Srey Rath, a confident, attractive Cambodian teenager was 15 when her family ran out of money. She offered to go to Thailand with four friends for two months to work as a dishwasher to help pay bills.
Once in Thailand, the job agent who had promised them a job in a restaurant handed them over to gangsters who drove them to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There Rath was raped and beaten by her captors and forced to work as a prostitute. Because she still refused to cooperate, they drugged her regularly with a “happy pill”.
The girls worked fifteen hours day, seven days a week and were forbidden from asking customers to use a condom. They were kept naked and under constant guard so they could not run away or keep tips (having been told they had a ‘debt’ to pay off at which time they could go home). When they were not working, a dozen of them were locked in a tenth-floor apartment.
One night a group of them went out onto the balcony and pried loose a long wooden board about five inches wide. They balanced it between their balcony and another one on the next building twelve feet away. It wobbled precariously but four of them escaped while the others watched on too scared to risk falling to their death.
The girls ran to the local police station where they were arrested for illegal immigration. Rath served one year in prison (!) only for the Malaysian policeman escorting her home to sell her to another Thai brothel.
This story is featured in Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the only married couple to have both won Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism. It is a call to action for the millions of females who go missing every YEAR in places where girls have a deeply unequal status such as China, India, Pakistan and parts of Africa. Studies estimate that between 60-107 MILLION females are missing in the world that birth statistics indicate would be alive were they born male.
And it doesn’t make the news partly because it is not a single dramatic event. Remember the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989? Between 400-800 protesters were killed that day. Yet every year some 39,000 baby girls die in China because parents don’t give them the same medical care as boys. The numbers and stories are gruesome and incredibly difficult to comprehend. “Bride burning” in India – where a woman is punished for an inadequate dowry or because her husband wants to remarry – happens once every two hours. In the last nine years, an estimated five thousand women have been doused in kerosene and burned alive by family members for perceived disobedience in parts of Pakistan.
In wealthy countries discrimination means lower pay, underfunded sports teams and unwanted touching. Yet in under-developed countries, being female can be lethal. “More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all genocides of the twentieth century.” Read that again.
In the nineteenth century, slavery was the moral challenge. In the twentieth century it was the fight against totalitarianism. Kristof and WuDunn argue that the struggle for gender equality around the world is the moral battle of this century.
What happened to Srey Rath? Fortunately, she was not guarded as closely second time around. After two months she escaped back to Cambodia. A social worker connected her to the American Assistance to Cambodia program. They gave her $400 to buy a small cart and starter selection of goods to sell as a street peddler. Finally her good looks and outgoing nature worked in her favor and have helped her become an effective saleswoman. Now she is able to support her parents and two younger sisters. She is married with a son. Her cart has become two stalls and she has added a second business – charging people to use her cell phone.
This example of microfinance is one of the solutions endorsed by the authors and is one of many empowering stories of women who conquered mind-numbing abuse. Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has brought incredible recognition to microfinancing through his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The other solution is education. Both have been endorsed by the UN and the World Bank as crucial in fighting global poverty. Why would half a country’s resources go untapped?
Actor George Clooney comments: “I think it’s impossible to stand by and do nothing after reading Half The Sky. It does what we need most: it bears witness to the sheer cruelty that mankind can do to mankind.” Kristof and WuDunn state that “Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”
To read more about emancipating girls and fighting world poverty, visit www.womensenews.org. Donations for microfinancing can be made at www.globalgiving.org and www.kiva.org.
Author: Matt Anderson
www.TheReferralAuthority.com
