More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Less than 1 percent of U.S. foreign aid is specifically targeted to women and girls.
The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. 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.
Upon her return, Rath met a social worker who put her in touch with an aid group that helps girls who have been trafficked start new lives. The group, American Assistance for Cambodia, used $400 in donated funds to buy a small cart and a starter selection of goods so that Rath could become a street peddler. She found a good spot in the open area between the Thai and Cambodian customs offices in the border town of Poipet. Travelers crossing between Thailand and Cambodia walk along this strip, the size of a football field, and it is lined with peddlers selling drinks, snacks, and souvenirs.
if girls get a chance, in the form of an education or a microloan, they can be more than baubles or slaves; many of them can run businesses.
Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.
Women are indeed a linchpin of the region’s development strategy. Economists who scrutinized East Asia’s success noted a common pattern. These countries took young women who previously had contributed negligibly to gross national product (GNP) and injected them into the formal economy, hugely increasing the labor force. The basic formula was to ease repression, educate girls as well as boys, give the girls the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs, and then benefit from a demographic dividend as they delayed marriage and reduced childbearing. The women meanwhile financed the
...more
Evidence has mounted that helping women can be a successful poverty-fighting strategy anywhere in the world, not just in the booming economies of East Asia.
“Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world,” Lawrence Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. “The question is not whether countries can afford this investment, but whether countries can afford not to educate more girls.”
promoting gender equality is crucial to combat global poverty.
UNICEF issued a major report arguing that gender equality yields a “double dividend” by elevating not only women but also their children and communities. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) summed up the mounting research this way: “Women’s empowerment helps raise economic productivity and reduce infant mortality. It contributes to improved health and nutrition. It increases the chances of education for the next generation.”
French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders, bluntly declared of development: “Progress is achieved through women.” The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining “why and how to put girls at the center of development.” CARE is taking women and girls as the centerpiece of its antipoverty efforts. The Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation are both focusing on building opportunities for girls in the developing world. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much
...more
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. Empowering girls, some in the military
...more
“sex trafficking,” is a misnomer. The problem isn’t sex, nor is it prostitution as such. In many countries—China, Brazil, and most of sub-Saharan Africa—prostitution is widespread but mostly voluntary (in the sense that it is driven by economic pressure rather than physical compulsion). In those places, brothels do not lock up women, and many women work on their own without pimps or brothels. Nor is the problem exactly “trafficking,” since forced prostitution doesn’t always depend on a girl’s being transported over a great distance by a middleman. The horror of sex trafficking can more
...more
sex workers can’t be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily.
many other women who inhabit a gray zone between freedom and slavery.
Since Meena didn’t cross a border, she wasn’t trafficked in the traditional sense. That’s also true of most people who are enslaved in brothels. As the U.S. State Department notes, its estimate doesn’t include “millions of victims around the world who are trafficked within their own national borders.”
While there has been progress in addressing many humanitarian issues in the last few decades, sex slavery has actually worsened. One reason for that is the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Indochina. In Romania and other countries, the immediate result was economic distress, and everywhere criminal gangs arose and filled the power vacuum. Capitalism created new markets for rice and potatoes, but also for female flesh.
The reality is that past efforts to assist girls have sometimes backfired. In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would have banned imports made by workers under the age of fourteen. Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.
Rescuing girls from brothels is important, Krisher believes, but the best way to save them is to prevent them from being trafficked in the first place—which means keeping them in school.
America’s schools rarely convey much understanding of the 2.7 billion people (40 percent of the world’s population) who today live on less than $2 a day. So while the primary purpose of a new movement on behalf of women is to stop slavery and honor killings, another is to expose young Americans to life abroad so that they, too, can learn and grow and blossom—and then continue to tackle the problems as adults.
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.
When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers.
The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking. That must be the starting point of any abolitionist movement.
one of George W. Bush’s few positive international legacies was a big push against trafficking.
One reason for discord is a dispute about how to regard prostitution. The left often refers nonjudgmentally to “sex workers” and tends to be tolerant of transactions among consenting adults. The right, joined by some feminists, refers to “prostitutes” or “prostituted women” and argues that prostitution is inherently demeaning and offensive. The result of this bickering is a lack of cooperation in combatting what everybody believes is abhorrent: forced prostitution and child prostitution.
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.
That legalize-and-regulate model simply hasn’t worked very well in countries where prostitution is often coerced. Partly that’s because governance is often poor, so the regulation is ineffective, and partly it’s that the legal brothels tend to attract a parallel illegal business in young girls and forced prostitution. In contrast, there’s empirical evidence that crackdowns can succeed, when combined with social services such as job retraining and drug rehabilitation, and that’s the approach we’ve come to favor. In countries with widespread trafficking, we favor a law enforcement strategy that
...more
crackdowns don’t work perfectly, but they tend to lead nervous police to demand higher bribes, which reduces profitability for the pimps. Or the police will close down at least those brothels that aren’t managed by other police officers. With such methods, we can almost certainly reduce the number of fourteen-year-old girls who are held in cages until they die of AIDS.
Many liberals and feminists are taken aback by the big stick approach we advocate, arguing that it just drives sex establishments underground. They argue instead for a legalize-and-regulate model based on empowerment of sex workers, and they cite a success: the Sonagachi Project.
health experts were deeply concerned by the spread of AIDS in India, and in 1992 they started the Sonagachi Project with the backing of the World Health Organization (WHO). A key element was to nurture a union of sex workers, Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), which would encourage condom use and thus reduce the spread of HIV through prostitution.
A 2005 study found that only 9.6 percent of Sonagachi sex workers were infected with HIV, compared to about 50 percent in Mumbai (the city formerly known as Bombay), where there was no sex workers’ union.
As we probed the numbers, however, we saw that they were flimsier than they at first appeared. HIV prevalence was inexplicably high among new arrivals to Sonagachi—27.7 percent among sex workers aged twenty or younger. Research had also shown that, initially, all sex workers interviewed in Sonagachi claimed to use condoms nearly all the time. But when pressed, they admitted lower rates: Only 56 percent said they had used condoms consistently with their last three customers. Moreover, the contrast with Mumbai was misleading, because southern and western India had always had far higher HIV rates
...more
DMSC has become a front for the brothel owners, and that well-meaning Western support for DMSC has provided cover for traffickers.
As far as Geeta could see, the supposed campaign by DMSC to prevent trafficking was simply an illusion peddled to outsiders. Even when she was finally allowed to stand on the street outside the brothel to wave to customers, she was closely watched. Contradicting the notion that the girls get a decent income, Geeta was never paid a single rupee for her work. It was slave labor, performed under threat of execution. Other women who worked in Sonagachi after DMSC took control offered similar stories.
Anup Patel, a Hindi-speaking medical student at Yale University, conducted research on condom use in Kolkata in 2005. He found that not only is the price of sex in Sonagachi negotiated between the customer and the brothel owner (rather than with the girl herself), but the customer can pay the brothel owner a few extra rupees for the right not to use a condom. The girl has no say in that.
While the madam spoke with others in the room, gushing about the group’s success, the three of us on the bed asked the prostitute in Hindi to tell us if those things were true. Afraid and timid, the prostitute remained silent until we assured her that we wouldn’t get her in trouble. Barely audible, she told us that almost none of the prostitutes in Sonagachi came with aspirations of becoming a sex worker. Most of them, like herself, were Trafficked…. When I asked her if she wanted to leave Sonagachi, her eyes lit up; before she could say anything, the DMSC official put her hand on my back and
...more
The Netherlands and Sweden highlight the differences between the big-stick approach and the legalize-and-regulate model.
Sweden took the opposite approach, criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of them by prostitutes; a man caught paying for sex is fined (in theory, he can be imprisoned for up to six months), while the prostitute is not punished. This reflected the view that the prostitute is more a victim than a criminal.
In the Netherlands, legalization has facilitated health checkups for women in the legal brothels, but there’s no evidence that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or HIV has declined. Pimps in the Netherlands still offer underage girls, and trafficking and forced prostitution continue.
for the first time U.S. embassies abroad had to gather information on trafficking. American diplomats began holding discussions with their foreign ministry counterparts, who then had to add trafficking to the list of major concerns such as proliferation and terrorism. As a result, the foreign ministries made inquiries of the national police agencies.
Europe should have made trafficking an issue in negotiating the accession of Eastern European countries wishing to enter the European Union, and it can still make this an issue for Turkey in that regard.
Some degree of prostitution will probably always be with us, but we need not acquiesce to widespread sexual slavery.
Momm, like many brothel girls, had become addicted to methamphetamines.
In her village, the craving had overwhelmed her, and she was consumed by the need to go back to the brothel and get some meth.
She yearned to leave the brothel behind, but she could not overcome her addiction.
Neth and Momm underscore that many prostitutes are neither acting freely nor enslaved, but living in a world etched in ambiguities somewhere between those two extremes. After her return, Momm was bound to the brothel by drugs and debts, but the owner let her leave freely with customers, and Momm could easily have escaped if she had wanted to do so.
it.
What of the patriarchal abuse and drugging this book has cited?
fate.
Predatory practices
themselves.
Shouldn't the burden also fall on the shoulders of societies willing to teach men not to rape.
educated:
How have untouchables become so educated?
