Refer back to the post on the responsibility to protect as you read about the horror of modern slavery, and consider how quickly you would vote to send troops in.
A Crime So Monstrous
By Logan Paul Gage
Monday, May 5, 2008, 6:37 AM
If when you think of slavery, you imagine a distant, bygone era, ponder this conversation:
Florin: That’s not a lot. For one night, I make two hundred Euros off her. . . . She’s very clean. A very nice girl—you won’t have any problems with her. Whatever you say, she will do.”
Skinner: Two thousand seems like a lot.
Florin: No, for two months that’s very inexpensive! The girl is very nice, she is not doing drugs. She is good at what she is doing.
Skinner: How about something else? A trade. A motorcycle—I can see that being about the value.
Florin: A car, maybe. Not a motorcycle. A good car.
Skinner: A Dacia? But only if I’m buying the girl for three months. And the car will come with 50,000 kilometers.
Florin: OK.
Skinner: Could I leave the country with her?
Florin: What if you leave me with my eyes in the sun? [a Gypsy expression for being stood up] I don’t know if you’d be back with her. I need a deposit. But I can get a Romanian passport for her.
Investigative reporter E. Benjamin Skinner recorded this conversation with Florin, a pimp in Bucharest. You can listen online, if you have the stomach. In his new book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, Florin represents the worst of the worst: selling not only a sex slave but an abused, scared, suicidal girl with Down syndrome out of a sewage-infested store, caring little how much she is beaten and raped. All for less than $2,400.
Skinner’s eyes, though only thirty-two, have seen much. According to former assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke, Skinner is the first person to observe the sale of human beings on four continents. Skinner’s interest in slavery goes far back. As a boy in Wisconsin, he attended Quaker meetings where he reports learning as much about Harriet Tubman and William Lloyd Garrison as he did about Jesus.
A conversation with Walter Russell Mead prompted Skinner’s five-year exploration culminating in this book—at once a portrait of slavery today, a history of recent U.S. abolition efforts, and a critique of the antislavery lobby.
According to the State Department, more than 800,000 people (two-thirds are women and children) are trafficked across national borders, and millions within national borders, annually. But what does slavery mean today? Skinner insists upon the following tripartite definition: “A slave is a human being who is forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.” Skinner first paints a portrait of modern slave experience, and along the way we hear some gruesome tales.
Lampstand Foundation website, http://www.lampstandfoundation.org/
"The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint." Charles Peguy (1873-1914)
About
- David H. Lukenbill
- I am a California native, married, we have one daughter and live close to the American River with two cats and all the wild critters we can feed. I am a management consultant to nonprofit organizations and have an Associates of Arts degree in Administration of Justice from Sacramento City College, a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Behavior from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Public Administration degree, also from the University of San Francisco.