Half the Sky: how the trafficking of women today is on a par with
genocide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/19/women-slavery-half-the-skyThe authors of a new book, Half the Sky, say the slavery and abuse of
women is the greatest moral outrage of our century
Ed Pilkington The Guardian, Thursday 19 August 2010 Article history
Asha and Suborna (background), young bonded sex workers in a brothel
in Faridpur, Bangladesh. Photograph: GMB Akash/Panos
Nicholas Kristof is not the kind of person you would expect to be a
slave owner. As a columnist on that most august of newspapers, the New
York Times, he belongs to an elite within an elite, the embodiment of
journalistic seriousness. Yet there he was, in 2004, blithely forking
out $150 (£96) for Srey Neth and $203 for another teenager, Srey Momm;
handing over the money to a brothel keeper in exchange for a receipt
and complete dispensation to do with the two girls as he would. Nick
Kristof: double Pulitzer prize winner, bestselling author, slave
owner. But that, as is made clear in his new book, written with his
wife Sheryl WuDunn, is just the start of it.
Half the Sky
by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn
Buy it from the Guardian bookshopSearch the Guardian bookshop
At the time of his purchase, Kristof had been travelling to a wild
and dangerous part of north-western Cambodia, and had checked into an
$8-a-night hotel-cum-brothel in the town of Poipet. He arranged to see
Neth, who had been in the brothel for a month, having been sold to its
owner by her own cousin. Thin and fragile, she had no idea how old she
was, but looked to Kristof about 14. Her virginity had been auctioned
to a Thai casino manager who later died of Aids, and now she was on
offer to local punters at a premium price by dint of her youth and
light skin.
Kristof arranged to buy her, as well as Momm from a different brothel.
Momm was a frail girl further down the line of misery, having been
forced into prostitution five years previously. Amid floods of tears
and rage, she pleaded with Kristof to be bought, freed and taken back
to her village on the other side of Cambodia. He took both girls back
to their villages and, with the help of an American charity, attempted
to ease them back into society.
The story of Neth and Momm is just a small indication of the lengths
Kristof and WuDunn are prepared to go to expose the injustices that
they see in the modern world. Buying up child prostitutes is pretty
extreme, but no more than the message they are seeking to deliver in
their groundbreaking book, Half the Sky.
In it, they argue that the world is in the grip of a massive moral
outrage no less egregious in scale or in the intensity of despair than
the African slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries or the
genocides of the 20th. They believe this outrage is a key factor
behind many of the most pressing economic and political issues today,
from famine in Africa to Islamist terrorism and climate change. Yet
they say the phenomenon is largely hidden, invisible to most of us and
passing relatively unreported. At worst it is actively tolerated; at
best it is ignored.
The fodder of this latterday trade in human suffering is not African
people, but women. Which is why they call it "gendercide". If the
supreme moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery, and of the
20th century the fight against totalitarianism, then, they write, "in
this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for
gender equality in the developing world".
The contention is as startling as the idea of a Pulitzer prize-winning
journalist buying up prostitutes. I put it to them that, to some
people, the claim will seem overblown. After all, you don't go lightly
comparing the plight of women in developing countries today with
slavery or, by implication, the Holocaust.
"This idea is a couple of decades in gestation," Kristof says. "Over
those years, we reluctantly came to the conclusion that this really is
the greatest moral challenge of this century."
A 16-year-old Cambodian girl hides after being rescued from a brothel
were she was forced to work. Photograph: Rob Elliott/AFP Then WuDunn
chimes in: "When you hear that 60 to 100 million females are missing
in the current population, we thought that number compares in the
scope and size. And then you compare the slave trade at its peak in
the 1780s, when there were 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to
the New World, and you see there are now 10 times that amount of women
trafficked across international borders, so you start to think you are
talking about comparable weight."
Their disturbing conclusion seems all the more powerful for being
reached at the end of what they call a "journey of awakening", which
began in such different places. Kristof is the product of the west
coast who grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Oregon, the son of
liberal academics. WuDunn is east coast-cum-Orient; a third-generation
Chinese American formed through the fusion of her family's Chinese
roots and the urbanity of New York City.
The hotch-potch of influences is reflected in their suburban New York
home where we meet, a large house set in its own thick greenery in an
area of real estate where residents are surely more familiar with
hedge funds and stock fluctuations than fistulas or honour killings.
It feels a little incongruous, the horror of what we're discussing
amid the tranquility of the setting. But the gulf is lessened by the
fact that they have surrounded themselves with mementoes of their many
travels: African wooden dolls, Asian carvings and a large box bed from
China covered in furs that fills the living room.
WuDunn and Kristof date the start of their journey to Tiananmen
Square, which they covered for the New York Times, having been sent to
China by the paper as a young married couple shortly before the 1989
protests erupted (they won a joint Pulitzer for their troubles). "We
were horrified by what we saw in Tiananmen," WuDunn says. "But then we
went roaming in the countryside a year or two afterwards and started
finding all this stuff we had never heard about: the infanticide, with
30 million baby girls missing in the Chinese population."
They realised with a jolt that, every week, as many infant girls were
dying in China through lack of access to health care as the up-to-800
protesters who died in Tiananmen. Kristof received a further shock in
1996 when he came face-to-face with girls being trafficked for sex in
Cambodia. "I went to a village outside Phnom Penh where a very young
teenage girl was having her virginity auctioned. Instead of helping
her, the police were there to ensure that, if she escaped, she would
be returned to her owners. The main difference from 19th-century
slavery was that all these girls would be dead of Aids by their
twenties. I was really shaken by how open it was, how blatant. It
wasn't underground slavery, it was like what a cutting plantation
would have been 150 years earlier."
The discovery of such horrendous abuse got them wondering about the
nature of the journalism they were engaged in. Here they were, along
with the rest of the "serious" press, debating weighty geopolitical
issues of the day. Yet this huge injustice was going on under their
noses, largely unreported, dismissed as "women's issues" by the
mainstream media. "We've thought a lot about the failure to see this,"
says WuDunn. "Partly, it's because the news is defined by what happens
on a particular day, and a lot of the most important things in the
world don't happen on a particular day . . ."
"And it's partly that our definition of what constitutes news is a
legacy of the perspective of middle-aged men," adds Kristof. "It may
well be that one major reason why high-school girls drop out of school
around the world is that they have trouble managing menstruation, and
probably one reason nobody has cottoned on to this is that people who
run aid organisations and write about it have never menstruated."
Gradually, they began to see this great global disaster more clearly,
discovering that, every year, at least two million girls worldwide
disappear because of discrimination. They began to investigate and
chronicle its various forms, from sexual slavery to honour killings of
women deemed to have disgraced the family, to rape as an extension of
war, to genital mutilation, to the less violent but no less damaging
exclusion of women from health services and education. They widened
their net from China to India, Korea, Japan and then Africa.
Runa, 20, a prostitute in Bangladesh. The scar on her face was made
by her pimp. Photograph: Sven Torfinn/Panos "Over the years we began
to think about the thread between all of this," WuDunn says. "We
realised there was a societal attitude that doesn't allow women to be
active members of society, that doesn't treat them like human beings.
That's the link: the disregard of women as human beings."
The dawning recognition that they were confronted by nothing less than
a modern form of global slavery, with women as its victims, has had
profound personal and professional implications for them both. Above
all, it has demanded a rethinking of the function of their writing. If
you are convinced you have stumbled across an enormous moral outrage,
you cannot merely cast light on the subject. You have to do something
to stop it. You have to effect change.
That is what makes their book – named after the Chinese saying that
women hold up half the sky – so unusual, not just in its searing and
heart-rending contents but in its steely determination and sense of
purpose. As the Washington Post's reviewer put it, this is a "call to
arms, a call for help, a call for contributions, but also a call for
volunteers".
From the opening pages, WuDunn and Kristof make an unashamed pitch for
the reader's support and engagement. No on-the-one-hand-this and on-
the-other-hand-that. "We hope to recruit you," the authors write, "to
join an incipient movement to emancipate women . . . Just open your
heart and join in."
At the end of the book, in similar vein, they give a list of action
points that readers can take within 10 minutes to make a difference.
And they set us a personal challenge: will we join a historical
movement to eradicate sex slavery, honour killings and acid attacks,
or are we content to remain detached bystanders? It is the 21st-
century equivalent of that ultimately probing 20th-century question:
"What did you do in the war, Daddy?"
The ambition to inspire us to action, to foment what they call a
modern abolitionist movement, informs every page of the book. It's not
just evident in the direct appeals they make to readers; it is also
subliminally present in the way they manage their information.
Specifically, they wanted to avoid a numbing effect where readers
would become so overwhelmed by the grimness and apparent hopelessness
of the lives women lead that they would sink into depression, rather
than leap into action.
So WuDunn and Kristof studied psychological papers on what gels people
to participate, and discovered that statistics are particularly bad as
motivational tools. By contrast, focus on individuals is key. In one
experiment, research subjects were told to donate $5 to alleviate
world hunger. They were offered the choice of giving the money to
Rokia, a girl in Mali aged seven, or to reduce hunger among 21 million
Africans. Most chose Rokia. In another study, people were asked to
give $300,000 to fight cancer. One group was told the money would save
the life of a single child, another that it would save eight children.
Perversely, people gave almost twice as much to save just one child
rather than eight.
The authors have followed the lessons of these psychological studies
They do have statistics in the book, many of which are harrowing. The
equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labour each day.
Every 10 seconds a girl somewhere in the world is pinned down, her
legs pulled apart and a part of her genitals cut off, mainly without
anaesthetic.
But because the studies warn of the perils, they keep numbers in their
place, and instead focus on individual stories. Such as that of
Mukhtar Mai, who grew up in a peasant village in southern Punjab and
was gang-raped as a child by members of a higher-status local clan.
After that she was expected to commit suicide – that's what women who
have been gang-raped do. Instead, she went to the police, and with the
$8,300 she received in compensation set up a village school.
Or Sunitha Krishnan, who stands just four-and-a-half-feet tall but who
has become a legendary fighter in the war against sex trafficking. She
set up an organisation in Hyderabad called Prajwala that has helped
some 1,500 women escape from prostitution and into new careers such as
carpentry or welding.
As well as focusing on the personal, the authors relentlessly
accentuate the positive; constantly firing out examples where terrible
wrongs have been overcome, proving that seemingly immutable problems
can be shifted. The most powerful case for WuDunn is also the most
personal: her grandmother's feet were bound in the rural village where
her family originates, yet today feet binding in China is unknown.
"I'm so conscious of how lucky I am there was a movement in China and
abroad that put a stop to a practice that was centuries old." The
authors also remind us that genital mutilation was practised regularly
in England until the 1860s. It too was eradicated.
"The research stresses the importance of the positive," says Kristof.
"People want to be part of something that is successful, and that's
one reason why, even though a lot of the stories we profile plumb some
really desperate moments, we also try and show it is possible to make
a difference. We don't want to sound manipulative – but we do want
readers to care about these issues. We followed research in terms of
writing in a way that would engage people, and Half the Sky was a kind
of experiment in trying to use these approaches to reach a broader
audience. From that regard, I think it worked remarkably."
More than 300,000 copies have been sold in the US, a four-hour public
broadcasting TV documentary is in the works, and a videogame version
of the book will be launched in an attempt to reach a younger
audience. More importantly, the authors' call to arms has been heard,
with people across the US who first engaged with Half the Sky through
reading groups transforming their networks into mini-aid
organisations, raising money and making contact with projects abroad.
Some 580 book clubs, with 6,500 members, signed up to a Half the Sky
project organised by the global aid agency Mercy Corps that raised
$20,000. Beyond the money, book club members held speaking
engagements, wrote to elected officials, placed opinion pieces in the
local paper, and generally caused a stir that in turn inspired others
to get involved.
Kristof and WuDunn hand me a letter. "I have a strong passion for
helping women," writes its female author. "After reading your book, I
decided to take my passion and turn it into my life. I travelled to
Uganda, where I saw first-hand how difficult life is for those living
in extreme poverty."
And here's one from a woman in Ohio: "After reading your book I felt I
had to do something, so I enlisted the members of my water aerobics
class at the Cleveland Racquet Club. We now have $640 to foster girls'
education." And another from Saratoga Springs: "This year, for the
holidays, I gave 25 copies of your book Half the Sky. The result has
been the enthusiastic desire of a group of us to establish a multi-
generational women's giving circle."
It's the kind of feedback any author or publisher would die for. "I
think it's truly taking off," Kristof says.
As for his slaves, it hasn't been easy for them. Momm slid back into
prostitution to feed the methamphetamine addiction she had already
acquired when Kristof "bought" her. But she eventually became free for
a second time following a government crackdown on brothels, and
married one of her customers. In 2008, Kristof went to Cambodia to see
her again. She called herself a housewife, and said she had left her
old life behind for ever.
Neth had her troubles too. She was diagnosed with HIV and thought her
life was over, but found medical treatment and also eventually married
and had a son. When Kristof last saw her, she told him she planned to
set up a hairdressing salon. She said she would name it after him.
Half the Sky: How to Change the World by Nicholas D. Kristof and
Sheryl WuDunn is published by Virago, price £12.99. To order a copy
for £10.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330
333 6846
• This article was amended on 19 August 2010. The original referred to
the slave trade at its peek in the 1780s. This has been corrected.
--
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. - Mohandas Gandhi
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