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This year I’ll be posting quick snippets from Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Pulitzer Prize–winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book is a must-read if you want to learn how to empower women. (Read about why empowering women is a key to ending human trafficking.) Sometimes these post will be summaries, sometimes just bits of information to get you thinking and interested. To get the full effect, read the book. It has more ideas, information, and encouraging stories than I could fit on the blog.

Introduction: The Girl Effect

This section highlights the immensity of the problems women and girls face in the world today. “Journalist tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day.” These are exactly the types of gaping holes that the authors hope to fill with this book.

“Thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys receive—and that is just in the first year of life. One Chinese family-planning official, Li Honggui, explained it this way: ‘If a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once. but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, “Well, let’s see how she is tomorrow.”‘”

“In India, for example, mothers are less likely to take their daughters to be vaccinated than their sons. … Girls in India from one to five years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys the same age.”

“Research shows that when parents are banned from selectively aborting female fetuses, more of the daughters die as infants.”

According to Lawrence Summers former chief economist of the World Bank, “Investment in girls education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.” Educated women save more, invest in their families, and postpone marriage and childbirth until adulthood. The author explain that the increase in factory jobs for women in China made a huge boost in the countries GDP. That means that helping women isn’t just the right thing to do—it helps the economy.

In Kuala Lumpur: “A modest amount of international scolding had led a government to take action, resulting in an observable improvement in the lives of girls at the bottom of the power pyramid. The outcome underscores that this is a hopeful cause, not a bleak one.”

The book details three particular abuses affecting women: sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality.

This is the key: “Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”

Chapter 1: Emancipating Twenty-First Century Slaves

This chapter focuses on sex trafficking.

“There are 2 to 3 million prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of the them entered the sex industry unwillingly.”

3 reasons why sex slavery has worsened in the last few decades:

• • collapse of Communism (leaving space for another power to take hold and leaving women vulnerable)
  • globalization (making it easier to transport victims)
  • the spread of AIDS (making sex slavery more lethal)

In the section “Fighting Slavery From Seattle,” the book talks about an American school that sponsored a school in Cambodia—and saw the challenges and success that came as a result of the partnership.

“A starting point is to be brutally realistic about the complexities of achieving change.” The authors tell of some American legislation against sweatshops that caused young workers to be fired—and end up in brothels. But where legislation sometimes fails, health and education have an excellent record of making change.

One creative program called Girls Be Ambitious bribes girls to stay in school, giving them $10 a month for perfect attendance.

“Aid projects have a mixed record in helping people abroad, but a superb record in inspiring and educating the donors.” And that’s something. Even not-so-successful attempt to help teach us to care and teach us better ways to spur change.

Chapter 2: Prohibition and Prostitution

This chapter talks about how the response to prostitution and sex trafficking affects women and the world.

“The victims are perceived as discounted humans. India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the U.S. government 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 authors have found that legalize-and-regulate model hasn’t worked, but crackdowns can succeed. “That means holding governments accountable not just to pass laws but also to enforce them, and monitoring how many brothels are raided and pimps are arrested.”

“It’s pretty doable,” says Gary Haugen, who runs International Justice Mission. “You don’t have to arrest everybody. You just have to get enough that it sends a ripple effect and changes the calculations. That changes the pimps’ behavior. You can drive traffickers of virgin village girls to fence stolen radios instead.”

They discuss differing approached to the problem in Mumbai and Kolkata. Mumbai favored crackdowns and Kolkata favored regulations on the trade to increase sex workers rights. Crackdowns in Mumbai made trafficking less profitable there, so many traffickers moved to Kolkata instead.

The section “Rescuing Girls is the Easy Part” discusses the challenges women face once they leave brothels: “The stigma that the girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled, with drug dependencies or threats from pimps, often lead them to return to the red-light district.”

“Neth and Momm (both survivors who struggled to become truly free) underscore that many prostitutes are neither acting freely nor enslaved, but living in a world etched in ambiguities somewhere between those two extremes.

Three lessons to take from the challenges of aftercare:

• • rescuing girls is complicated and uncertain
  • never give up
  • even though the problem is vast, it’s still worth mitigating

Find out more about human trafficking.
Shop ethical fashion made by survivors.
Be a part of the solution: Be part of Stop Traffick Fashion.

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