Kristof's book on gendercide

[Guest]

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[Dottie b]

There's an excellent review on Slate of a new book by Nicholas Kristof (who's written articles about Kiva) and his wife Sheryl Wu Dunn called "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide."

Whether or not you read the book, read the article.

http://www.slate.com/id/2227598?nav=wp


Dottie B

[alan]

Thanks for this, Dottie.

In a similar vein, see the story "Land of the Rising Son" on the problem of gender selection in India from Saturday's Globe and Mail:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/land-of-the-rising-son/article1285122/

[charity]

I read this book recently and was really floored by it. 

For example, near the beginning they mentioned that more people are trafficked annually as slaves today than during the Atlantic Slave trade.  They throw out some numbers (I think about 70,000-90,000 people trafficked annually during the highest years of the Atlantic slave trade versus 600,000 - 800,000 people annually today). 

I ended up looking this up further because part of me just didn't want to believe it - I mean how could there be a larger slave trade today than during the Atlantic slave trade?!  And people (including me) not know about it?!   I had heard of trafficking of people before, but the few stories I had seen left me with the impression it was a (relatively) small number of isolated cases, not a huge profitable trade.

The numbers panned out, and the 600,000-800,000 even only referred to those people trafficked across international borders - it didn't take into account all those people trafficked within their own country. 

I found the population of the world to be estimated at ~1 Billion  around 1800, while todays population is ~6.8 Billion.  So it seems that the population is ~7 times greater, while the international slave trade is about 10 x bigger!!! 


They talk about in Half the Sky how to help prevent this and many other tragedies they identify.  I am not doing the book justice, but I know they talked about and gave examples of how educating girls (among many other strategies) can help the problems.  I am meaning to go back through the book to look over the solutions they talk about, so I can support those ideas more.  They do have a very big list in the back of organizations and programs they mention in the book that are doing a good job. 

Also, in searching all this stuff on human trafficking, I found that even within my own state, this year, there were multiple stories where girls had been kidnapped and taken to another city and forced into prostitution.   Police in one area were commenting that because the sentences are relatively light, and it was so profitable, guys who used to be into drug dealing were now going into pimping.  And it sounded like the typical new prostitute was an under 16 year old runaway.  So there might be ways to help in a more local sense as well. 


Anyway, long story short is that this book really opened my eyes to a lot of things I had heard of but didn't really know about.  And while many of the stories they tell are horrific, they do seem to follow up every story with another story of people who are efficiently helping in situations like the one they just talked about.  So I like that they give you a real way to follow up and try to do something about any/all of the issues.