She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel
One of the high school seniors that participated in a study trip that the Christian Church In Oklahoma sponsored this year opened his sermon (report to his home congregation that paid for most of his trip) with these words, “I am a 21st century slave owner and so are you.” The study topic for IAS was, “Faith and Economics: Consumption, Contentment, and Compassion.” We didn’t learn much about human trafficking that week, but what we learned about the treatment of workers in Bangladesh and other poor countries by multinational corporations that have home town names, Walmart for example, altered the world view of the group. The cold facts are that the gold and other minerals in my cell phone help underwrite regional wars between persons vying to control the natural resources (coltan, gold, diamonds, oil, other precious metals and gemstones) of poor countries. What I know is that little of I was wearing back in March, or even today, was made in the United States with materials from the United States, not even my Wrangler Jeans or shirt. Wrangler! Can it have a more western name, but not made in the USA.
I follow Nicholas Kristof’s investigative reporting for the New York Times and recently he has been looking into the sex slave trafficking that exists, the preys on the poor by offering a few hundred dollars for their girls and their boys. His reporting has been heart breaking, surreal, and at moments while reading I’ve thought that they should just scoop up these children in the night and put them on a plane to anywhere but where they are. It is hard for a white westerner to grasp what it must be like to be a lower caste or sub-caste member in India, though walking in Vegas, LA or NY, any major city really, you get a sense of our own American caste system though we “class” it up. This kind of trafficking in children and adults no doubt happens to Americans as well as people of other nationalities. Oppression and rape happen whether there is forced sex involved of not. How do we break the consumption cycle?
She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel
Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times | June 1, 2001KOLKATA, India
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.
Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.
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.