Dustin Franz/Aspen Daily NewsNew York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof speaks to a full house at Paepcke Auditorium on Tuesday.
by Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof went to Southeast Asia and bought two child prostitutes recently.
He collected receipts from the brothel as the new owner of these two teenage Cambodian girls. Then he took them back to their families.
The transaction, reminiscent of American abolitionists who did the same and bought slaves to free them here 150 years ago, sparked controversy recently when Kristof wrote a column about it.
He stood by the move in a speech to a supportive overflow crowd at the Aspen Institute’s Paepcke Auditorium on Tuesday night, saying he had interviewed and written about two other teen Cambodian prostitutes years earlier. That time he left without trying to help them.
“I walked out knowing that I had a great front page story and those two girls were going to end up staying there and probably dying of AIDS,” he said of the earlier trip, as an objective reporter and not the columnist crusader he has become. “It felt unequal and it felt, frankly, kind of exploitative ... . It’s just unimaginable that 150 years after emancipation we still have slavery on this kind of scale in so many parts of the world.”
At the peak of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1700s, he noted, about 80,000 Africans were taken into slavery each year. Right now, Kristof said, about 1 million girls are annually sold into the modern version.
In last night’s speech, Kristof gave a call to action, not only for the freedom of girls sold into the sex trade, but for the education and economic empowerment of all women in underdeveloped nations.
“Just as the central moral challenge for the 19th century was slavery and in the 20th century was totalitarianism,” he said, “the central moral challenge for this century will be to address gender inequity in the developing world.”
Indeed, these days, Kristof often sounds more like William Lloyd Garrison than Maureen Dowd.
His forthcoming book, co-written with his wife and fellow Pulitzer-winner Sheryl Wudunn, tackles the plight of women in the developing nations that make up his Times beat. Among the issues plaguing these women: maternal mortality and lack of education, along with a brutal male-dominated culture of cruelty toward their bodies and lives. Titled “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” it comes out next month.
Kristof outlined some of his more provocative ideas on women in the developing world in his speech. For example, he said that in households that earn less than $1 per day worldwide where men control spending, 2 percent of their income goes to education of their children while 20 percent goes to things like tobacco, alcohol and prostitution. So, getting women more involved in the spending economy there could actually lead to better-educated families and more money toward necessary things like food or medicine, Kristof said.
For the fortunate folks in well-off places like Aspen, he suggested, giving aid to the developing world should become a more active process.
For instance, he said, donating money toward a scholarship for a schoolgirl in Third World Africa or Asia can unexpectedly be a detriment to the girl who gets it. Why? Because, oftentimes, the headmasters choose the prettiest girl in the school and expect sex in exchange for the scholarship money.
“And he may have HIV or AIDS,” Kristof added.
“My advice to you,” the missionary journalist concluded, “would be to pick a particular project that really means a lot to you. Research it and drill deep. Stay with it for a number of years. Take your family — it’s a huge educational process for one’s own family, as well.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
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