E. Benjamin Skinner

E. Benjamin Skinner, "raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria where his father served as a British colonial administrator, Ben first learned about slavery as a child in Quaker meeting. In 2003, as a writer on assignment in Sudan for Newsweek International, Skinner met his first survivor of slavery. Having flown in along with an Evangelical group, purporting to buy slaves en masse to secure their freedom, he hitched a ride on a U.N. Cessna to the frontlines of the north-south Sudanese civil war. There he met Muong Nyong. Like Skinner, Nyong was 27 at the time, yet unlike Skinner, he had spent the first part of his life in bondage. Since that time, Skinner has traveled the globe to find others like Nyong, a task which would prove to be the most daunting challenge of his professional life. Going undercover when necessary, he has infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels. In the process, he has become the first person in history to observe the sales of human beings on four continents. His book, A Crime So Monstrous tells the stories of the lives of a few of these slaves, as well as of his own often harrowing encounters with those who sell, own, and free them."


 * Fellow (2009), Carr Center

Books
"25% of U.S. royalties go to Free The Slaves, a group that uses holistic, locally-based strategies through global partners to fight slavery, rehabilitate slaves and eradicate bondage. 25% of U.K. royalties go to the group's British sister, Anti-Slavery International, the world's oldest human rights organization."
 * Ben Skinner, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (Free Press, 2009). Foreword by Richard Holbrooke.