If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is?

[FUCK THE POLICE]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/op...er=rss&emc=rss

If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is?



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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 3, 2009

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

Nicholas D. Kristof

Barack Obama’s presidency marks a triumph over the legacy of slavery, so it would be particularly meaningful if he led a new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery — like the trafficking of girls into brothels.

Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.


Long Pross

Glance at Pross from her left, and she looks like a normal, fun-loving girl, with a pretty face and a joyous smile. Then move around, and you see where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.

Yes, I know it’s hard to read this. But it’s infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so — and to appear in a video posted online with this column — because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be.

Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

Pross paid savagely each time she let a potential customer slip away after looking her over.

“I was beaten every day, sometimes two or three times a day,” she said, adding that she was sometimes also subjected to electric shocks twice in the same day.

The business model of forced prostitution is remarkably similar from Pakistan to Vietnam — and, sometimes, in the United States as well. Pimps use violence, humiliation and narcotics to shatter girls’ self-esteem and terrorize them into unquestioning, instantaneous obedience.

One girl working with Pross was beaten to death after she tried to escape. The brothels figure that occasional losses to torture are more than made up by the increased productivity of the remaining inventory.

After my last column, I heard from skeptical readers doubting that conditions are truly so abusive. It’s true that prostitutes work voluntarily in many brothels in Cambodia and elsewhere. But there are also many brothels where teenage girls are slave laborers.

Young girls and foreigners without legal papers are particularly vulnerable. In Thailand’s brothels, for example, Thai girls usually work voluntarily, while Burmese and Cambodian girls are regularly imprisoned. The career trajectory is often for a girl in her early teens to be trafficked into prostitution by force, but eventually to resign herself and stay in the brothel even when she is given the freedom to leave. In my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, I respond to the skeptics and offer some ideas for readers who want to help.

Pross herself was never paid, and she had no right to insist on condoms (she has not yet been tested for HIV, because the results might be too much for her fragile emotional state). Twice she became pregnant and was subjected to crude abortions.

The second abortion left Pross in great pain, and she pleaded with her owner for time to recuperate. “I was begging, hanging on to her feet, and asking for rest,” Pross remembered. “She got mad.”

That’s when the woman gouged out Pross’s right eye with a piece of metal. At that point in telling her story, Pross broke down and we had to suspend the interview.

Pross’s eye grew infected and monstrous, spraying blood and pus on customers, she later recounted. The owner discarded her, and she is now recuperating with the help of Sina Vann, the young woman I wrote about in my last column.

Sina was herself rescued by Somaly Mam, a trafficking survivor who started the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia to fight sexual slavery. The foundation is working with Dr. Jim Gollogly of the Children’s Surgical Center in Cambodia to get Pross a glass eye.

“A year from now, she should look pretty good,” said Dr. Gollogly, who is providing her with free medical care.

So Somaly saved Sina, and now Sina is saving Pross. Someday, perhaps Pross will help another survivor, if the rest of us can help sustain them.

The Obama administration will have a new tool to fight traffickers: the Wilberforce Act, just passed by Congress, which strengthens sanctions on countries that wink at sex slavery. Much will depend on whether Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton see trafficking as a priority.

There would be powerful symbolism in an African-American president reminding the world that the war on slavery isn’t yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

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.

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

Free Markets! So shut up!

[uscitizen]

Supply and demand?

Seriously, I was watching a pbs show on this and many partents actually sell thie female children for this. They should be sterilized.

[FUCK THE POLICE]

Supply and demand?

Seriously, I was watching a pbs show on this and many partents actually sell thie female children for this. They should be sterilized.

If there were any sort of regulation on this at all it wouldn't happen. But these countries simply don't care.

[uscitizen]

If there were any sort of regulation on this at all it wouldn't happen. But these countries simply don't care.

Of course not if the citizens do not care. Governments are mostly a reflection of the people in the country.

Like making Afganistan a Democracy, not much change cause you still have the same people.

[Epicurus]

Of course not if the citizens do not care. Governments are mostly a reflection of the people in the country.

Yeah I'm sure the citizens of Burma agree with you.

[cawacko]

San Francisco has all kinds of brothels/asian massuse parlors that traffic in these girls from overseas and the city doesn't do sh*t about it.

[cawacko]

Yeah I'm sure the citizens of Burma agree with you.

LOL...

[uscitizen]

Yeah I'm sure the citizens of Burma agree with you.

if they condone or sell children into slavery or sell into anything really.

Burma? You mean Myanmar?

No govt will long continue with out most of the people accepting it.

[Epicurus]

if they condone or sell children into slavery or sell into anything really.

They "condone" being brutally subjugated by a military junta, so I was just curious how that fit into your "Governments are a reflection of the people" philosophy. Do the people themselves secretly love the beatings and lack of any rights whatsoever?

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

Governments are mostly a reflection of the people in the country.

.

No they're a reflection of the prevailing opinions of the hegemonic power in the country.

See 'Theory of Hegemonic stability".

[uscitizen]

They "condone" being brutally subjugated by a military junta, so I was just curious how that fit into your "Governments are a reflection of the people" philosophy. Do the people themselves secretly love the beatings and lack of any rights whatsoever?

Depends on who gets beat if too many disapprove the govt will change.

The govt of the USA approved of slavery and beating slaves. But things changed didn't they when enough Americans opposed it.
change does not happen overnight.
heck it took 8 years to get rid of bush.

[FUCK THE POLICE]

San Francisco has all kinds of brothels/asian massuse parlors that traffic in these girls from overseas and the city doesn't do sh*t about it.

That too.

Underground brothels aren't regulated, and therefore they are exponentially more likely to have sex slaves in them, but at least in the US we make an effort to root them out.

[uscitizen]

That too.

Underground brothels aren't regulated, and therefore they are exponentially more likely to have sex slaves in them, but at least in the US we make an effort to root them out.

yes we do, but instead of saying they are worse than we are, lets make America better yet without comparison to other nations.
lets just make it better because it is the thing to do.

[LadyT]

Actually, I just watched something on Showtime On Demand not two days ago. The police in this country don't give a shit about this stuff. A woman went to her local precinct in NYC for months trying to find her daughter who was kidnapped and trafficked by a pimp. She managed to find out what building her daughter was being kept in, went to the police with it and they did NOTHING. The guy told her he couldn't do anything without a warrant. He didn't even bother investigating. Its sickening. Although, I'm pretty sure if the mom was a rich white lady from Texas thing would have went down a little differently.

The other sick thing about it, is when this happens in the US, the girls are treated like criminals.