If our kids were hungry, we'd step into slavery.

Slavery is what slavery's always been: About one person controlling another person using violence and then exploiting them economically, paying them nothing. That's what slavery's about

Most of the people who come into slavery today, the people who enter into slavery for the first time in the present moment, are not captured, they're not knocked over the head, it doesn't follow the old sorts of mechanisms.

For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.

Ben Skinner's brains and courage take us into the belly of the beast and expose the ugly truth of modern slavery. Instead of sensation, A Crime So Monstrous gives us desperately needed insight and analysis. This is an important book, the first deep look into America's confused relationship with human trafficking and slavery today. Skinner's balanced dissection of our government's haphazard policies will be controversial, but it can also be the foundation for a new anti-slavery agenda, one that ends the political games being played with the lives of slaves.

Yes, twenty-seven million in slavery is a lot of people, but it is just .0043 percent of the world's population. Yes, $23 billion a year in slave-made products as services is a lot of money but it is exactly what Americans spent on Valentine's Day in 2005. If humans trafficking generates $32 billion in profits annually, that is still a tiny drop in the ocean of the world economy.

It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.