December 11, 2009
PROVIDENCE — Nicholas D. Kristof tells stories about girls and young women around the globe who have been kidnapped, beaten, raped and enslaved — and yet, he leaves his audience feeling hopeful.Speaking before more than 250 guests at the annual fundraiser for Day One, Rhode Island’s sexual-assault and trauma resource center, Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author, recounted stories of how relatively small contributions, often by readers of his columns, have enabled survivors of poverty and abuse to transform their lives and the lives or their families and villages.
“I think we sometimes psych ourselves out because the problems seem so big and so vast,” he said. “But one can truly chip away at them and make a difference for some individuals.”
Consider the bright, sixth-grade girl in central China’s Hubei Province who, in 1990, nearly dropped out of school because her family felt they couldn’t afford the $13-a-year fee for school. After Kristof’s story about Dai Manju ran on the front page of The New York Times, money (mostly $13 checks) poured in from readers wanting to help.
One reader wired $100, which turned into $10,000 when the bank accidentally misread a decimal point. The bank agreed to honor its mistake (the money had already been wired to China) and the donation was enough not only to pay for one girl’s schooling, but to eliminate fees for all girls at the school. Manju finished school and became an accountant.
Her story and others far more wrenching (a 13-year-old girl whose eye was gouged out by her brothel owner) are recounted in a new book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity For Women Worldwide,” which Kristof coauthored with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn. The title of the book comes from a Chinese saying that “women hold up half the sky.”
More powerful than the cruelties recounted in the stories, though, is the resilience of the girls and young women.
At some point while reporting on life in the brothels in Cambodia, Kristof said, he felt it wasn’t enough to write about these women and girls.
“I’d gotten a great front-page story,” he said, “and these two girls would end up dying of AIDS. It felt exploitative.”
So he went back to Cambodia and “bought” the freedom of two girls from their brothel owner. He paid $150 for one and just over $200 for another. “And I got receipts,” he said, proof of the “disgrace” of placing a price on a human being. He and his wife also have launched an organization to find solutions ( www.halftheskymovement.org/).
Kristof quoted estimates from the U.S. State Department that as many as 800,000 people a year are trafficked across international borders, 80 percent of them women and girls, mostly for sexual exploitation. That’s nearly 10 times the roughly 80,000 slaves who were shipped annually across the Atlantic from Africa during the slave trade in the 1780s, according to his book. Just as slavery was the greatest moral issue of the 19th century, he said, gender equality is the central moral issue for the 20th century. In most of the world today, he said, boys are better fed, better educated and better cared for than girls. “When there aren’t enough resources, he said, “you starve your daughters and feed your sons.”
Nor is gender inequality and exploitation something that only happens in foreign lands. “In the United States, the worst victims of exploitations tend to be poor girls,” he said, “often girls of color, from disadvantaged homes.”
Kristof said in an interview that he’d read about how Rhode Island recently outlawed indoor prostitution, and said it’s important that law enforcement focus on prosecuting the pimps who control the prostitutes.
“There are clearly some women who choose to sell sex for money,” Kristof said. “I’m not ideologically opposed to legalizing prostitution … But, side by side, the legal market for [sex] tends to attract an illegal black market” and sex tourists. “Legalizing prostitution is an experiment that has not worked.”
Peg Langhammer, executive director of Day One, said that the problem of sexual exploitation is more prevalent in this country than most people realize.
“People have a tendency to say none of this is happening here; we, in this country, would not do what is happening in other countries,” she said. “The reality is we, our community, is committing serious acts of sexual violence. And we need as a community to embrace the issue and figure out how to address this.”
Back when the organization opened as a rape crisis center, she said, most of their clients were women. Today, she said, 62 percent of Day One’s clients are children.
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