More Slaves Than Ever Before

A Crime So Monstrous by Benjamin Skinner

50 million people are enslaved as of 2021, more than at any given point in history, even during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Slavery today happens right under our noses, and the traffickers escape justice.

Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (2008), is an established researcher on modern-day slavery. For his book, he went into the depths of human trafficking circles in Haiti, Sudan, Romania, and India. He pretended to be looking to buy a child laborer in Haiti and a sex trafficking victim in Romania in order to understand how the traffickers operate.

A Crime So Monstrous is full of history and pertinent information about international law. It is also heart-breaking to read about human trafficking victims, many of whom had no means to escape and were failed by the law and justice systems.

According to the US State Department, trafficking is slavery, but trafficking was just a euphemism used in order to absolve international law enforcement from acting on punishing traffickers. Some believed that using the term slavery would be a slap in the face to those descended from the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and to countries which the US had never issued an apology to for slavery.

Human trafficking is illegal, but it is not a crime against humanity, according to the United Nations, but they do consider slavery to be a crime against humanity, much like genocide.  

Skinner found that in Haiti, much like in the US, human traffickers fly under the radar while drug traffickers are pursued and punished. Haitian authorities do not intervene when they know that people are selling children into forced labor, they say that it is a domestic issue between families so they stay out of it. According to End Slavery Now, over 300,000 children are enslaved in Haiti, they are called restaveks.

Skinner interviewed John Miller, former Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, the United Nations peacekeepers partook in human trafficking on their assignments. Miller said, “The UN peacekeepers are the worst military in the world, I demand you quote me on that,” and Skinner did. The “blue helmets [peacekeepers] pressed girls into slavery in the Congo, purchase sex slaves outright in Cambodia and Eritrea, and became known ‘less for peace than for rape.’”

Human trafficking is a crime, whether it is for labor or sex, whether they are adults or children. Read more about Skinner’s research into trafficking in Haiti, Sudan, Romania, and India in A Crime So Monstrous.