Essay Contest Winner Meets Human Trafficking Author Ben Skinner

Posted on October 21st, 2008 by Paul Bernish

Journalist and author Benjamin Skinner, whose recently published book on the many faces of contemporary slavery, “A Crime So Monstrous,” has generated strongly positive reviews and favorable publicity worldwide, got to meet face-to-face Tuesday with a local high school student who composed a winning essay on the meaning of slavery in today’s world.

The student, Joanna Pogue, is a senior at Cincinnati’s Summit Country Day School. Joanna and two Summit classmates, who also participated in the essay contest, met with Skinner at the Freedom Center. In a wide-ranging question and answer session of nearly 90 minutes, Skinner told the students that the major obstacle to overcoming modern slavery is persuading people that slavery still exists in the world.

“Many people — probably a majority — have the idea that slavery ended with the end of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the passage of the 13th Amendment,” Skinner said. “But as A Crime So Monstrous emphasizes, slavery exists all over the world as a moral, political and economic issue that must be dealt with by modern abolitionists.”

Skinner told the students that to understand the modern face of slavery, agreement on a definition of what slavery is is critically important. “I define slavery as people of whatever age who are compelled to work, through force or fraud, for no pay beyond subsistence.” He also said that the issue of slavery cannot be separated from grim economic realities, in which much of the world’s population exists on the verge of extreme poverty, thus making them vulnerable to be trafficked by unscrupulous perpetrators who treat human life as a disposable commodity.

Skinner was in Cincinnati to present a keynote address to the The Jean-Robert Cadet Restavec Foundation’s Benefit & Public Awareness Dinner, named for a one-time child slave (called a “restavec”) in Haiti, one of the countries Skinner wrote about in his book.

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