Women and Violence

Rev. Amy Russell & Corrinne Woods - 2010-03-07

In reading and hearing about this issue as a woman, I found myself confronting some basic fears within myself. The issue about violence against women is so systemically endemic in some cultures and so seemingly opposed to our Western values that it makes me feel sick even thinking about it. I hesitated bringing this issue into our sanctuary because it is so painful to think about and imagine. And it's so hard to imagine possible solutions because sometimes the problems are so complex that simple solutions can backfire when not viewed as whole system. But I feel that our lack of education about the issue can prevent us from acting. Since the women and children who are affected by the issues of human trafficking are not people we see in our daily lives, it's easy to not understand how women are oppressed worldwide. And because an issue is painful and uncomfortable is not a good reason for us to avoid an issue that is so important.

I was privileged to be able to attend the Dayton Literary Peace Prize dinner as someone's guest. Nicholos Kristof, author of Half the Sky, a book about the oppression of women worldwide, spoke about his experiences as a New York Times reporter covering this issue in Asia and Africa. He told stories about the girls that he interviewed in brothels who were being held against their will. His stories of how these girls were tricked by family members or friends into situations where they became slaves makes your hair stand on end.

When Nicholas Kristof described how he actually bought and paid for human beings and held a receipt in his hand making him the owner of two of these girls, I was shaken by the understanding that humans are still in slavery in this world.

Kristof explains that after buying the girls, his team went to great efforts to return these girls to their families and then he describes the torturous paths that led the girls back into slavery either due to drug addiction or economic hardship. These stories make it clear that there are no simple solutions and the efforts of a sincerely intentioned person often have little effect on the system as it operates.

In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin introduced legislation that would ban imports made by workers under the age of fourteen. The affect of this well intentioned program was that several Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thousands of young girls. These girls ended up in brothels, many eventually dying of AIDS.

Many perspectives offered on changing the culture that allows oppression of women to happen include proposing increased education for girls in these countries, advancement of economic opportunities for women, and regulation of the sex trade. All of these proposed solutions come with complex ramifications. When you change one part of a system, you see other impact on other parts of a system, not always the impact that was intended.

One story about a group that has had a positive impact is the work of a private school in Redmond, Washington. The principal of the school, Frank Grijalva, realized that his very privileged school needed to broaden their understanding and involvement in the wider world. He learned about a group called American Assistance for Cambodia who rescued girls from brothels where they were being held. He learned more about their work and how keeping girls in school was one of their main approaches. They focus on founding schools for children in rural villages in Cambodia. Building a school in Cambodia starts with about $13,000 of funding with matching grants from other organizations including the World Bank. Grijalva and his school raised that money and build a school which was completed in 2003. Grijalva attended the opening of the school in Cambodia along with some of his students. He says that the impact of this experience on all of his students is life-changing. Their understanding of themselves as an inter-connected part of the larger world was tremendous. He sees it as the most meaningful educational project he has taken part of, and he means the education for his students, not necessarily the Cambodian students. He has seen several of his students change their life plans as a result of this experience. One of the girls who has become a close penpal with some girls in Cambodia, decided that her career would involve finding ways of empowering young people worldwide.

Since poverty and lack of economic opportunity create a situation where women and children become vulnerable to sex traffickers, there are several international groups who work to change the systems under which human traffiking can occur. The United Nations has an office that focuses on creating TV ads warning people about the dangers of being traffiked by people who seem to offer legitimate job opportunities to women and children and then lead them into slavery or into debt bondage where they are bonded by a debt they cannot pay.

In several countries, the focus has been on changing the law to either outlaw the trade of prostitution or to outlaw the buying of sex services. In Thailand, they focused on the source of demand for underage sex workers by passing laws that impose high penalties for the customers than on the sellers for involvement with underage sex workers.

The Netherlands and Sweden have taken opposite approaches to the ideas of shutting down the opportunities for oppression in the sex trade industries. In 2000, the Netherlands formally legalized prostitution in the belief that regulation of the industry would be easier if it wasn't underground. In Sweden, in 1999, the opposite approach was attempted by criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, thereby focusing on shutting down the demand for the services. This reflected the view that the prostitute is more a victim than a criminal and the person buying the service should be punished.

The approach taken in Sweden seems to have been more successful in reducing trafficking and forced prostitution. Prostitution was reduced by 41 % in the first five years after the law passed. The law has made the environment less profitable for traffickers and girls being trafficked are being taken to different countries such as the Netherlands.

The US State Department took an important step in 2007 in creating an annual Trafficking in Persons Report for all countries, ranking them by their tolerance of trafficking. The lower tiered countries are sanctioning for not doing enough to stop the practice. This meant that government officials in embassies started gathering information about trafficking and began serious discussion with their counterparts about what needed to be done. The aid to that country was in jeopardy and this made a difference. Laws started being passed and crackdowns attempted that starting having an influence on the trafficking industry. If you go to the web site Human Trafficking.org you can see a report on all the countries that have been known for human trafficking. In Cambodia the focus of the issue by the State Department has had a major impact on the sale of Cambodian girls into slavery. The government is actually enforcing the laws against slavery which previously had been ignored.