I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write?...We would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
- Franz Kafka, as quoted in To Be Told by Dan Allender
I am thankful that over the past few years, several great books have been written about human slavery and human trafficking. The two books that I have read by Gary Haugen are great because they biblically lay out the reasons why we should be concerned about this great darkness. And Gary Haugen can be trusted as an author, because he faces this darkness every day, along with his organization International Justice Mission. The book I just finished called The Road Of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam is a great book, because we get to read first hand from an actual trafficked sex slave what it's like behind the curtain, what the darkness contains and who are the masters of this darkness.
However, the book I am reading right now - A Crime So Monstrous: Face-To-Face With Modern Day Slavery by Benjamin Skinner is in its own class of great. It's not better than the above mentioned books, it's "great" differently because it shows us the totality of the situation. Just like Haugen, Skinner presents reasons why we should be fighting modern-day slavery (although they aren't biblical reasons like Haugen's...scratch that, they actually are because he appeals to the goodness of humanity, and the Bible shows us that the ultimate good that a human can do is love God and love our neighbors). Like Somaly Mam, Skinner takes us into the darkness and shows us many of the layers of human slavery - the main three being sex slavery, forced bondage and war slavery.
Sex slavery is the one I've read the most about. It's where (mostly) girls, some as young as five years old, are sold into sex slavery. Sometimes the salespeople are these girls' own parents - to pay a debt off, to escape poverty, whatever the reasons, it's a harsh reality. Sometimes the salespeople are traffickers who have kidnapped girls from their homes or the streets, or perhaps they promise these girls a job in a restaurant. These girls are then sold to a brothel and forced to have sex with "clients" - several times a day. These girls are stripped of their decency, privacy, and ultimately of their humanity as they become commodities for their owners. Their stories are horrifying.
Forced bondage is another facet of slavery. Again, there are many facets of forced bondage. Sometimes a family has incurred a debt to a landowner - sometimes these debts have gone back for generations - and so these families are forced to work for the landowner, all day, doing backbreaking labor for nothing - to someday pay back the debt. Other times men, women and children are kidnapped by slave raiders and trafficked to another country or area of a country and are forced to work.
If you saw the prequel of this season's 24, then you witnessed another area of slavery - war slavery. This is where warlords and rebel fighters will kidnap boys - usually very young boys - and after a period of humiliation, brainwashing, and terror - force them to fight for their army.
Skinner's book is hard to read. It's devastating. Personally, I can only read a few pages before I have to put the book down and contemplate what I just read. It's like when you were a kid and you had to take gross tasting medicine - you knew it was good for you but it was hard to stomach.
The different types of slavery isn't the only way that Skinner gives the total package of slavery. He also shows how hard it is to really make a difference in this dark place. There are a whole lot of politics that get in the way of being able to do something. I've never been a big fan of the United Nations - but after reading about some of the futility of fighting the system in the U.N., my respect for that organization is nil. U.S. politics gets in the way as well, as Secretaries of State and other State department workers press for other issues that the U.S. should be more concerned about - like war and oil. And of course in some countries you are dealing with centuries old discrimination and disdain for rights.
The good thing is we serve a God who can change the hearts of world leaders, who can call a group of people to make a difference, who can work miraculously in any situation to heal hearts, shine light in darkness, and overthrow tyrannical agents of destruction. After all, his own people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. He understands the plight of the slave. He hears the cry of the eight-year-old girl in a brothel in Cambodia, the cry of the twenty-year-old forced prostitute in Romania, the cry of the family born in the caste of "untouchables" working for the last forty years in a rock quarry to pay off a $30 debt, the cry of the ten year old boy in The Lord's Army in the Sudan, fighting for a cause he can't hope to understand or care about.
As Kafka in the above quote said, this is a book that will wound and stab you.
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