M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.
So begins Nicholas Kristof, in
this New York Times column, whose title I have used for this diary. It is about a young girl whose family roots are in a rural part of India, but who is now in Kolkata, where her mother is a prostitute.
The column is troubling - in India there are prostitutes as young as 5.
The girls often have no choice. M is not only the daughter of a prostitute, which makes it highly likely she will be one, but from a subcaste whose daughters are often expected to become prostitutes.
Although both parents are illiterate, M. is bright, fluent in English, because of living at the New Light Shelter program, designed to help prostitutes and their families. She attends a school for middle class children outside of the red-light district.
Let me offer the final two paragraphs from Kristof, whom I urge you read, and then offer some further thoughts of my own beneath the fold. From Kristof:
What I do know is that it is surreal that these scenes are unfolding in the 21st century. The peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the 1780s, when just under 80,000 slaves a year were transported from Africa to the New World.
These days, Unicef estimates that 1.8 million children a year enter the commercial sex trade. Multiply M. by 1.8 million, and you understand the need for a new abolitionist movement.
From me - that figure of 1.8 million children a year entering the sex trade. In too much of the world children are still seen as property of their parents, and too many men still seem to think a primary purpose of females of various ages is to satisfy their particular urges.
Prostitution is one issue. Childhood prostitution is entirely another.
There is a reason prostitution is still often described as the world's oldest profession. I remember in my childhood reading about the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, off the coast of mainland China. They were held by the Nationalist Chinese based in what we now call Taiwan but in the 50s was still described as Formosa. The Communist government on the Mainland viewed the occupation of these islands as an insult, and would periodically shell them. The relevance? The article I read describe how the Nationalist government maintained brothels for the troops stationed on those islands. When I discussed the article with my family my mother noted two things. First, the modern US was one of the few militaries that did not officially sanction camp followers, the hordes of prostitutes known to accompany military forces around the world. Second, that the term "hooker" for a prostitute derived from our own Civil War, when people knew about "Hooker's brigades" - Union General Fighting Joe Hooker allowed camp followers. Turns out my mother was not accurate on the latter, since the term can be traced back to the mid 1840s, to the existence of brothels around shipyards around Corlear's Hook in Manhattan.
There are those who argue for full legalization of prostitution, such as exists in some counties in Nevada, and in controlled red-light districts in cities around the world. The females working there would be protected from abuse, inspected for disease, and perhaps even allowed to keep the vast majority of the fees paid by customers.
I do not believe complete eradication of prostitution is possible. Too often when it is not legal, it becomes a method for further corruption of law enforcement.
And if one believes as do I that sexual acts between any two consenting adults are not the business of the government, it becomes much harder to rationalize a complete abolition/prohibition of prostitution.
But children are another matter completely. In our society we have long had the principle that below a certain age children are not capable of giving consent - to legal contracts to be sure, and thus to sexual activity, although surprisingly when I was growing up and the legal age for signing contracts was 21 quite a few states allowed the age of consent outside marriage to be significantly lower, and there were cases of relatively young girls being allowed to marry: what almost killed the career of Jerry Lee Lewis is when he married his 13 year old first cousin once removed (although people around Lewis insisted she was 15). Country singer Loretta Lynn (nee Webb) also married at 13.
Our culture is very different in many ways than those of other nations. There are things we tolerate that are offensive in other cultures, just as things in them offend and shock us.
Kristof focuses much of his writing on the treatment of females in other cultures. His voice, both by itself and when paired with that of his wife Sheryl WuDunn (with whom he shared a Pulitzer for reporting about Tienanmen Square and with whom he co-authored the powerful book on women, Half the Sky) has been an important one addressing issues of women around the world, especially that of human trafficking.
In this column Kristof's focus is childhood prostitution. It is a part of human trafficking. It is something that should not be ignored, even allowing for important cultural differences between our society and that of other nations.
We as a nation are not immune from human trafficking. There are wealthy Americans known to fly to other nations for sex, sometimes with those we would qualify as children, or at least as adolescents. There are many in our society sexually fascinated by and drawn to sexualized images of young children of both sexes, some of whom act upon those impulses. We tolerate sexualizing of females in our advertising, in our popular culture. Merchandisers profit from the sexualizing of girls - believe me, on warm days like last week it is hard for us to avoid in our schools.
I agree with Kristof that we should condemn the selling of children into prostitution. Perhaps on that issue we can get near-universal agreement among the governments of most nations.
But national government agreeing is not the same as abolition. Every nation has strong subcultures not easily changed by national policy. India still has a functioning caste system, as Kristof notes in his article. And in the US, despite Supreme Court decisions saying students cannot be force to participate in the Pledge ceremony as a condition of attending public schools nor be subject to denominational prayer at school events including graduation, in many places around the nation adults act as if those rulings about what our Constitution and its Amendments mean are ignore and/or willfully violated.
I don't know how we accomplish the complete abolition of childhood prostitution. It is a form of slavery, even if in some cases the young ladies actually earn a living from the activity. That I cannot posit a path of getting to such abolition does not, however, mean that I think we should not try to accomplish it.
Kristof writes
I’m here in Kolkata with America Ferrera, the actress from “Ugly Betty,” to film a television documentary. Ferrera fell in love with M., and M. with Ferrera; they spent much of their time giggling together.
“When I look at her, I see all the 10-year-old girls I’ve ever known,” Ferrera said. “She’s bubbly, silly, and optimistic. It would be heartbreaking to lose such a beautiful spirit to a life of violence and prostitution.”
It is heartbreaking how many spirits of so many different kinds we lose and not just to lives of violence and prostitution.
What is encouraging is when our hearts can still be broken. Then there is hope, then perhaps there is a will to try to do something different, so that fewer spirits will be lost, so that we can move to the next thing that breaks our hearts.
I am spending the rest of this week and part of next dealing with children/adolescents - I am serving as a Reader (grader) of the AP US Government and Politics exam. I teach the course myself. I try to encourage the young people before me - some only 3-4 years older than M, that not only can they understand the content, but that they can become active participants in our political and social processes and thereby make a difference in our society.
Were I in my class, I would be tempted to print out Kristof's column and share it with my students and see what their reactions are. I wonder if we might learn from them how to approach such problems?
I think further, about how many of our policies break the spirits of our own people - in schools, with respect to medical and financial security.
Then I come back to the focus about which Kristof writes. M is ten years old.
When I was ten I first encountered legalized segregation. It changed me forever.
When I see nieces and nephews and children of friends and neighbors who are young, I want to see the positive opportunities of the future for them. It is why I teach. It is also why I am politically active.
I want that for those I know.
I want that for all children in our nation.
I desperately want that for all children around the world.
I had not planned to write a diary today. Then I read Kristof.
I want people to read the column.
If you are troubled by it, good.
I do not have an answer to offer.
This may break your heart. I write words like that too often. I wrote such words when I first encountered the people at the health fair in Wise Virginia. I wrote similar words about the women subject to the rapes in the warfare in the Congo. I could write similar words about so many things.
My heart gets broken time and time again. Which is good. Which reminds me of my common humanity.
Perhaps together, all of us, we can be working towards a world where a ten year old like M is not facing the prospect of being sold into prostitution.
That would be a start of something good, would it not?