Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide Read online

  Naina explained later that she had felt alone and terrified, partly because Ainul Bibi had told her that Vivek had died. But after an hour in the police station, Naina began to realize that maybe she could escape the brothel, and she finally whispered: "Yes, you're my mother."

  Apne Aap whisked Naina off to a hospital in Kolkata, where she was treated for severe injuries and a morphine addiction. The brothel had drugged Naina constantly to render her compliant, and the morphine withdrawal was brutal to watch.

  In Forbesgunge, life became more difficult and dangerous for Meena and her family. Some of the brothel owners there are related to Ainul and Manooj, and they were furious at Meena. Even those in the Nutt community who didn't like prostitution disapproved of the police raid, and so the townspeople shunned Apne Aap's school and shelter. Meena and her children were stigmatized, and a young man working with Apne Aap was stabbed. Threats were made against Meena's two daughters with Kuduz. Yet Meena was serene as she walked about the streets. She laughed at the idea that she should feel cowed.

  "They think that good is bad," she scoffed, speaking of the local villagers. "They may not speak to me, but I know what is right and I will stick to it. I will never accept prostitution of myself or my children as long as I breathe." Meena is working as a community organizer in Forbesgunge, trying to discourage parents from prostituting their daughters and urging them to educate their sons and daughters alike. Over time the resentment against her has diminished a bit, but she is still seen as pushy and unfeminine.

  Apne Aap later started a boarding school in Bihar, partly with donations from American supporters, and Meena's children were placed there. The school has a guard and is a much safer place for them. Naina now studies at the boarding school and hopes to become a teacher, and in particular to help disadvantaged children.

  One afternoon, Meena was singing to her two young daughters, teaching them a song:

  India will not be free,

  Until its women are free.

  What about the girls in this country?

  If girls are insulted and abused and enslaved in this country,

  Put your hand on your heart and ask,

  Is this country truly independent?

  Fighting Slavery from Seattle

  People always ask how they can help. Given concerns about corruption, waste, and mismanagement, how can one actually help women like Meena and defeat modern slavery? Is there anything an ordinary person can do?

  A starting point is to be brutally realistic about the complexities of achieving change. To be blunt, humanitarians sometimes exaggerate and oversell, eliding pitfalls. They sometimes torture frail data until it yields the demanded "proof" of success. Partly this is because the causes are worthy and inspiring; those who study education for girls, for example, naturally believe in it. As we'll see, the result is that the research often isn't conducted with the same rigor as is found in, say, examinations of the effectiveness of toothpastes. Aid groups are also reluctant to acknowledge mistakes, partly because frank discussion of blunders is an impediment in soliciting contributions.

  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.

  Yet many forms of assistance--particularly in health and education--have an excellent record. Consider the work of Frank Grijalva, the principal of the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington, a fine private school with 450 students in grades five through twelve. Annual tuition hovers around $22,000, and most of the kids are raised in a sheltered upper-middle-class environment. Grijalva was looking for a way to teach his students about how the other half lives.

  "It became clear that we, as a very privileged community, needed to be a bigger, more positive force in the world," Grijalva recalled. Frank heard about Bernard Krisher, a former Newsweek correspondent who was so appalled by poverty in Cambodia that he formed an aid group, American Assistance for Cambodia. 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. So American Assistance for Cambodia focuses on educating rural children, especially girls. Bernie Krisher's signature program is the Rural School Project. For $13,000, a donor can establish a school in a Cambodian village. The donation is matched by funds from the World Bank and again by the Asian Development Bank.

  Grijalva had a brainstorm: His students could sponsor a school in Cambodia and use it as a way of emphasizing the importance of public service. Initially the response from students and parents was polite but cautious, but then the attacks of 9/11 took place, and suddenly the community was passionately concerned with the larger world and engaged in this project. The students conducted bake sales, car washes, and talent shows, and also educated themselves about Cambodia's history of war and genocide. The school was built in Pailin, a Cambodian town on the Thai border that is notorious for cheap brothels that cater to Thai men.

  In February 2003, the school construction was completed, and Grijalva led a delegation of nineteen students from Overlake School to Cambodia for the opening. A cynic might say that the money for the visit would have been better spent building another Cambodian school, but in fact that visit was an essential field trip and learning opportunity for those American students. They lugged along boxes of school supplies, but as they approached Pailin by car, they realized that Cambodia's needs were greater than they ever could have imagined. The dirt-and-gravel road to Pailin was so deeply rutted that it was barely passable, and they saw a bulldozer overturned beside a crater--it had hit a land mine.

  When the Americans reached the Cambodian school, they saw a sign declaring it the OVERLAKE SCHOOL in English and Khmer script. At the ribbon cutting, the Americans were welcomed by a sea of excited Cambodians--led by a principal who was missing a leg, a landmine victim himself. Cambodian men then had an average of only 2.6 years of education, and Cambodian women averaged just 1.7 years, so a new school was appreciated in a way the Americans could barely fathom.

  The school dedication--and the full week in Cambodia--left an indelible impression on the American students. So Overlake students and parents decided to forge an ongoing relationship with its namesake in Cambodia. The Americans funded an English teacher at the school and arranged for an Internet connection for e-mail. They built a playground and sent books. Then, in 2006, the American school decided to send delegations annually, dispatching students and teachers during spring vacation to teach English and arts to the Cambodian pupils. And in 2007, the group decided to assist a school in Ghana as well, and to send a delegation there.

  Kun Sokkea in front of the Overlake School in Cambodia (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  "This project is simply the most meaningful and worthwhile initiative that I have undertaken in my thirty-six years in education," Frank Grijalva said. The Overlake School in Cambodia is indeed an extraordinary place. A bridge has washed out, so you have to walk across a stream to reach it, but it looks nothing like the dilapidated buildings that you see in much of the developing world. There are 270 students, ranging in age from six to fifteen. The English teacher is university-educated and speaks good English. Most stunning of all, when we dropped by, the sixth graders were busy sending e-mails from their Yahoo accounts--to the kids at Overlake School in America.

  One of those writing an e-mail was Kun Sokkea, a thirteen-year-old girl who would soon be the first in her family ever to graduate from elementary school. Her father had died of AIDS, and her mother was sick with the same disease and needed to be nursed constantly. Kun Sokkea is rail-thin, a bit gangly, with long, stringy black hair. She is reserved, and her shoulders sag with the burdens of poverty.

  "My mom encourages me to st
ay in school, but sometimes I think I should go out and earn money," Kun Sokkea explained. "I have no dad to support Mom, so maybe I should provide for her. In one day, I could earn seventy baht [a bit more than two dollars] cutting hay or planting corn."

  To address these financial pressures, American Assistance for Cambodia started a program called Girls Be Ambitious, which in effect bribes families to keep girls in school. 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. The approach helps because it is typically girls like Kun Sokkea who end up trafficked. Their families are desperate for money, the girls are poorly educated, and a trafficker promises them a great job selling fruit in a distant city.

  Kun Sokkea showed us her home, a rickety shack built on stilts--to guard against flooding and vermin--in a field near the school. The house has no electricity, and her possessions were in one small bag. She never has to worry about choosing what to wear: She has just one shirt, and no shoes other than a pair of flip-flops. Kun Sokkea has never been to a dentist and to a doctor only once, and she gets the family's drinking water from the nearby creek. That's the same creek in which Kun Sokkea washes the family clothes (she borrows someone else's shirt to wear when she has to wash her own). She shares a mattress on the floor with her brother, as three other family members sleep a few feet away. Kun Sokkea has never touched a phone, ridden in a car, or had a soft drink; when she was asked if she ever drank milk, she looked confused and said that as a baby she had drunk her mother's milk.

  Yet one thing Kun Sokkea has beside her bed is a photo of the American Overlake students on their campus. In the evenings before she goes to sleep, she sometimes picks up the photo and studies the smiling faces and neat lawns and modern buildings. In her own shack, with her mother sick and often crying, her siblings hungry, it is a window into a magical land where people have plenty to eat and get cured when they fall ill. In such a place, she thinks, everybody must be happy all the time.

  Kun Sokkea and her family aren't the only beneficiaries. The Americans themselves have been transformed as much as the Cambodians. And that is something you see routinely: Aid projects have a mixed record in helping people abroad, but a superb record in inspiring and educating the donors. Sometimes the lessons are confusing, as Overlake found when it tried to help Kun Sokkea get to middle school after graduating from the elementary school. She needed transport because the middle school was far away, and young men in the area often harassed girls on their way to the school.

  So, at the teachers' suggestion, Overlake bought Kun Sokkea a bicycle, and for several months that worked very well. Then an older woman, a neighbor, asked to borrow Kun Sokkea's bicycle; the girl felt she couldn't say no to an older person. The woman then sold the bicycle and kept the money she received for it. Frank Grijalva and the American students were beside themselves, but they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first. The Americans decided they couldn't just buy Kun Sokkea another bicycle, so the girl returned to walking an hour each way to school and back. Perhaps in part because of the distance involved and the risks of getting to school, Kun Sokkea began to miss a fair number of days. Her grades suffered. In early 2009, she dropped out of 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.

  "After going to Cambodia, my plans for the future have changed," said Natalie Hammerquist, a seventeen-year-old at Overlake who regularly e-mails two Cambodian students. "This year I'm taking three foreign languages, and I plan on picking up more in college."

  Natalie's Cambodian girlfriend wants to be a doctor but can't afford to go to university. That grates on Natalie: A girl just like me has to abandon her dreams because they're unaffordable. Now Natalie plans on a career empowering young people around the world: "All anyone should do is use their gifts in what way they can, and this is how I can use mine. That is the weight of how valuable seeing Cambodia was for me."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Prohibition and Prostitution

  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

  After visiting Meena Hasina and Ruchira Gupta in Bihar, Nick crossed from India into Nepal at a border village crowded with stalls selling clothing, snacks, and more sinister wares. That border crossing is the one through which thousands of Nepali girls are trafficked into India on their way to the brothels of Kolkata. There they are valued for their light skin, good looks, docility, and inability to speak the local language, hindering the possibility of escape. As Nick filled out some required paperwork at the border post, Nepalis streamed into India, without filling out a form.

  While sitting in the border shack, Nick began talking with one Indian officer who spoke excellent English. The man said he had been dispatched by the intelligence bureau to monitor the border.

  "So what exactly are you monitoring?" Nick asked.

  "We're looking for terrorists, or terror supplies," said the man, who wasn't monitoring anything very closely, since one truck after another was driving past. "After 9/11, we've tightened things up here. And we're also looking for smuggled or pirated goods. If we find them, we'll confiscate them."

  "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 kidnap Nepali girls and imprison them in Indian brothels?"

  The officer shrugged, unperturbed. "It's unfortunate," he agreed. "These girls are sacrificed so that we can have harmony in society. So that good girls can be safe."

  "But many of the Nepali girls being trafficked are good girls, too."

  "Oh, yes, but those are peasant girls. They can't even read. They're from the countryside. The good Indian middle-class girls are safe."

  Nick, who had been gritting his teeth, offered an explosive suggestion: "I've got it! You know, in the United States we have a lot of problems with harmony in society. So we should start kidnapping Indian middle-class girls and forcing them to work in brothels in the United States! Then young American men could have fun, too, don't you think? That would improve our harmony in society!"

  There was an ominous silence, but finally the police officer roared with laughter.

  "You are joking!" the officer said, beaming. "That's very funny!"

  Nick gave up.

  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. India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the United States cares about intellectual property. 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 st
arting point of any abolitionist movement. We're not arguing that Westerners should take up this cause because it's the fault of the West; Western men do not play a central role in prostitution in most poor countries. True, American and European sex tourists are part of the problem in Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Belize, but they are still only a small percentage of the johns. The vast majority are local men. Moreover, Western men usually go with girls who are more or less voluntary prostitutes, because they want to take the girls back to their hotel rooms, while forced prostitutes are not normally allowed out of the brothels. So this is not a case where we in the West have a responsibility to lead because we're the source of the problem. Rather, we single out the West because, even though we're peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.

  A Cambodian teenager, kidnapped and sold to a brothel, in the room where she works (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  One reason the modern abolitionist movement hasn't been more effective is the divisive politics of prostitution. In the 1990s, the American left and right collaborated and achieved the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which was a milestone in raising awareness of international trafficking on the global agenda. The antitrafficking movement then was unusually bipartisan, strongly backed by some liberal Democrats, such as the late senator Paul Wellstone, and by some conservative Republicans, such as Senator Sam Brown-back. Hillary Rodham Clinton was also a leader on this issue, and no one has been a greater champion than Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic congresswoman from New York. Likewise, one of George W. Bush's few positive international legacies was a big push against trafficking. Vital Voices and other liberal groups were stalwart on sex trafficking, as were International Justice Mission and other conservative evangelical groups. Yet while the left and the right each do important work fighting trafficking, they mostly do it separately. The abolitionist movement would be far more effective if it forged unity in its own ranks.