In this fascinating, heartbreaking interview, Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery, discusses the four years he spent investigating the current condition of slaves around the world.
There are more slaves now than at any other time in human history: 27 million.
Skinner discusses the time in Romania he was offered a young girl with Downs Syndrome and slashes all over her arms as a sexual slave in trade for a used car, as well as being offered sexual-servant children in broad daylight in Port-au-Prince for $100. He talked them down to $50.
History’s worst stories just keep getting told over and over: as writers, our jobs are to find them, bring them to light, and show how they are the same but different.
TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.
BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. These are people that cannot walk away.
I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who’d been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo — he asked me to protect his identity — was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.
Since he was a child, he and his family and his children, along with the rest of the enslaved villagers, took huge rocks out of the earth. They pummeled those rocks into gravel for the subgrade of India’s infrastructure, which is the gleaming pride of the Indian elites.
They further pulverized that gravel into silica sand for glass. There’s only one way that you turn a profit off handmade sand, and that’s through slavery.
via There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.
