 2009 events, and read what’s next on our agenda for 2010.
Global Religion in February with leading Buddhist thinker Sharon Salzburg and five other leading religious figures;
Modern-day Slavery in March with Peter Buffett and Dayton Literary Peace Prize winning author Benjamin Skinner;
Global Capitalism in March with ProfessorJeffrey Sachs and the New York Bureau Chief of The Economist Matthew Bishop;
Green Transportation in May with Robin Chase one of Time Magazine‘s most influential people in 2009 and Vijay Vaitheeswaran award-winning correspondent for The Economist;
Iranian Elections in June with journalist and author Hooman Madj and Nisid Hajari, Newsweek’s Foreign Editor;
Empowering Women & Girls in September with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn and Camfed’s Executive Director, Ann Cotton.
Climate Change Debate in November with NRDC’s Ralph Cavanagh, Duke University’s Eric Roston, AEI’s Steven Hawyard, Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey, moderated by CNBC’s Dennis Kneale;
We undertook a complete redesign of our Web site and switched from being “the voice of global nomads” to “curating global conversations.” We now integrate video into the site more and think this better reflects our mission of making international affairs accessible and attractive.
And we launched a brand-new membership program with exciting benefits! We not only serve individuals with discounts to our events at our Nomad level, but we can also help causes spread the word at the GameChanger level, or even co-host events with authors, advocates and concerned citizens at the Leaders level. And this is just the beginning. Click on our Membership page and find out which level fits you best, and sign up today!
2010 promises to be amazing. We are taking the conversation to the next level by partnering with fabulous companies and individuals, and are expanding beyond New York. If you’re interested in bringing our events to your city, email us to set it up.
THANK YOU for being with us along this roller-coaster ride and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
This interview was originally published last March, but since Skinner’s book “A Crime So Monstrous” just won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction, we wanted to highlight Skinner and his groundbreaking book once again. Skinner is donating his $10,000 honorarium to Free the Slaves, the American wing of Anti-Slavery International.
Hardly a thing of the past, slavery thrives in our world. Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner tells the shocking truth about human trafficking.
By Hannah Wallace
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.
I sat down with Skinner recently 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.
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.
Hannah Wallace is the offline curator at JANERA. This interview originally appeared on Salon.com
The drinks were nicely chilled. Guests mingled, speaking in clusters. Music thrummed through the Chelsea Art Museum. But this was an altogether different night in New York. A young Cambodian girl peered from a huge photograph, perched on a table, the detritus of the street floating by behind her. A woman could be seen in a second photograph, light hitting her face as if piercing a deep well. Testimonials about human trafficking splashed across a wall from a projector. The evening was a speaking, thinking, sipping and—ultimately—dancing benefit in support of the Somaly Mam Foundation.
Ben Skinner, author of the book A Crime So Monstrous, held a nearly empty drink and stood to the side with singer Peter Buffet and writer Hannah Wallace. “Defining what slavery is first, that’s the biggest challenge,” Skinner said. “Language and terminology are incredibly important to get right, not only in the way the laws are written but in our daily conversations and the way we frame this issue.”
Buffet, who runs the organization and Web site www.istheresomethingicando.com to highlight human trafficking and social justice issues, nodded. “Sex slavery is not a women’s rights issue, it’s a human rights issue,” he said. “It’s important for men to stand shoulder to shoulder on this.”
Although the evening was to benefit Somaly Mam’s efforts to address sex slavery, Skinner was quick to point out that “fifteen out of sixteen slaves in the world are not held in commercial sex slavery.” He cited figures from a recently updated International Labor Organization (ILO) report.
Janera Soerel, one of the hosts of the evening, took the microphone and called the evening to order. “Twenty seven to twenty nine million people are enslaved today,” she said. Clearly the numbers and definitions can become an overwhelming aspect of the struggle to understand, and fight, modern human trafficking. Photographer Jennifer MacFarlane spoke next to explain her photos from the brothels of Cambodia and to remind the guests that all money raised over the evening would go to build additional shelters and help to rescue more girls. Peter Buffet spoke next, reiterating his commitment to the cause and his efforts to marry his creative energies with raising awareness about humanitarian issues.
But it was Benjamin Skinner, currently serving as a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, who spoke the longest and offered, perhaps, the most vivid details of what it is to be in the back streets, alleys and quarries of human trafficking.
“There are more slaves in the world today than at any point in human history,” he said. But its in the details that the sweeping statements gain traction. In India, Skinner met a man whose family, due to a debt of 62 cents, was forced to work in a quarry pounding stones into sand. “There’s only one way you can turn a profit off handmade sand,” Skinner said. “And that’s with slaves.
In the U.S. alone, Skinner added, between fourteen and seventeen thousand people are trafficked into slavery each year. “Put it this way,” he continued. “In the next half hour, one more person will be trafficked into slavery on U.S. soil.”
“It’s everywhere and nowhere,” he continued. “From right here, where we’re standing in Chelsea, we are five hours from being able to buy a healthy boy or girl.” Skinner used that fact as an entry point to discuss his travels and experience in Haiti, where there are an estimated 300,000 child slaves. In his effort to get behind the closed doors and shadowed spaces of human trafficking, Skinner posed as a buyer in Port au Prince, where he was offered to purchase a ten-year-old girl for both domestic work and sex slavery. “The price started at one hundred dollars,” Skinner said. “But after two minutes of bargaining it quickly fell to fifty.”
Skinner highlighted that the purchase of human life to free that little boy or girl will only give rise to further human misery. “If we all did that, next year there would be 600,000 child slaves in Haiti, not 300,000,” he said. Finding the best way to halt this vicious trade invites contemplation of what Skinner described as “enormously daunting issues.” Still, in the research he conducted for his book, Skinner in one case made the decision to “cross that line,” as he stated. He helped to free a little girl bound for a lifetime of slavery.
“I don’t feel bad about it,” he said, his voice full of the kind of rare conviction heard in people who have grappled with our most challenging moral issues and made a decision that, while never easy (what about the remaining 299,999 Haitian child slaves?) is one made with pride. “Former slaves can be tremendous agents of freedom,” Skinner said. In December of that year, after he had left Haiti with assurance the little girl would enroll in school and have at least one hot meal per day, he received an email from Haiti. He was in India at the time, at a “grindingly slow internet café.” The message took fifteen minutes to download. But it contained some of the first words the little girl had ever written, a message to Benjamin thanking him.
“It was the only Christmas present I received that year,” Skinner said. “It was the only one I needed.”
Skinner finished with a point on what we can do, right now, about all of this. “Write to Kerry, Lugar and the other members of the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee and urge a swift confirmation of Lou de Baca, just nominated by Obama as Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the State Department,” Skinner said. De Baca has been a powerful voice against human trafficking and deserves, Skinner concluded, our strongest support.
With the last of the remarks made, the evening evolved into a rambunctious dance party as John Amira led the Afro-Caribbean drumming accompanied by singers Regina Iyaleio and Jose Genua together with a host of additional drummers and bell-players. Soon Globesonic DJ Fabian Alsultany seamlessly took over.
The museum rang with beats and, as guests continued to mingle and dance, the evening’s dark focus acquired a lighter turn. Entrepreneur Guilherme Cunha stood against a far wall, taking it all in.
“We have a responsibility,” he said. “If you’re able to help, you have to.”
Recent stories of foreclosures and widespread personal bankruptcy are heartbreaking, but the deep recession has dealt an even harsher blow to a hidden population in America: across the country, shelters report staggering growth in the number of victims of human trafficking. Here in Los Angeles for example, the Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), has seen a 200% increase in the number of trafficking victims. To be clear, trafficking victims are those forced to work for no pay beyond subsistence. They are held under threat of violence, coerced through fraud, and the women and children are often subjugated further through sexual abuse. They are slaves.
Today, there are more slaves worldwide than at any point in human history, and that number is growing at an alarming rate. In February, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that, despite hundreds of new antislavery laws across the globe, widespread impunity for traffickers remains, and increasing numbers are entering slavery. Their frequently illegal status—and always illegal bondage—make slaves impossible to count with precision. But the U.S. government estimates that up to 17,000 are enslaved in America every year. The State Department holds that as many as 800,000 are trafficked across international borders annually, largely into commercial sexual slavery. But the vast majority of slaves worldwide are held in some form of collateralized, hereditary debt bondage, a euphemism for a monstrous crime that renders as many as 20 million South Asians de facto chattel of masters whose only claim to their labor is a debt, often miniscule, often initiated in a previous generation.
The numbers can be numbing, which is why, in five years of travel on five continents, I sought out slaves, traffickers and abolitionists, to collect some of the human stories behind the statistics. I found slavery chillingly close. Five hours from my Brooklyn apartment, in broad daylight on the street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, I was offered ten-year-old girl for domestic and sexual slavery. The asking price was $100; a quick negotiation dropped the cost of the girl to $50. I never paid for human life in Haiti or anywhere else; to purchase slaves’ freedom, shelter operators told me, would only bolster a trade in human misery.
But as Thoreau wrote about slavery and the rumbling disunion in 1861, two days before the first shots of the Civil War: “As long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis.” Knowledge of the reality and extent of modern-day slavery is its own imperative, and abolition is a collective pledge. Encouragingly, President Obama promised during the campaign to make fighting human trafficking “a top priority.” Thus far, his appointments have included a number of individuals who have owned the antislavery issue. Last week, the president nominated Melanne Verveer, most recently the co-founder and chairman of the board of Vital Voices, an organization doing effective antislavery work worldwide, to be his ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. Verveer’s former and current boss, Hillary Clinton, was deeply affected by meeting an HIV-positive sex slave during a trip to Thailand in 1994. Together, if they can turn passion in to policy, they will build on the Bush administration’s well-meaning but underfunded and inconsistent efforts to cajole foreign governments to abolish slavery.
Now, more than ever, abolitionists need our help. On my Web site, I link to two of the best organizations doing worldwide antislavery work. Both offer direct ways of becoming an abolitionist; others include Verveer’s former organization Vital Voices; CAST; and the Somaly Mom Foundation, a fundraiser for which I’ll be speaking at tomorrow night at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan.
—E. Benjamin Skinner
