If there is even needed another case for globalization and development, Nicholas Christof writes a very moving article about slavery and prostitution in the east (click on continue reading link below for full article). For a while I have been making the argument that the American boycott of goods and hence closing of Asian sweatshops was not the smartest thing. Nike doesn’t use forced labor in its overseas factories, workers are willing to work there because its a better option than others they currently have. According to the Institute for International Economics foreign companies pay about double the local manufacturing wage in low-income countries. Another NYT columnist, Paul Krugman, made essentially the same point more elegantly than I could put it:
“In 1993, child workers in Bangledesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart and Sentor Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangldeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to OXFAM, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse job, or on the streets – and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.”(Hearts and Heads, NYT, 4/22/01)
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UPDATE:
Slavery vs. the Cell Phone: Epilogue to the previous piece.
Girls for Sale
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 17, 2004
OIPET, Cambodia
One thinks of slavery as an evil confined to musty sepia photographs. But there are 21st-century versions of slaves as well, girls like Srey Neth.
I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20′s.
Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it’s an issue that gets little attention and that most American women’s groups have done shamefully little to address.
Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.
The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.
Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.
“I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner,” she said. “They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They’re afraid I would run away.”
Why not try to escape at night?
“They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up.”
“What about the police?” I asked. “Couldn’t you call out to the police for help?”
“The police wouldn’t help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners,” Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.
I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.
“Do you really want to leave?” I asked. “Are you sure you wouldn’t come back to this?”
She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. “This is a hell,” she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. “You think I want to do this?”
Another girl, Srey Mom, grabbed at me as I walked down the street. She wouldn’t let go, tugging me toward the inner depths of her brothel but she looked so young and pitiable that I couldn’t help thinking that she really wanted me to tug her away.
So I did. I paid the owner $8 to spring her for the evening and then took her away for an interview.
The owner let Srey Mom go out unsupervised, it turned out, partly because she had been a prostitute for several years and was trusted to return and partly because her dark complexion meant that she was of little value anyway. The brothel sold her to men for just $2.50, compared with the $10 commanded by the lighter-skinned Srey Neth.
I asked Srey Mom what her freedom would cost. Payment of about $70 in debts to her brothel owner, she said. Two girls in her brothel had been freed after they found boyfriends who paid their debts, she said, and she spoke of her longing to see her sisters and the rest of her family in her village on the other side of Cambodia.
“Do you really want to leave the brothel?” I asked.
“I love myself,” she answered simply. “I do not want to let my life be destroyed by what I’m doing now.”
That’s when I made a firm decision I’d been toying with for some time: I would try to buy freedom for these two girls and return them to their families. I’ll tell you in my column on Wednesday what happens next.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
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Epilogue:
Bargaining for Freedom
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 21, 2004
OIPET, Cambodia Srey Neth and Srey Mom were stunned when I proposed buying their freedom from their brothel owners.
“It’s unbelievable,” Srey Mom said, smiling with an incandescence that seemed to light the street. “There’s no problem with taking pictures and telling my story. I want to tell it. But I’m a little afraid that if my mother sees it, she’ll be heartbroken.”
After I decided to buy the two teenage prostitutes, as recounted in my column on Saturday, I swore them to secrecy for fear that the brothel owners would spirit them away, rather than let them tell their stories. But the first purchase, of Srey Neth, went smoothly.
I woke up her brothel’s owner at dawn, handed over $150, brushed off demands for “interest on the debt” and got a receipt for “$150 for buying a girl’s freedom.” Then Srey Neth and I fled before the brothel’s owner was even out of bed.
But at Srey Mom’s brothel, her owner announced that the debt was not $70, as the girl had thought, but $400.
“Where are the books?” I asked. A ledger was produced, and it purported to show that Srey Mom owed the equivalent of $337. But it also revealed that the girls were virtually A.T.M.’s for the brothels, generating large sums of cash that the girls were cheated out of. After some grumpy negotiation, the owner accepted $203 as the price for Srey Mom’s freedom. But then Srey Mom told me that she had pawned her cellphone and needed $55 to get it back.
“Forget about your cellphone,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Srey Mom started crying. I told her that she had to choose her cellphone or her freedom, and she ran back to her tiny room in the brothel and locked the door.
In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them and the girls are often so naοve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.
With Srey Mom sobbing in her room and refusing to be freed without her cellphone, the other prostitutes her closest friends began pleading with her to be reasonable. So did the brothel’s owner.
“Grab this chance while you can,” the owner begged Srey Mom. But the girl would not give in. After half an hour of hysterics about the cellphone, I felt so manipulated that I almost walked out. But I finally caved.
“O.K., O.K., I’ll get back your cellphone,” I told her through the door. The tears stopped.
“My jewelry, too?” she asked plaintively. “I also pawned some jewelry.”
So we went to get back the phone and the jewelry which were, I think, never the real concern. Srey Mom later explained that her resistance had nothing to do with wanting the telephone and everything to do with last-minute cold feet about whether her family and village would accept her if she returned. The possibility of rejection by her mother was almost as frightening as the idea of finishing her life in the brothel.
On our return with the phone and jewelry, the family of the brothel’s owner lighted joss sticks for Srey Mom and prayed for her at a Buddhist altar in the foyer of the brothel. The owner (called “Mother” by the girls) warned Srey Mom against returning to prostitution.
Finally, Srey Mom said goodbye to “Mother,” the owner who had enslaved her, cheated her and perhaps even helped infect her with the AIDS virus yet who had also been kind to her when she was homesick, and who had never forced her to have sex when she was ill. It was a farewell of infinite complexity, yet real tenderness.
So now I have purchased the freedom of two human beings so I can return them to their villages. But will emancipation help them? Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We’ll see.