An Interview With Ben Skinner

Ben Skinner is a journalist for Newsweek, and was assigned to do a story about the Sudan and came face-to-face with modern-day slavery. After learning that there are 27 million slaves in the world today, more slaves than at any other time in history, Skinner decided to go undercover into the slave industry on four different continents and write a book about it. Here is an interview with him from Breakpoint Magazine:

BreakPoint: Where and how did you develop an interest in modern-day slavery?

Skinner: I was raised Quaker, and the Quakers have a long history of decrying slavery. In Quaker meetings growing up we would read the stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as much as we would read Bible stories. But it was always taught to me in the past. Then I picked up a book called Disposable People by Kevin Bales [of Free the Slaves], also a Quaker. Bales began looking at slavery around the world and tried to quantify it. He came up with the number 27 million. That was more slaves than any [other] point in human history. I wanted to put a human face on that. Also, I wanted to try to get into the minds of those who buy and sell human beings. That was the biggest challenge. And, also, I wanted to get into the minds of those who were fighting the trade.

BreakPoint: In your book you say that “journalists are not supposed to be activists; they are supposed to be objective and aloof.” Did your perspective on what it means to be a journalist change on your journey?

Skinner: Samantha Power (author of Darfur Darfur) and Philip Gourevitch (author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families) were my models. In each of these cases, the journalists were writing about victims who were dead. They were not in a position to perhaps prevent the genocide from taking place.

What I’m writing about in this book is ongoing. I didn’t know that I was going to be able to find people that would offer me children for sale. I asked local NGOs how to handle this. I never got one response that you should pay for their freedom. They told me that the best thing to do is record the details and go to the authorities.

But it’s not satisfying to do that when you go and you see a young woman who has the visible effects of Down syndrome and looks like she’s trying to kill herself,[i] and then record the pimp that’s trying to enslave her, but it’s really hard to build a case.

In the story of Camsease,[ii] my feeling was that I couldn’t turn a mother down. This is a distinct situation from my being offered a girl in forced prostitution. In this case, emancipation is not enough. Unless I’m in a position to know that there is a shelter, income generation, and other resources, I may be doing more harm than good. I fear what Nick Kristof found.[iii] This case with Camsease—when I went in with her mother and we walked out with her—there’s a certain joy that you see very rarely in your lifetime. This instance of mother holding daughter for the first time in three years is that joy. From a very intimate, personal perspective, witnessing that joy makes it very, very personally worthwhile.

But you very quickly come back to the reality that this girl can’t survive on her own and might even be going back to a worse situation. So, I asked myself, What would it take to keep this young woman free and out of the hands of traffickers? It costs $87 for a school uniform, books, tuition, and one hot meal a day. A week earlier I’d been offered a girl on the streets for $50. It was worth $87 to keep a girl definitively off the streets free.

That Christmas, I got a note forwarded from Camsease. It was the first note she had ever written in Creole. There was a picture attached to the note. She was in a school uniform and she was smiling. I had never seen her smile before. To see her smile really sort of made the whole thing worth it. It underscored why every abolitionist’s cause is so worthy.

BreakPoint: When you pretended to buy a slave in Haiti, you mentioned your fear that your plot might backfire. Did you have a course of action should the worst come true?

Skinner: My greatest fear was retaliation against people who were enslaved. I considered myself the least vulnerable. In so many instances, these traffickers have no regard for the lives of those they enslave. If they feel like there’s a risk that these people could testify against them, they would take it out on them.

I found something I didn’t expect to find. In many cases, it was clear to me that they were coerced and that there was an element of violence in their coercion. In other cases, where I was off on my own—for instance in Dubai, I met a woman in a club. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. We walked in, and there were some 500 women in this club, all organized by race. I didn’t talk to one who had come over knowing full well the terms that they were coming to. For example, they didn’t know their passports would be taken away. I met one of these women in a mall the next day who told me this heartbreaking story of how she had come over from Romania. She came over because she had to feed her child. She’d been beaten and, at times, tortured by the people who were renting her body. When she eventually broke free, you would think that she could rebuild her life, but the options that you’re left with after something like that are so narrow. She felt that the only way she could keep going was to stay in prostitution. I think that any restorative justice on this has to address the psychological aspects.

BreakPoint: It seems like one of the slaves you got to know the most was Gonoo.[iv] How long did you stay with him?

Skinner: I was on and off with Gonoo for two months. Gonoo had lived his entire life in slavery. The thought of being free was more daunting than the thought of staying enslaved and miserable. The thought of freedom hadn’t been presented to him as a very attractive option. The world of bondage was, in a dark way, almost comforting to him. That isn’t to say he wasn’t miserable and didn’t live with daily humiliation and the constant threat of the women in his life being raped. To you and [me], that would be absolutely intolerable, but for him, that was his world.

BreakPoint: Of the freedom fighters you met, who had the greatest impact on you and why?

Skinner: One I didn’t write about was Father Raymond D’Souza, a Catholic priest in northern India. He runs an organization that goes in and finds carpet looms that are enslaving children. They monitor the place and gather testimonies, and, in daring raids, they go in and free these children. That isn’t the end of the story. They then put these children in places where they get education and vocational training, and the children go back and start tea shops.

Another is an American woman named Sharla Musabih in Dubai who runs the only functional shelter for trafficked women. She’s been living in Dubai for about 25 years, and she does this over the resistance of the Emirates. She’s doing what the government should be doing and helping victims become survivors. The Emirate government views that as tarnishing the reputation of the Emirates. She says, “God is watching, and God is judging us on this.”

BreakPoint: It seems like many of the human-rights advocates/liberators you mention, like John Eibner and Michael Gerson, claim a Christian faith. Would you say the majority of the freedom fighters you met were Christians?

Skinner: The majority are nominally Christian. The hard fact is that there is no abolitionist movement in Islam correlative to the Christian tradition. By the same token, I did find a great number of people who were doing great work [who] weren’t Christian. In the U.S., particularly, they tend to be people who are moved to this issue because of their faith. The secular media hasn’t picked up the story the way the Christian media has. What I’m sincerely hoping is that the secular media will pick this up with an equal amount of vigor. There is some doubt in the secular media that slavery really is slavery, as opposed to a metaphor for something else. You hear the term “slave wages,” but that’s not really slavery. If you can walk away, you’re not a slave. But there are still more slaves today than in any [other] point in human history.

BreakPoint: You say that the sex trade, like Picasso’s painting,[v] has many faces. What was the worst face you saw and why?

Skinner: You don’t get much worse than the young woman in Bucharest[vi] who had been presented to me in exchange for a used car. But, it’s hard to compare misery. Slavery is always monstrous. The rape that she endured was no more endurable than the rape the woman in Miami[vii] endured.

The fact of the matter is I respectfully disagree with those who say that the victimization of this woman in Bucharest is the same as that of any woman in prostitution. Prostitution is not always slavery. They’ve made a choice I would never want my daughter to make, but, at some level, they made a choice.

BreakPoint: So many of those you interviewed, like Natasha,[viii] lived lives of such hell, it’s unimaginable to me that they could have any hope. Did you ever find a hope that shocked you?

Skinner: My friend Bill Nathan, who was a child slave in Haiti: There were a couple of things that helped him recover from that. He did have a loving mother, and he holds her up as one bedrock of unconditional love. Also, the faith and the redemptive power of Christ—that has given him a tremendous amount of strength. He would say it was God’s will. I found him to be superhuman. I have no doubt that he kept me alive when I was laid out with malaria. And he prayed for me. You hear stories of child molesters who were molested as children. Well, why didn’t Bill end up that way? I think it has to do with the people who welcomed him right after he got out of slavery. They told him, “You are a child of God, and we will embrace you.” Bill would call them his family. Let’s be frank, he’s lucky.

BreakPoint: You said that this knowledge came to dominate John Miller: “For every free slave, there were ten, twenty, a hundred who suffered in the shadows.” Has this knowledge come to dominate you too?

Skinner: Yeah, absolutely. The degree to which I’ve been able to cover all the slaves in the world in this book is really insufficient. The main contribution that most of us can make is to get as many people as possible to care about this and to own the issue. Neither Miller nor I have the capacity to free every slave. I know that for every one Camsease, there are 26.999 million others. That’s where the multiplier effect of someone like Wilberforce comes in. But, in some sense, our challenge is greater than Wilberforce’s. Wilberforce just had to show that slavery is a monstrous crime. We have to show that it even exists.

BreakPoint: What’s going to be your next project?

Skinner: It’s too early to say. I’m still wound up in this. The next book will be a bit easier on my soul, because the rest of my time will be spent on this issue.

Modern-day slavery is not only a relatively solvable problem, but relatively cheap. On average, it would take about $400 to free and rehabilitate each slave for four to six years. We’re talking about $11 billion roughly. If you do that, you will be creating consumers who will contribute $22 billion to the global economy. It makes sense to do this from a development perspective. The tunnel in Boston cost about $11 billion. Even if you’re talking to these trade guys who don’t have a human-rights bone in their body, you don’t have to make a moral argument on this, you can make a development argument on this, and it’s a very coherent one.


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Looks like I have another book that I need to get.