This year's International Women's Day comes at a difficult time. The brutal sexual assaults and harrassments described by women at Cairo's Tahrir Square last month were a visceral reminder of the ongoing subjugation suffered by so many women and girls around the world. Abuse and humiliation of women is an outlet for rage, addiction, dominance and control and, at times, a tactic of war. As my friend and writer Nicholas Kristof recently wrote in his forward to my memoirs: "The central moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery, and in the 20th century it was totalitarianism. In this century, the equivalent moral challenge is to address the oppression that is the lot of so many women and girls around the world."
We are all guilty of discounting difficult realities. At home in the United States, we often ignore the unacceptable daily facts facing women worldwide -- the thousand women who die each day in pregnancy or childbirth, the tens of millions of girls who are kept out of school, and the millions more who are regular victims of violence and abuse. A few years ago, in my role as Global Ambassador for the health organization PSI (Population Services International), I visited a Kenyan brothel -- it was a scuzzy flea-bag flophouse on a teeming street in a broken-up, tough part of town. Rooms were rented in 15-minute intervals to exploit prostituted women who often fought over clients, so desperate were they to survive.
I met a woman there name Shola, who was not as hardened as many of the other women I've met in brothels in 13 countries. Shola was a teenager -- six-feet tall, rail thin and heartbreakingly gorgeous. She was one of seven children. Her mother died in an accident when she was 12; when she was 15 her father died of tuberculosis. Her father's relatives took their land and she was left alone, in charge of her siblings. She dropped out of school and tried to make do. At 15, she found out she was pregnant. At 18, she was pregnant again. This time, her boyfriend left her.
Two months pregnant, hungry, with no education, no skills and her health collapsing, Shola made a poor and disempowered woman's classic "choiceless choice." Every day at 9 a.m. she would take the bus to the crowded street where Imet her, and she would sell herself to strange men for sex while a neighbor watched her child. She earned a dollar on her back, two dollars on her hands and knees. Struggling to feed her growing toddler for whom her breast milk was not enough, she worked until her eighth month of pregnancy, and was having exploited sex again a month after delivering. She was innocent and fragile. And she was so ashamed of what she was doing.
It's easy to distance ourselves from Shola's agonizing lot in life and to ignore her story on a day like today. But we must remember that her life is not so different from our own. She is a woman with incredible potential, dreams and hopes. My own mother was a high school senior when she found out she was pregnant. She took money out of her piggy bank to secretly hire a cab to visit our family doctor and confirm the pregnancy. When the doctor found out she was pregnant he wept; when my grandmother found out, she screamed. Like Shola, my mother had to drop out of school and was forced to move out of her family's home.
Fortunately for my mother, she was born here in the United States, And unlike Shola, my mother had grandparents who, despite the dramas, pitched in to help, and a boyfriend -- my father -- who adored and helped care for his girls.
Thanks to these important blessings, in spite of her own considerable hardships, my mother was able to raise a healthy, productive family. Shola doesn't have those same opportunities, and her situation puts her life and her family's at risk. Every day, she's exposed to lethal sexually transmitted diseases like HIV and further unintended pregnancies. And when she is not healthy and strong, her children can't be either. Children who lose their mothers at a young age are 10 times more likely to die prematurely than those who have not. For Shola and millions like her, the onus lies on us to help as much as we can to create opportunities for her and her family to live healthy and happy lives. If we want peace, we must.
As a start, I encourage all of you to honor and remember Shola today by educating yourselves and those around you. I read a perplexing poll that said that the majority of Americans believe that 25 percent of our federal budget goes to foreign aid. Actually, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) receives only one half of 1 percent of the federal budget for foreign aid. I hope you'll take some time to learn where that money goes and how USAID and all Americans are improving the health of millions of people in the developing world in HIV/AIDS, malaria, child, maternal, reproductive health, and tuberculosis. I also hope you'll focus on what more still needs to be done to help women like Shola. Even if all you can do is spread the word, it's something. Eli Weisel said to fail to transmit an experience is to betray it. In a world of difficult problems, that is a challenge that you can meet. The time is now, and our sisters across the world are waiting.
Ashley Judd is an actor and philanthropist currently serving on the board of directors for the global health organization PSI (Population Services International, as well as other NGOs). Read more about Shola and Ashley Judd's other travels in her upcoming memoir All That is Bitter and Sweet.
Jan Eliasson: Sexual Violence on the Way to Water
Heather
@prTini
These estblishemnts seem to have an air of respectability about them believe me they are no different to any other part of the world.
that 10 or 20% of the population who screws things up for everybody?
Be they mercenaries, war mongers, pimps, con-men, religious zealots, politicians and others of the criminal sort, by far most humans really do just want to get along.
We can't seem to do anything about them and they keep screwing things up...
and they are the same the world over.
Second, aside from feeling awful for Shola, what are we to do? Most HP readers want the U.S. out of anything that smacks of colonialism and want us to stop being the world's policeman, but isn't that what USAID is? Doesn't our aid always come with strings attached? For example, doesn't food aid require that food come from the U.S.? Don't such programs frequently destroy local food production?
Again, I'm sympathetic to Shola's plight, as is anyone who hears such a sad story, but thinking that the U.S. can change the education, land ownership, and family structure of Kenya without interfering in their politics is just silly. And thinking that we can send a few bucks and end choiceless prostitution is woefully naive.
" Even if all you can do is spread the word, it's something. Eli Weisel said to fail to transmit an experience is to betray it. In a world of difficult problems, that is a challenge that you can meet. The time is now, and our sisters across the world are waiting."
It is a small thing being asked of you, simply speaking up against atrocities.
You are doing amazing stuff with your time. Thank you.
Prostitution, is usually a last resort. It's not something women like Shola enter into lightly. If you were to solve all the economic problems of all the people, you probably wouldn't have any prostitution. However, this is almost impossibly unlikely.
Consequently, I think prostitution needs to be legalized, and regulated. Take away the moral implications, and the only major issue remaining is the health and safety issue. And when you're dealing with foreign cultures, you HAVE TO ignore the moral implications as they may be entirely different. The health issues could be reduced with mandated condom use and health checks. And the safety issues would probably be greatly reduced when these women are working within the system with protections in place rather than when they themselves are classified as criminals.
Like Ashley Judd, I am glad I was born an American. But Shola was not. As counterintuitive as it seems, taking away Shola's horrible, choice is not the answer. Making the horrible choice she was forced to make healthier and safer is the regrettable answer.
It is very telling that no matter how poor, uneducated, unskilled, and unemployeed a nation is it can still manage to support prostitution. Women having to sell themselves isn't the problem it is a culture that thinks it is okay to buy an other person. Prostitution is the last form of slavery that is still practiced and defended by the developed world.
When the buyers are held up to the same shame and leagal penalties as the sellers then we will see its decline not before
And I'm not saying that it's not something that is good or healthy for society in general. I myself don't drink, smoke, or partake in most of the legal "sins". But I wouldn't outlaw them either.
And I agree that the idea of it becoming mainstream with degrees in brothel management and franchises is extremely distasteful. But have you looked around you at the modern world? Much of the world today is made of up horrible abuses created by the capitalist system. But I don't think the answer is to ignore the basic desire of humans to barter for mutual benefit but to reduce or eliminate abuses.
I find it difficult to pity top earning strippers who make thousands of dollars per day. Or to pity the legal prostitutes in Nevada who earn $300K+ per year. I don't admire them, but it's not the same. And the difference isn't the morality, it's the legitimacy and money.
I do agree with your, and the other person's point about possibly eventually seeing "corporate prositution". Perhaps the solution to that would be something like the British system where prostitution itself is not illegal but solicitation is (and I believe "pimping" as well).
And as far as "there has always been prostitution", that's not my argument. My argument is more in line with, "there has always been and there will always be a demand for sex, and as long as there is an unfilled demand for sex, there will always be prostitution."
Unfortunate, yes. But the refusal to accept this as a basic human desire that people are willing to pay for is unproductive. We need to protect the unfortunate women who make these choices.
@Bert mentioned the possibility of one's children making this choice. Legal or not, some peoples' children have made this choice. Do you think these people would prefer that efforts were made to protect their child, or arrest their child?
Thank you, Ashley, once again for proving that intelligence, talent and compassion for the planet and its people can amplify the voice of the plight of women from Kenya to Kentucky and around the world.
Keep making me proud, Homegirl.
-T
I'd like to give "only one half of 1 percent of the federal budget for" our military, and a trillion dollars for foreign aid. Retrain our soldiers into jobs in the peace corps. They'd have more skills they could use in civilian life.
We'd have a better economy world wide, and we wouldn't need to fight wars.