Nicholas Kristof Talks About Sex Trafficking, Rape and Raising Kids

Nicholas Kristof has found himself in some pretty tough spots. Brothels in Cambodia, refugee camps in Darfur, villages in Pakistan. Still, this last one might take the cake. "The night before I was in Ogden, Utah," says the New York Times' columnist, as if he couldn't quite believe he'd found himself in this remote outpost in the American West.

Kristof is on tour for his new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Thankfully tonight the globe-trotting journalist is in far more cosmopolitan San Francisco at the storied Fairmont Hotel.

Kristof is speaking at an event sponsored by the International Museum of Women (www.imow.org), a self-described "social change museum." In short the museum does a lot to help women around the world connect. Kristof is here as part of their speaker series and a new online exhibition, "Economica: Women and the Global Economy." It's all about ordinary women doing extraordinary things to lift themselves out of violence, discrimination and poverty.

Pretty inspiring stuff.

Sort of like Kristof's book.

But tonight "half the sky" is missing, so to speak. The other half being Sheryl WuDunn, who is married to the journalist. WuDunn not only co-wrote Half the Sky, she also shared a Pulitzer Prize with Kristof for their coverage of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. Plus there's the marriage and three kids.

As it happens the first question for the foreign journalist had to do with domestic policy. "People always ask, how do you do all this and stay married?" he said to the audience later downstairs. Let's just say the books are easier to put to bed than the kids. "Books don't play you against each other," he said. Which the audience found pretty funny.

In person Kristof is as thoughtful and down-to-earth as he appears in his columns. For an hour and a half, he sat on stage across from Jane Wells, the President and CEO of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, genially answering questions about sex trafficking, "honor" killings, mass rape, genital cutting, and the awful things being done to women and girls in the most awful places on earth.

Take sex trafficking. Kristof said he was shocked by how prevalent the practice is. It's even worse today than it was during the Transantlantic Slave Trade. To pay the bills many girls are sold into slavery by their own families. And if a girl doesn't like it or is "uncooperative" she's killed. "This happens repeatedly in brothels in the 21st century," he said.

There were the 14-year-old and 15-year-old girls Kristof got to know at a brothel in Cambodia. He couldn't just leave them there, right? So he called the lawyers at the New York Times. Was there a policy against buying human slaves? Apparently not. So Kristof forked over $150 for each girl, the owner gave him a receipt, and he reunited the girls with their families. One thrived, the other returned to the brothel. "There is a happy outcome, but I'm going to make you read the book to find out," Kristof teased.

American teenagers sure could learn from these stories that there are far worse things than being grounded for missing curfew. For instance, being a 14-year-old girl in Ethiopia. There, if a man wants to marry a girl, he simply kidnaps and rapes her. But this girl was having none of it. With her father's support she tried to prosecute her attacker. Instead the man kidnapped her again and took her to a judge, who promptly married them.

This story has a happy ending, too. But you'll have to read the book. Or see the documentary in 2010. Or for you younger people who don't like to read or watch old people's TV, wait for the video game Kristof has hired some game designers to develop.

After his many travels Kristof has changed his mind about a few controversial issues. For one, he's not so sure that we should be telling countries in Africa, where genital mutilation of girls is the norm, to knock it off. Those cultural norms are most likely to change when the community intervenes itself.

He's also got a new perspective on sweatshops using child labor. As well-intentioned as such efforts are to end the practice, they can backfire. America's threat to punish Bangladesh led to girls being forced out of factories and into the streets. "It ended up being catastrophic for these girls," said Kristof.

And the better educated girls are, the better off their families and communities are. When women are educated they have fewer children and send them to school, they work and make a living. And the men who once forbid them to even leave the house alone often don't mind at all!

Still, it was hard not to notice the irony of an event devoted to the plight of oppressed women and girls being held in a 5-star hotel. "It's a little strange," noted a young woman at the reception named Elisabeth. Elisabeth told me she was a history teacher at San Francisco State and City College, where the budgets had just been slashed by something like 30 percent. She said she was glad she still had a job.

But at the Fairmont you couldn't even get a room! For a while I sat in the high-ceilinged marble lobby and watched the crowd. A parade of lawyers in dark suits, middle-aged women toting little dogs, tourists, and elderly couples strolled through. And a lot were carrying shopping bags. Talk about being out of touch! Don't these folks realize there's a Great Recession? When Kristof swept through the front door, no one even blinked at the world-famous journalist.

But that quickly changed. At the reception he was mobbed by the crowd of international policy wonks, academics, social activists, college students and gray-haired feminists. (Oh, and a few San Francisco philanthropists.) In the midst of the admiration fest, I managed to pull him aside for a few seconds to ask, how did he and WuDunn decide which stories to leave in, which to leave out?

Here's what Kristof, who was sipping a glass of red wine, said: "We wanted the book to be fundamentally hopeful. We wanted to show the power of women's work and have stories emphasizing empowerment and opportunity, not just tragedy."

Later his face lit up when Wales asked him about a certain Pakistani teenager. It started off as the usual horrific story about rape, but then turned into a Lifetime movie. Only in this case the plot was true.

The girl not only prosecuted the man who raped her, she went on to found a legal counseling center for women, build a school, launch a 24-hour-hotline to rescue kidnapped girls. And she wants to be a lawyer. Not everyone is thrilled about her work. She could be killed at any moment, said Kristof, but that doesn't seem to faze her.

As for his own kids, Kristof and WuDunn are educating them too. Last Christmas the whole family went to Cambodia and Thailand. (So much for skiing in Utah or visiting the Happiest Place on Earth!) At one point during the vacation they confronted a novel decision: Should they take the kids to go see the brothels Kristof had written about?

Oh, why not? they decided. It might reinforce to the kids how lucky they were. It might also encourage them to get with the cause.

As Kristof said of the effect on his 11- year- old daughter, "You may encounter Caroline out there trying to raise money for a school in Cambodia."

Follow Mona Gable on Twitter: www.twitter.com/monalg

Comments

[Cyndala]

Great post, Mona, and it sounds like an inspiring book. I will put this on my reading list!

[Zonie]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7070929.stm

Nice he's making up for it all.....in Cambodia and Thailand.

But the rank of number two....or at least number three....in top destinations for traffic of women and girls is I s r a e l.

I was shocked when I learned this....

Okay....so I wasn't so shocked.

Amnesty international and the UN are well aware of I s r a e l's status in the traffic of women and girls....

Amnesty International has also accused authorities in Israel of treating the women forced to work in prostitution rings as as criminals, rather than victims.

I guess that doesn't shock me either.

[tbone99]

Shocking and eyeopening story!

[lastpost]

"Books don't play you against each other,"
No, but don’t you still need to share that commonality of purpose in order to carry through the task?

“wait for the video game Kristof has hired some game designers to develop.”
What’s it called? Humanoids, Survival Struggle.

“telling countries in Africa, where genital mutilation of girls is the norm, to knock it off.”
As opposed to, cut if off?
Just ask, for what purpose are they doing it. They’ve probably forgotten themselves.

As Kristof said of the effect on his 11- year- old daughter, "You may encounter Caroline out there trying to raise money for a school in Cambodia."
Personal experience is a powerful thing.

[MJinCanada]

Last week my husband and I went to get some art framed and started chatting with the guy at the shop. He came to Canada from southern India some 20 years ago and did well in his business but was childless. So he went back to India with the idea of adopting a child. What he discovered was that there were children who were learning disabled or crippled and abandoned by families who couldn't afford them living on the streets. He adopted several of these kids and rather than face the hassle of immigration, he found them a home and people to look them in India. His relatives back home were happy to check up on them between his visits, and soon got more involved. He and his siblings now have about 60 kids. He's got lots less money now, but his karma's in great shape.

[tbone99]

Thats a very heartwarming story.

[Maya68]

I'm waiting to read the book. Meantime, reading .... as a mother of a son and daughter, I've realized that the way I bring up my son to be considerate of others, specially the opposite sex, is even more important than teaching my daughter to be a strong woman. So I want to know a few things.... how can I make my boy into a decent man? Why isn't there an effort to make boys into better men along side the effort to make girls strong? as I argue with my husband, the reason I can't move about freely is because of the way men behave. But the onus is always on us women to take of our own safety while there's never an effort by men to control themselves ...ie: they can't but be men! That is what has to change ....

[MJinCanada]

Our sons seem to be fairly considerate and chivalrous. I think part of it was having an English grandma (Britain should hire them out, honestly -- change the whole world and help the economy), but we've also participated in the Society for Creative Anachronism since they were small. It's an international historical society (founded 40 odd years ago in California) focused on learning about the Middle Ages by doing and re-enacting that period -- but the way history should have been, with real chivalry. It's great for teaching kids about patience, doing things for others, courteous behaviour, the beauty of hand-crafted things and reasons for studying history. You can find out more about it at SCA.org.

So after school activities, while the jocks were roaring out of the parking lot in their sports cars, my boys were waiting with the girls who were waiting for parents to show up or walking up to two miles out of their way to see them home.

Oh, and encourage them to read science fiction/fantasy with strong women characters and tough honourable guys.

[seattle music]

We give birth to them, nurse them at our breasts, teach them to walk and to speak, to read and write if we can. We cuddle and rock away their nightmares, feed them the last of the food when we're hungry, we sit at their bedside, exhausted, nursing them back to health when they're sick. We love and nurture them until they hit puberty and grow into independence.

Then, for the rest of their lives, they rape us, beat us and sell us in brothels and on the streets, demand that we give them whatever we earn. They pay to watch us in skanky strip clubs, demand that we wait on them, bringing them drinks and drugs, demand that we service them, entertain them, cook for them, clean for them, shut up and let them run things, demand that we bear and raise their children and the cycle begins again.

I sometimes wonder why women everywhere don't drown their sons at birth.

I blame the patriarchy, but really, you have to wonder at a species where even the most cosseted, cherished and privileged young males grow up to treat their mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, daughters and cousins like filth under their shoes.

[robbyJ]

In my experience there are women who will look past how a man treats her because of other attributes he has, like looks or wealth.

I had a roommate in college who was outright mean to girls and they still came flocking to him.

Nice guys finish last.

[wietog]

There's a big gap there between childhood and whatever it is that distorts a man (or woman) to use other human beings as though they were animals. I for one truly believe that patriarchal religions contribute GREATLY to encourage certain insecure males to treat women as being inferior or even sub-human.

[harnam]

Jebus woman! what kind of men have you encountered in seattle? Thats one city im never visiting now, ill tell u that.

[XRaraavis]

If you believe 10% of what is in your post I suggest you immediately seek counseling. Obviously something terrible has happened to you in your life that you need to deal with. I hope you are able to get better.

[34MillionFriends]

Half of Chapter 8 of Nicholas Kristof's and Sheryl Wudunn's wonderful HALF THE SKY book is Jane Roberts and Her 34 Million Friends. www.34mill­ionfriends­.org Come on Huffington Post Readers! It's taking a stand for the women of the world! It's somethng you can actually DO! www.34mill­ionfriends­.org Cheers, Jane

[OfficeCandy]

I don't see where Kristof said anything "not nice" about Ogden, at least in this piece. But the way the first paragraph was written - it was an odd way to start this piece.

Lookin forward to reading this book. Kristof and WuDunn are inspirational.

[OgdenUt]

Mr. Kristof has said some not very nice things about Ogden. Ogden has been ranked as the best place to live and do business in by virtually every major publication. I suggest anyone who doubt this visit the city webpage at

http://www.ogdencity.com/

Come for a visit and see for yourself. We welcome you!

Cheers,
David