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This study found that thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive—and that is just in the first year of life. One Chinese family-planning official, Li Honggui, explained it this way: “If a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once. But if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, let’s see how she is tomorrow.’” The result is that as many infant girls die unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died in the one incident at Tiananmen.
A similar pattern emerged in other countries, particularly in South Asia and the Muslim world. In India, a “bride burning”—to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry—takes place approximately once every two hours, but these rarely constitute news. In the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, Pakistan, five thousand women and girls have been doused in kerosene and set alight by family members or in-laws—or, perhaps worse, been seared with acid—for perceived disobedience just in the last nine years. Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian
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Less than 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid is specifically targeted to women and girls.
“More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Even poor regions like most of Latin America and much of Africa have more females than males. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), India has 108, and Pakistan has 111.
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The implication of the sex ratios, Professor Sen found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for “missing women” of between 60 million and 101 million. Every year, at least another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination.
In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons—that alone accounts for one fifth of India’s missing females—while studies have found that, on average, girls are brought to the hospital only when they are sicker than boys taken to the hospital. All told, girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age. The best estimate is that a little Indian girl dies from discrimination every four minutes.
It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world.
Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. As the Pentagon gained a deeper understanding of counterterrorism, and as it found that dropping bombs often didn’t do much to help, it became increasingly interested in grassroots projects such as girls’ education.
There are 2 to 3 million prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.
China has more prostitutes than India—some estimates are as high as 10 million or more—but fewer of them are forced into brothels against their will.
Paradoxically, it is the countries with the most straitlaced and sexually conservative societies, such as India, Pakistan, and Iran, that have disproportionately large numbers of forced prostitutes. Since young men in those societies rarely sleep with their girlfriends, it has become acceptable for them to relieve their sexual frustrations with prostitutes.
The police seemed unlikely saviors to girls in the brothels because police officers regularly visited the brothels and were serviced free.
But a friendly neighbor warned Meena that the brothel owners had decided to murder her. That doesn’t happen often in red-light districts, any more than farmers kill producing assets such as good milk cows, but from time to time a prostitute becomes so nettlesome that the owners kill her as a warning to the other girls.
Yet it’s not hyperbole to say that millions of women and girls are actually enslaved today. (The biggest difference from nineteenth-century slavery is that many die of AIDS by their late twenties.) The term that is usually used for this phenomenon, “sex trafficking,” is a misnomer. The problem isn’t sex, nor is it prostitution as such.
The horror of sex trafficking can more properly be labeled slavery.
The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just sexual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And The Lancet, a prominent medical journal in Britain, calculated that “1 million children are forced into prostitution every year and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million.”
In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—although
the overall population was of course far smaller then. As the journal Foreign Affairs observed: “Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was.”
If a girl has perfect attendance in school for one month, her family gets $10. A similar approach has been used very effectively and cheaply to increase education for girls in Mexico and other countries. Kun Sokkea’s family is now getting the stipend. For donors who can’t afford to fund an entire school, it’s a way to fight trafficking at a cost of $120 per year per girl.
Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN
“What about trafficked girls?” Nick asked. “Are you keeping an eye out for them? There must be a lot.” “Oh, a lot. But we don’t worry about them. There’s nothing you can do about them.” “Well, you could arrest the traffickers. Isn’t trafficking girls as important as pirating DVDs?” The intelligence officer laughed genially and threw up his hands. “Prostitution is inevitable.” He chuckled. “There has always been prostitution in every country. And what’s a young man going to do from the time when he turns eighteen until when he gets married at thirty?” “Well, is the best solution really to
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People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans.
Originally, we sympathized with the view that a prohibition won’t work any better against prostitution today than it did against alcohol in America in the 1920s. Instead of trying fruitlessly to ban prostitution, we believed it would be preferable to legalize and regulate it. That pragmatic “harm reduction” model is preferred by many aid groups, because it allows health workers to pass out condoms and curb the spread of AIDS, and it permits access to brothels so that they can more easily be checked for underage girls. Over time, we’ve changed our minds. That legalize-and-regulate model simply
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“It’s pretty doable,” says Gary Haugen, who runs International Justice Mission. “You don’t have to arrest everybody. You just have to get enough that it sends a ripple effect and changes the calculations. That changes the pimps’ behavior. You can drive traffickers of virgin village girls to fence stolen radios instead.”
Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.
Some degree of prostitution will probably always be with us, but we need not acquiesce to widespread sexual slavery.
For us, there were three lessons in this story. The first is that rescuing girls from brothels is complicated and uncertain. Indeed, it’s sometimes impossible, and that’s why it is most productive to focus efforts on prevention and putting brothels out of business. The second lesson is to never give up. Helping people is difficult and unpredictable, and our interventions don’t always work, but successes are possible, and these victories are incredibly important. The third lesson is that even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it’s still worth mitigating. We
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A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water. “What are you doing, son?” the man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.” The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean. “It sure made a difference to that one,” he said.
Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.
21 percent of Ghanaian women reported in one survey that their sexual initiation was by rape; 17 percent of Nigerian women said that they had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen; and 21 percent of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen.
Behind the rapes and other abuse heaped on women in much of the world, it’s hard not to see something more sinister than just libido and prurient opportunism. Namely: sexism and misogyny.
As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves.
“They know that a woman humiliated in that way has no other recourse except suicide,” Mukhtar wrote later. “They don’t even need to use their weapons. Rape kills her.”
Suicide is the expected way for a woman to cleanse herself and her family of the shame.
The paradox of honor killings is that societies with the most rigid moral codes end up sanctioning behavior that is supremely immoral: murder.
The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings a year, almost all in the Muslim world (Pakistan’s government uncovered 1,261 honor killings in 2003 alone). But that estimate appears too low, because so many of the executions are disguised as accidents or suicides. Our estimate is that at least 6,000, and probably far more, honor killings take place annually around the world.
In short, rape becomes a tool of war in conservative societies precisely because female sexuality is so sacred.
Codes of sexual honor, in which women are valued based on their chastity, ostensibly protect women, but in fact they create an environment in which women are systematically dishonored.
mandatory four adult male Muslim eyewitnesses to prove that it was rape.
90 percent of girls and women over the age of three were sexually abused in parts of Liberia during civil war there.
The world capital of rape is the eastern Congo.
Frequently the Congolese militias rape women with sticks or knives or bayonets, or else they fire their guns into the women’s vaginas. In one instance, soldiers raped a three-year-old girl and then fired their guns into her. When surgeons saw her, there was no tissue left to repair. The little girl’s grief-stricken father then committed suicide.
In just the Congolese province of South Kivu, the UN estimates that there were twenty-seven thousand sexual assaults in 2006.
“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world.”
But whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.
One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a “gap year” or by studying abroad.
It costs about $300 to repair a fistula, and about 90 percent of them are repairable.
L. Lewis Wall, a professor of obstetrics at the Washington University School of Medicine who has campaigned tirelessly for a fistula hospital in West Africa, estimates that 30,000 to 130,000 new cases of fistula develop each year in Africa alone.
A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act.
