I don't know about you, but I have always admired Nick Kristof, the OpEd columnist for the Times. He goes tromping all over the world to raise our awareness of issues such as genocide in Darfur and the various ways in which women are exploited and abused all over the world.
I have to brace myself before I read his columns, since they often relate painful personal stories about things like women being disfigured by acid thrown into their faces, or and girls buried alive just for talking to the boys in a neighboring town.
Kristof has written a lot about human trafficking, and in particular Cambodian women being sold into slavery as prostitutes.
These stories are usually tough for me to read, and then contemplate on a large scale, but we need to know about them if anything is ever going to change.
So, today I thought I was prepared when I started to read another story about the enslavement of women in Cambodia. But it's one thing to think in the abstract about girls being sold into prostituion, it's another to read a torture story. It cut right through all my compassion fatigue and brought tears to my eyes.
I am hoping Hillary Clinton read that column today. Stories like this that hit you hard in the gut can provoke people to create real change.
According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor there are more people enslaved today than there were during the Atlantic slave trade. How many? 27 million. Yes, that's 27 MILLION.
Estimates do vary. This is from the State Department website:
A wide range of estimates exists on the scope and magnitude of modern-day slavery. The International Labor Organization (ILO)—the United Nations agency charged with addressing labor standards, employment, and social protection issues—estimates that there are 12.3 million people in forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, and sexual servitude at any given time; other estimates range from 4 million to 27 million.
Annually, according to U.S. Government-sponsored research completed in 2006, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The majority of transnational victims are females trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. These numbers do not include millions of female and male victims around the world who are trafficked within their own national borders—the majority for forced or bonded labor.
From the same article in the CSM, lest we think this only happens in other countries:
For instance, between 14,000 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States annually, according to the US government, most forced into the sex trade, domestic servitude, or agricultural labor. At any one time, between 52,000 and 87,000 are in bondage. And much of that is in plain view, in towns and cities across the country, experts say. People simply don't recognize it.
...snip...
The United Nations estimates that the profits from human trafficking (about $9.5 billion last year [2003]) rank it among the top three revenue earners for organized crime, after drugs and arms. In 10 years, it's expected to be the top source of revenue.
So, Kristof hits in the gut with a case study. He often writes about women who have overcome their horrible fate in one way or another, and this column is no different, so there is a light at the end of this tunnel. But not so for other women who are enslaved in this manner.
Today he tells us about of a woman named Sina Vinn, a Vietnamese woman who was kidnapped when she was 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She woke up naked and bloody next to a white man who had had purchased her virginity. This took place in the uppor floor of a nice hotel. She and the other girls were then taught some phrases in Khmer and English, basically asking for men to have sex with them. They had to act seductive or else....
But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.
“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”
As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.
Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.
After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.
She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.
The image of this poor girl in a coffin, covered with biting ants after she had been tortured by electric shock, all because she resisted being raped over and over again, was just too much for me today.
But Vina was rescued by police working with the Somaly Mam foundation, which is named for its founder, who had suffered a similiar fate but after escaping was determined to help other women in this situation.
Here is Vina today (from the NY Times):
The Somaly Mam foundation runs an incredible program for girls (as young as 5!) who have been rescued or escaped from these brothels.
Here is a 3 minute CNN video about Somaly and her organization:
The foundation has a nice website too, which has more information on all of this, here, including more videos, and a $2 per month donation program.
One thing we can do is go to Change.org and vote to have the new Obama administration make human trafficking a priority in its foreign policy initiatives.
You know, there are some horrible things going on around the world, and this seems the most difficult for us to do something about, but at least we can be aware of the problem and pressure our government to do something about it. Since it also occurs in our country, we can also let our Congress critters know that this is something we care about.