Yeah, what about those women and children slaves?

From The New York Times:

Op-Ed Columnist

In Obama’s Speech, Their Voices

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: September 26, 2012     

When President Obama made a landmark speech against modern slavery on Tuesday, many of us in the news media shrugged. It didn’t fit into the political narrative. It wasn’t controversial, so — yawn — it wasn’t really news.

But women like Sina Vann noticed. She’s a friend of mine who was trafficked as a young girl from Vietnam into Cambodian brothels — where she was regularly punished by being locked inside coffins with scorpions and biting ants. Now an anti-trafficking activist with the Somaly Mam Foundation, she sent me an exuberant e-mail (in fractured English, her third language) with a message for Obama: “We are survivors here so proud of you, you are the big president in U.S. and you take action of trafficking. So you give victims from around the world have hope.”

 

Rachel Lloyd, a survivor of human trafficking who was nearly choked to death by her pimp, felt the same way. Lloyd now runs a superb program in New York City, GEMS, to help American girls escape “the life.” She told me that watching the Obama speech was “one of the most gratifying moments in my 15 years of work on the issue.”

 

If Representative Todd Akin’s remarks about “legitimate rape” provoked an uproar, shouldn’t it be incomparably more offensive that millions of human beings are still trafficked in the 21st century? Yet the world often scorns the victims and sees them as criminals: these girls are the lepers of the 21st century.

 

So bravo to the president for giving a major speech on human trafficking and, crucially, for promising greater resources to fight pimps and support those who escape the streets. Until recently, the Obama White House hasn’t shown strong leadership on human trafficking, but this could be a breakthrough. The test will be whether Obama continues to press the issue.

 

I’ve been passionate about human trafficking ever since I encountered a village in Cambodia 15 years ago where young girls were locked up, terrified, as their virginity was sold to the highest bidder. It felt just like 19th-century slavery, except that these girls would likely be dead of AIDS or something else by their 20s.

 

Granted, not all prostitution is coerced. Reasonable people can disagree about what to do in the case of adults who sell sex voluntarily. Put aside that disagreement, for we can agree to place priority on the millions of children and adults compelled to provide sex or other labor.

 

Prostituted kids are among the most voiceless of the voiceless around the world, and it will make a difference if the White House speaks up for them — and fights for them.

 

On the India/Nepal border, I once chatted with an Indian policeman who was on the lookout for terrorists and smuggled DVDs but was uninterested in the streams of Nepali girls passing through, destined for the brothels in Bombay and Kolkata. The policeman explained that America was pressuring India on movie piracy, so let’s show India and the world that we’re also concerned with enslaved children.

 

If we tell other countries to free their slaves, we also have to clean up our own act. Contrary to public opinion, the worst of America’s human trafficking arguably doesn’t involve foreign women smuggled into the United States, but homegrown girls.

 

It’s a disgrace that police officers and prosecutors routinely go after such teenage girls — often runaways fleeing abuse or other impossible situations — and treat them as criminals, while showing less interest in the pimps who exploited them.

 

Normally, if a man has sex with a young girl, he risks jail and she gets counseling. But, if she has a pimp who earns $50 from the transaction, then everything changes: The man may get a slap on the wrist and the girl may go to jail. Does that make any sense?

 

So let’s demand that police officers and prosecutors go after pimps and johns, while treating the teenagers as victims who need comprehensive social services.

 

Republicans have done superb work on this issue in the past, but now they’re balking at straightforward reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act — landmark legislation against human trafficking. What are they thinking?

 

One person on the front lines here in the United States is Alissa, who has a scar on her cheek from where her former pimp mutilated her with a potato peeler as a warning not to escape. She did get away and now works with prostituted girls in Washington whose average age, she says, is 14. Alissa is her street name; she doesn’t want her real name published because pimps still harass her.

 

Alissa watched Obama’s speech, and then replayed it four more times. She has always been treated as a “throwaway,” she said, and now she was dazzled that the president was treating the issue as a priority.

 

Some 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, let’s make sure that this isn’t just a speech, but a turning point.

The Poker Bride: A Story of Escape from Sexual Slavery

A book review, from The Wall Street Journal online:
From Far East to American West
Thanks to a poker game, she escaped the grim fate of so many Chinese women in 19th-century America.

By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
In 1923, an old woman arrived on horseback in the central Idaho town of Grangeville. She rode down from the remote Salmon River Canyon where she had lived for 50 years with her late husband. She had never seen a train, been to a movie or ridden in a car. A local newspaper dubbed her a modern Rip Van Winkle.

Thus begins one of the more curious stories in the history of American immigrants. The woman, Polly Bemis, was Chinese. She had left her village in the Pearl River Delta, in southern China, more than a half-century earlier, sold by her starving parents to brokers who roamed the countryside looking for pretty girls to work in the sex trade in California. She was shipped to San Francisco, where she was purchased for a wealthy Chinese merchant in a mining town in the Idaho Territory. The year was 1872.

Not long after Polly arrived in Idaho, the merchant lost her in a poker game to a saloon keeper by the name of Charlie Bemis. When Charlie was badly injured in a shootout over a gold stake, Polly nursed him back to health. He then did something almost unheard of for a white man in the Wild West: He married her.

Polly's story, as told by Christopher Corbett in "The Poker Bride," is also the history of the first Chinese immigrants to arrive in the American West. While Mr. Corbett's focus is on the women, he provides a colorful overview of the Chinese experience in general and the appalling discrimination they suffered.

Before the transcontinental railroad, a ship could cross the Pacific Ocean faster than the Pony Express could travel from the West to the East Coast. So in 1848 the news of gold in California reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston. Thousands of Chinese risk takers set sail for what they called the Golden Mountain. In the U.S., they were dubbed "Celestials" or "Sojourners" or "Chinamen," a designation that did not become a slur until later, Mr. Corbett says. Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce—all writers he describes as sympathetic to the Chinese—called them "Chinamen."

At first, Mr. Corbett observes, Americans welcomed Chinese as exotic "curiosities." But as their numbers increased, so did public sentiment against them. Chinese, who were willing to work for low wages, were accused of stealing jobs from Americans. Virtually all newspaper accounts "portrayed the Chinese as thieving, shifty, and untrustworthy."

Yet at the height of the Chinese Must Go campaign of the 1880s, there were only about 100,000 Chinese in the country. Given that there were 50 million people in the U.S. at that time, Chinese accounted for a mere one-fifth of 1% of the national population. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the entry of Chinese for 10 years. The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese in the U.S. to carry residency permits. Charlie Bemis may have married Polly in 1894 in part to reduce the risk that she would be deported.

Polly was one of the lucky ones. Most Chinese women who reached the U.S. in the second half of the 19th century were forced into prostitution. Under the discriminatory laws of the day, which were aimed at encouraging Chinese workers to go home, wives were prohibited from coming to join their husbands in the U.S. Young Chinese women were either smuggled into the country or allowed to enter by officials who knew that they were destined for the sex trade.

There was a class system among prostitutes, Mr. Corbett notes, and Chinese women ranked at the bottom. Chinese prostitutes rarely worked in high-class brothels alongside white women. The most fortunate, like Polly, were sold as concubines. But most were destined for "cribs" or "hog ranches"— essentially huts partitioned by curtains—where they serviced many men in a single night. Mr. Corbett quotes a reporter of the day who visited San Francisco's Chinatown and who related the pitch of a Chinese crib girl: "Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee."

The crib girls usually succumbed to venereal disease at a young age. As recounted in an 1869 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, an ailing prostitute would be locked into a "hospital," where she would be given a cup of water, a cup of rice and an oil lamp. If she wasn't dead by the time the lamp went out, the doctor would hasten the process along. "They come for a corpse, and they never go away without it," as the reporter put it.

Mr. Corbett is a journalist, formerly with the Associated Press and now teaching at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and "The Poker Bride" has a journalistic quality. The book is crammed full of quotations from contemporaneous sources and from books by scholars who have written on the Chinese experience. But it's too much of a good thing. While the quotations often add authority and color, they can also be distracting and impede the narrative flow.

At the close of "The Poker Bride," a photo shows Polly at home on the Bemis ranch. She is standing with two horses and a bushel basket at her feet. Her hair is pinned up neatly in a bun, and she is dressed in an ankle-length cotton dress that is protected by a long white apron. The only thing that differentiates her from other American frontierswomen is her face.

Before settling down on the ranch, Polly had run a boarding house and worked as a nurse. By all accounts she was energetic, hard-working and generous to those in need. In short, she thrived. Her success was not typical of the Chinese in America at that time. But on one level it reflects the essence of the American immigrant experience.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

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The trafficking of women and especially children for sexual exploitation is rampant today.  It is worse than it ever was.  In China, where there is a growing and severe shortage of marriageable age females, these crimes will only get worse.  Already the Communist authorities are worried about potential political unrest due to the unavailability of marriageable-age women.  There are millions of young men ready to marry - and they cannot find a mate.

This is what happens in a society that does not respect the natural balance between the sexes, but aborts female fetuses by the millions and exposes female infants to die in gutters and gullies because sons are preferable.  The entire problem is exascerbated by the "one child" rule in over-populated China.

India faces similar problems, although they do not have a "one child" rule - yet.  In India it is easy for even the poorest families to obtain an ultrasound of a pregnant woman's fetus to determine the child's sex.  Female fetuses are routinely aborted because of the cultural preference for sons.  Add to that the practice of systemically murdering widows in the age-honored (although long outlawed) practice of sutee - well, you get the picture. 

These two countries represent more than two-fifths of the world's entire population.  Instead of serious discussions about the warped cultural values that allow female fetuses, infants and grown women to be killed with impunity, the governments are allowing the increasing sexual imbalance beween males and females to spin out of control.  In China, I believe the present imbalance is 134 males for every 100 females of "marriageable" age.  Contrast that ratio with the traditional birthrate of 105 males to 100 females:

The reason for the difference, says Christopher Wills, professor of ecology, behavior and evolutionary biology at the University of California at San Diego, is that Mother Nature stacks the deck in favor of male births. Nature gives males an edge at birth because male fetuses and babies are less hardy than female fetuses and babies. So, by the time males reach the age at which they can reproduce, there should be a one-to-one ratio.   Article.

Just on a guess, after I read this book review earlier today, I did a quick search under "poker bride" and - sure enough - a story emerged that has nothing to do with the book of 19th century sexual slavery in the United States per se, but everything to do with the inequities visited on females by perverted societies:

From ctv news online:

Pakistan girl was to be poker debt bride
Associated Press
Date: Tuesday Feb. 27, 2007 11:29 PM ET
KARACHI, Pakistan — Police are seeking 10 men, including several tribal elders, accused of pressuring a Pakistani woman to hand over her teenage daughter as payment for a 16-year-old poker debt, officials said Tuesday.

In the latest case highlighting how conservative customs threaten women's rights in Pakistan, Nooran Umrani alleges that, despite paying off her late husband's debt of $165, she was threatened with harm if she failed to hand over her daughter, Rasheeda.

The 17-year-old was to be surrendered as a bride for the son of Lal Haider, the man who won the card game years before, Umrani told reporters on Monday in Hyderabad, 100 miles northeast of Karachi.

Umrani said her husband was a gambler who ran up the debt at a poker game when Rasheeda was 1 year old. He promised Haider that he would get Rasheeda in lieu of payment when she grew up, the mother said.

Koral Shah, a Hyderabad police officer, said both families belong to the Umrani tribe of Pakistan's impoverished Baluchistan province.

He said a group of elders from the tribe came to Hyderabad in January to investigate the case and had ruled that, under tribal custom, the girl should be married to Haider's 23-year-old son Abdul Ghani.

Police want to arrest the elders, he said.

Police said Tuesday the mother and daughter were in their protection and that an investigation was opened against Haider, his son and eight others.

"We are investigating the matter and vigorously searching" for the men, Hyderabad police chief Irfan Bhutto said.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has vowed to give women more rights in line with his policy to project Pakistan as a moderate, progressive Islamic nation.

In December, Musharraf signed into law a bill that makes it easier to prosecute rape cases in the courts, and the country's ruling party recently introduced a bill to outlaw forced marriages, including under tribal custom in which women are married off in order to settle disputes.

So, warped religious values too, have a role to play in the growing grievous issue of gender imbalance in the so-called "developing" nations.  Developing, my ass.

I would say ha ha, you deserve what you get, stupid males in stupid backward countries and believers in stupid backward religions, and I hope you all go the way of the do-do bird, except that it is always women and children who suffer for the stupidity of men, no matter where. 

I feel a great deal of sympathy for the Amazons, they may have had it right after all. 

For Sale So Males Can Eat: Wives and Daughters

This is a copyrighted story from AFP. Drought-hit Indian farmers sell wives to pay debts By Kulsum Mustafa (AFP) – 16 hours ago LUCKNOW, India — Drought-hit farmers in northern India are resorting to selling their wives to repay debts to local loan sharks, activists say, as one of the weakest monsoons in years takes its toll. Poverty, poor administration and a lack of education means farmers in the rugged Bundelkhand region are taking extreme steps to pull through a poor rainy season, they say. "This has been happening for quite some time now, but people were hesitant to come out with all this," said Manoj Kumar, a social activist working with farmers in the area. Excluded from the formal banking sector, the poverty-stricken farmers often turn to usurious private money lenders when banks refuse them loans or even accounts. After five years of poor crop yields and steadily decreasing rainfall, the crushing weight of the high interest payments has led to a well-documented spate of suicides and increasing cases of human-trafficking. Another social worker, Shailendra Sagar, said the situation of farmers in Bundelkhand, a region that spans the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, was "pathetic." "They are living in debt. Selling off one's wife or daughters is the last resort," he said. The sale price for married women is hard to ascertain and their fate after being sold is equally difficult to follow. Local reports have suggested wives can be pawned or sold for anything between one rupee to 12,000 rupees (240 dollars). Some women are sold under the guise of a legal marriage, complete with a formal contract, but activists believe others end up being exploited by prostitution rings. In the last four to five years around 50 percent of the region's population has left Bundelkhand villages to find work in cities, and at least 500 farmers have committed suicide, according to various Indian media reports. For India's 235 million farmers, a bad monsoon can spell financial disaster because of the lack of irrigation. Low rains have ravaged India's rice, cane sugar and groundnut crops, and have disrupted the flow of water into the main reservoirs that are vital for hydropower generation and winter irrigation. About 40 percent of India's districts have declared a drought, and the India Meteorological Department (IMD) this week said the country faced a 20-percent annual rainfall deficiency, though that figure is expected to improve with recent patchy rains. Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research in New Delhi, said research had identified Bundelkhand as one of the regions most vulnerable to sex trafficking. "This region is famous for that. Even earlier such incidents have happened, it's not the first time," she said. Some farmers are aware that they are selling their wives to prostitution rings, Kumari added, but "they do it out of absolute desperation. They have absolutely no other alternative before them." A government-funded scheme in which states are obliged to guarantee 100 days of paid employment per year to villagers has yet to be fully implemented in Bundelkhand. "There are no specially dedicated schemes to develop these regions. If skill training was delivered, this whole situation would have been different in the past six decades," said Kumari. Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

The Sex Trade

I remember how shocked I was some 10 years ago, when Isis first mentioned the child sex trade to me. I refused to believe it was a problem, not having read anything about it (that I could recall) in news coverage and news magazines. I wasn't online back then - that happened in December, 1998 at work and I didn't have my own computer at home until March, 1999. Since those days, I've read many articles and news reports about the international sex trade in children of both sexes and, particularly, young girls. It is a sickening reality that, unfortunately, most people are unaware, just like I was. Here is an article from today's New York Times. Op-Ed Columnist The Evil Behind the Smiles By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: December 31, 2008 PHNOM PENH, Cambodia Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right. But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls. Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity. After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive. “My first phrase in Khmer,” the Cambodian language, “was, ‘I want to sleep with you,’ ” she said. “My first phrase in English was” — well, it’s unprintable. Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. 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. Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution. After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly’s trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing. I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath. “I was in a room just like those,” she said, pointing. “There must be many girls who died in those rooms.” She grew distressed and added: “I’m cold and afraid. Tonight I won’t sleep.” “Photograph quickly,” she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. “It’s not safe to stay here long.” Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: “At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!” Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s. Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I’ll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina’s own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn’t. I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn’t been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists. 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.