Nick Kristof to the rescue!

Nicholas Kristof amd Somaly Mam (Credit: Twitter/Wikipedia)

When a New York Times columnist live tweets a Cambodia brothel raid, who benefits -- the women or the reporter?

Monday, Nov 7, 2011

By Irin Carmon

Salon

Yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid in Cambodia. Kristof’s novel approaches to international women-rights reporting have previously included purchasing two Cambodian underage prostitutes for the purpose of liberating them and naming a 9-year-old Congolese rape victim. After those generated criticism from victims’ advocates, Kristof shouldn’t be surprised that not everyone was cheering along his recent outing.

The narrative proceeded in a familiar fashion: There were villains, even some with military ties; then there is a rescue. Kristof tweeted, “Girls are rescued, but still very scared Youngest looks about 13, trafficked from Vietnam.” And then, “Social workers comforting the girls, telling them they are free, won’t be punished, rapes are over.” He was accompanied by Cambodian anti-trafficking activist and forced-prostitution survivor Somaly Mam. Post-presidential niece Lauren Bush chimed in perkily, “Awesome reporting by @NickKristof as the (sic) raided a brothel in Cambodia with @SomalyMam this morning!”

Freeing women from poverty, violence

Friday, January 8, 2010
By Mindelle Jacobs
Winnipeg Sun (Canada)

Occasionally, an extraordinary book comes along with the potential to galvanize people into reaching beyond their own little spheres to help someone impoverished elsewhere in the world.

That book is Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, a passionate clarion call to help stop the brutal oppression of females in the developing world.

Undoubtedly, you have read plenty of chilling statistics on the extent of the human rights violations girls and women suffer. But nothing you have read can possibly prepare you for the shocking, gut-wrenching, yet ultimately uplifting true stories in Half the Sky.

There is Srey, a Cambodian girl who is forced by gangsters to work in a brothel in Malaysia. When she escapes, a police officer sells her to a trafficker who hands her over to a Thai whorehouse.

In India, Meena is kidnapped and enslaved in a brothel for a dozen years. And in case you think all the villains in this book are men, the owner of the brothel is a woman who prostituted her own daughters.

Thirteen-year-old Woin-eshet, in Ethiopia, is kidnapped and raped in a rural area where that's what men do to the girls they want to marry.

There is Dina, from the eastern Congo, who is gang raped by five men who then shove a stick inside her. The stick causes a fistula, or hole, in her tissues and leaves her incontinent and paralyzed.

Make no mistake. Half the Sky isn't unrelentingly grim, even though it chronicles the brutally creative ways women are abused in the Third World. Aid organizations and individuals determined to make a difference are helping the oppressed women of the world one female at a time.

Srey now sells shirts, hats and costume jewelry in a little stall. Meena is free and working as a community organizer, trying to discourage parents from prostituting their daughters. Woineshet is finishing high school and plans to study law.

Challenge

Kristof and WuDunn, the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism as New York Times correspondents, are challenging us all to battle gender inequality as fiercely as good people fought slavery in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th.

"People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks 200 years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans," they write.

Half the Sky is a beautifully written, heartfelt exhortation to empower oppressed women by, for instance, educating girls, reducing maternal mortality and expanding microfinance.

"Women and girls cloistered in huts, uneducated, unemployed and unable to contribute significantly to the world represent a vast seam of human gold that is never mined," the authors write.

And countries that repress women -- mainly nations with large Muslim populations -- tend to be economic laggards that breed terrorism, they add.

Read this book and then make a difference by donating to a group, like CARE Canada, that supports women in the Third World. (Check out halftheskymovement.org for details.)

A documentary based on the book will be aired March 4 in Cineplex theatres in major cities across Canada with a portion of the proceeds going to CARE Canada.

"We've seen firsthand how empowerment of women makes a difference in an entire community," says CARE Canada spokesman Andrea Lanthier-Seymour. "These are real stories. They're stories we see everywhere we go."

If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is?

Long Pross (Photo: Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times)

Fighting Sex Trafficking in Cambodia

January 3, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

Barack Obama’s presidency marks a triumph over the legacy of slavery, so it would be particularly meaningful if he led a new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery — like the trafficking of girls into brothels.

Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.

Glance at Pross from her left, and she looks like a normal, fun-loving girl, with a pretty face and a joyous smile. Then move around, and you see where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.

Yes, I know it’s hard to read this. But it’s infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so — and to appear in a video posted online with this column — because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be.

Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

Pross paid savagely each time she let a potential customer slip away after looking her over.

“I was beaten every day, sometimes two or three times a day,” she said, adding that she was sometimes also subjected to electric shocks twice in the same day.

The business model of forced prostitution is remarkably similar from Pakistan to Vietnam — and, sometimes, in the United States as well. Pimps use violence, humiliation and narcotics to shatter girls’ self-esteem and terrorize them into unquestioning, instantaneous obedience.

One girl working with Pross was beaten to death after she tried to escape. The brothels figure that occasional losses to torture are more than made up by the increased productivity of the remaining inventory.

After my last column, I heard from skeptical readers doubting that conditions are truly so abusive. It’s true that prostitutes work voluntarily in many brothels in Cambodia and elsewhere. But there are also many brothels where teenage girls are slave laborers.

Young girls and foreigners without legal papers are particularly vulnerable. In Thailand’s brothels, for example, Thai girls usually work voluntarily, while Burmese and Cambodian girls are regularly imprisoned. The career trajectory is often for a girl in her early teens to be trafficked into prostitution by force, but eventually to resign herself and stay in the brothel even when she is given the freedom to leave. In my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, I respond to the skeptics and offer some ideas for readers who want to help.

Pross herself was never paid, and she had no right to insist on condoms (she has not yet been tested for HIV, because the results might be too much for her fragile emotional state). Twice she became pregnant and was subjected to crude abortions.

The second abortion left Pross in great pain, and she pleaded with her owner for time to recuperate. “I was begging, hanging on to her feet, and asking for rest,” Pross remembered. “She got mad.”

That’s when the woman gouged out Pross’s right eye with a piece of metal. At that point in telling her story, Pross broke down and we had to suspend the interview.

Pross’s eye grew infected and monstrous, spraying blood and pus on customers, she later recounted. The owner discarded her, and she is now recuperating with the help of Sina Vann, the young woman I wrote about in my last column.

Sina was herself rescued by Somaly Mam, a trafficking survivor who started the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia to fight sexual slavery. The foundation is working with Dr. Jim Gollogly of the Children’s Surgical Center in Cambodia to get Pross a glass eye.

“A year from now, she should look pretty good,” said Dr. Gollogly, who is providing her with free medical care.

So Somaly saved Sina, and now Sina is saving Pross. Someday, perhaps Pross will help another survivor, if the rest of us can help sustain them.

The Obama administration will have a new tool to fight traffickers: the Wilberforce Act, just passed by Congress, which strengthens sanctions on countries that wink at sex slavery. Much will depend on whether Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton see trafficking as a priority.

There would be powerful symbolism in an African-American president reminding the world that the war on slavery isn’t yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

NYT's columnist Nick Kristof builds a school in Cambodia

We start a school in Cambodia

December 29, 2008
By Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times

There was a special reason for the timing of this trip to Cambodia, one you won’t read about in my columns: My family has built a junior high school in Cambodia, and we just had the opening ceremony. We timed it for the Christmas vacation, so our three kids — aged 11 through 16 — could see it. Oh, yes, and so that they could see kids who are desperately eager to get an education.

I’ve been visiting Cambodia for the last dozen years and have been particularly moved by the horrific sex trafficking here. One of the antidotes to prevent trafficking is education, and Cambodia is desperately short of schools. A couple of years ago I wrote about a school in Seattle that had funded a school in Cambodia through American Assistance for Cambodia. I was impressed with the organization and the way it gets extra bang for the buck through matching funds from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. Moreover, in some countries, you build a school and have a nice new building, but the teachers never show up. That’s much less of a problem in Cambodia, where one of the bottlenecks truly is school buildings.

So my wife, Sheryl, and I talked it over and decided to start our own school. We had just received an advance for a book about women in the developing world — “Half the Sky,” coming out this fall! — and it seemed only appropriate to use the money to support girls in a poor country. And we also wanted to show our kids a glimpse of need abroad and the way education can transform people’s lives.

Our school is a middle school a couple of hours east of Phnom Penh, and it was finally finished this month. So Sheryl and I and the kids came here as a family trip, all five of us, and participated in the school-opening ceremony. It was quite an event: Buddhist monks opened it, the deputy governor spoke, and each member of our family spoke briefly. There were about 1,000 people attending, mostly students and their parents, and they got a real kick out of seeing my kids speak.

American Assistance for Cambodia is the brainchild of Bernie Krisher, a former news magazine correspondent who in 1993 started it as an aid group to support Cambodia. He has built 400 schools around the country, as well as health programs and projects to fight sex trafficking. He also publishes the Cambodia Daily, an English-language paper, and even persuaded J.K. Rowling to donate Khmer-language rights to “Harry Potter,” so that cheap Harry Potter books could encourage Cambodian children to start reading. Bernie is truly an extraordinary figure who is having a far-reaching impact on the people of Cambodia, and I’m just proud to know him.

If anyone out there wants to volunteer to teach English in the Cambodian countryside, the principal of our school said he would welcome an American teacher. He said the village would put the teacher up either at the Buddhist pagoda or in a local person’s home. If you’re interested, contact American Assistance for Cambodia to be put in touch with the principal.

Of course, there are lots of other ways to help Cambodia. I met a woman volunteering at teaching English to children at the garbage dump in Phnom Penh; she loves it and finds new meaning in the project. The organization is A New Day Cambodia, run by a Chicago couple and getting rave reviews all around. (There are fewer children at the dump now than when I last visited in 2004, and one reason is the New Day school.) And I had lunch with Alan Lightman, an MIT professor who on the side runs Harpswell Foundation, which provides a free dormitory and leadership training for young Cambodian women who otherwise would not be able to attend university.

In my speech to the new school, I told the kids that I sometimes wondered why America was so rich and Cambodia was so poor. It’s not because Americans are smarter or more industrious than Cambodians, because Cambodians are sharp as a whistle and incredibly hard-working. One of the factors, I believe, is the educational gap, and we’re just so pleased to do our part to reduce that gap.