A Crime so Monstrous: A Shocking ExposÉ of Modern-day Sex-Slavery, Human Trafficking and Urban Child Markets By E. Benjamin Skinner, Mainstream, £5.70

In Measure for Measure, when the judge, Escalus, asks Pompey, who is a tapster and a pimp, whether he thinks prostitution is a lawful trade, the latter answers, “If the law would allow it, sir.” Benjamin Skinner’s attempt to investigate the ways and forms in which slavery continues to exist to this day, when it has long been declared illegal worldwide, brings him face to face with the truth contained in Pompey’s laconic answer. The very law that bans slavery and prostitution is also the one that allows them to thrive, as law-keepers turn law-breakers by a curious sleight of hand.

In Haiti, Skinner finds brokers on the streets negotiating the price of children to be sold as slaves. Here he observes that the main contribution of the UN peacekeepers to the country’s economy has been through brothels. Later, while tracking down pimps in Romania, he discovers that “officers in the Amsterdam anti-trafficking vice units were allowed to purchase sex from prostitutes as long as they did so out of uniform”. Once forced into slavery or sold into prostitution, the victims thus find that there is little or no way out of the bondage. And the psychological impact of slavery conspires with other factors to ensure that a victim is unable to escape his identity.

“Slavery is a situation that inspires its sufferers to justify it in order to explain their own existence,” writes Skinner. This is particularly true in cases of sex-slavery, where the victims’ shame and guilt serve to perpetuate their ordeal. Skinner cites the case of a Haitian child called Little Hope, who was brought as a slave to Miami, made to perform all the household chores and whipped. The eldest son of the household in which Little Hope lived raped her regularly. She was later freed and is today a strapping teenager who loves shopping and hip-hop music. But just after Little Hope’ rehabilitation, her traumas had caused her to wash herself repeatedly, to scream in the bath and to hear voices in the head asking her to kill. She has left most of all that behind now, but still finds it difficult to trust people or to make friends.

Skinner journeys from Haiti to Sudan, from Romania to Dubai to India, and is everywhere confronted with the same picture of human bondage. Richard Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the UN, may declare that “Slavery is awful. Slavery is inhuman. Slavery is dead” in the foreword to this very book, but as Skinner states candidly, most of America’s “abolitionist efforts can be summed up in three words: sparkle and fade”. Skinner has much to say of the earnest endeavours of John Miller, the former US ambassador-at-large, against modern-day slavery, to abolish the practice. But with one energetic Miller against thousands of others who would prefer to live in denial of the reality, the campaign against human trafficking cannot progress too far.

Skinner’s sincerity is evident everywhere in his work. The drawbacks of this book — its reiteration of facts, its tedious effort to explain America’s stance towards slavery and the breathless, sometimes disjointed, rush of its narration — can be condoned as concessions to the righteous indignation of the author. While hoping that Skinner’s book will serve its purpose of bringing the crimes to light, one cannot help but remember how Shakespeare’s Pompey responded when forced by Escalus to own up to his profession. The bawd said, “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live”.