During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, “A Crime So Monstrous,” he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.

“There are more slaves today than at any point in human history,” writes Skinner, citing a recent estimate that there are currently 27 million worldwide. One hundred and forty-three years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865 and 60 years after the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade worldwide, slavery — or, as it is euphemistically called, human trafficking — is actually thriving. It is, as Hillary Clinton has said, “the dark underbelly of globalization.”

That slavery in its many forms — debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution — still exists is, indeed, shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don’t know where to look for it. Skinner’s great achievement is that he shines a light on the international slave trade, exposing the horrors of bondage not only through assiduous reporting and interviews with modern-day abolitionists and government officials, but by sharing the stories of several survivors. These poignant tales — of people like Muong, a 12-year-old Dinka boy from southern Sudan, who is abducted (with his brother and mother) by an Arab slave driver; Tatiana, an Eastern European woman who is tricked into slavery when her boyfriend of six months finds her an “au pair” job in Amsterdam; and Gonoo, an Indian man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who inherits a debt from his father and spends his days working it off at a stone quarry — illustrate the harsh realities of slavery while also offering some hope that former slaves can rebuild their lives.

Salon sat down with Skinner to talk about modern-day abolitionists, what’s wrong with redemptions (also called “buy backs”), and why he’s optimistic that slavery can be eradicated.

You infiltrated many dangerous underworlds to get these stories, often putting your life at risk by chatting up child slave brokers and negotiating to buy young women from a Russian mobster in Istanbul who’d just been released from prison. Which situation, in retrospect, was the most harrowing?

There were definitely some moments where I felt I’d made a mistake in terms of personal safety. At this point, though, I have to say that the people who are most in danger in these situations are the slaves themselves. My greatest concern going in was not “Am I going to come out whole?” but “Is there going to be some retaliation against the slaves if my cover is blown?”

I had a principle that I would not pay for a human life. You buy a human being and you can’t just set them free and dump them on the economy with no resources, no support system, no rehabilitation.

When I was offered this young woman in trade for a used car at the Romani brothel in Bucharest, I could have done one of a few things: I could’ve paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could’ve fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could’ve gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.

Very unsatisfying, that. You want to rip this guy’s head off, right? I was shown this woman who had scars all over her arm — she was clearly trying to kill herself to escape daily rape, and she had Down syndrome. I was so in shock. I was undercover and I had this moment where I thought, “What would my character be doing in this situation?” So I tried to smile. And I physically couldn’t. I was so horrified. I looked at my translator, who had not done this kind of work before, and there was just sheer horror on his face as well. To see somebody who is in such a condition. They had put makeup on her and her makeup was running because she was crying so much.

Did the police do anything?

The response from the police was, “These are the Roma, they have their laws, they have their blood.” The Roma are this incredibly oppressed and marginalized community within Romania — and have been for centuries. That’s why, I think, the major human traffickers in Romania over the past several years have been Roma.

I kept thinking of Samantha Power‘s book as I was reading this because you describe the reluctance of government officials to use the term “slavery” to describe what is obviously exactly that. (Power describes the same studied avoidance of the word “genocide” in “A Problem From Hell.”) Colin Powell didn’t use “slavery” in 2001 when he released the first Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. Even the major piece of U.S. anti-slavery legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, doesn’t use the word “slavery.”

There are over a dozen universal conventions and over 300 international treaties that have been signed banning slavery and the slave trade. We’ve all agreed that this is a crime of universal concern and it requires a robust response to stop it.

The U.S. has actually gotten better at using the term “slavery” when it’s appropriate. One group that has not gotten better in this regard — they’ve taken baby steps — has been the U.N. They are so tepid and afraid of offending member states. Even in a case like Sudan, which was as egregious a form of slavery and slave raiding as you’ve had in the late 20th century. In 1999, at the height of slave raiding, the U.N. Human Rights Commission said, “OK, we will no longer refer to slavery, we will refer to intertribal abductions.” And if you talk to U.N. officials behind the scenes, they’ll say that the logic behind this is that in order to move the issue forward, we had to be diplomatic and reach this middle ground. The problem with that logic is that you lose all leverage. Abduction is not a crime against humanity — slavery is. If it’s a crime against humanity, you get hit pretty hard.

How would you get hit very hard?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4, says slavery and the slave trade are banned worldwide. But actually, you’re bringing up a good point. In terms of enforcement, the U.N. doesn’t have the kind of systems built into it which can really deal with this, and that’s a problem.

The U.N., which has, as part of its original mandate, the eradication of slavery and the slave trade, finds itself now at a stage where there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. And it really makes you question the viability of the model and the strength of the system.

There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a “ripple effect” with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.

Nonsense.

But how do you explain this myopia? You cite so much research that shows that the other forms of slavery are even more prevalent — in the U.S., you say, less than half of American slaves are forced prostitutes.

I don’t think enough reports have come out and the ones that have come out haven’t been in the right places. I think when you start getting the 700 Club talking about how the slavery of a young man in a quarry in India — or in a brick kiln or on a farm — is equivalent to the slavery of the Israelites and you start quoting Bible verses, then maybe we’ll be getting somewhere.

Another philosophical divide among modern-day abolitionists has to do with the role of poverty. The late Senator Wellstone, who co-sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, was adamant that poverty was a central factor but Horowitz disagreed, vehemently. Why do you think that is? It seems so obvious that poverty is the very reason so many people are forced and hoodwinked into slavery.

Paul Wellstone’s view of this was basically that you can’t address slavery without having targeted anti-poverty programs. When I presented this to Horowitz, he slammed his desk and said something to the effect of “The Paul Krugmans of the world would love for this to be a means for me redistributing my income to Sri Lanka.” And I’ll give him this: I understand his point that the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. That’s not what I’m calling for and I don’t think that’s what Senator Wellstone was calling for.