Sex Slavery and World Issues
Nicholas
Kristof has written a series of poignant,
heartbreaking, and important articles about sex slavery for the New York Times.
He focuses on Cambodia as his example, although sex trafficking is an
international abuse. He argues in his
most recent
column that this has become the new slavery, and
I couldn't agree with him more. I'm glad he is raising the awareness of this
issue, something that doesn't get talked about except (in my experience) in
Women's Studies departments on university campuses. The UN has a number of
programs and have highlighted it for awhile, but "women's issues" normally get
pushed out of the spotlight when you put a bunch of old men in a room who are
way more interested in discussions of nuclear proliferation, war, and blowing
stuff up. That's not an inditement of the UN, it's more of a general complaint
about the way the world works.
In other
news, the man who started the
Grameen
Bank, Muhaamad Yunus, is coming to give a
lecture tomorrow, and I'm very excited about it. Grameen Bank was the first
micro-lending operation, one which has since spread like wildfire throughout the
world -- it loans small amounts of money to people (mostly women, and mostly in
underdeveloped and poor countries, although micro-lending has been implemented
in the US) to help them start businesses, or buy certain things -- it's been
ridiculously successful. I think it's one of the best ideas to come out of the
past century. In a somewhat related note, there was a NYT article awhile ago
about Jeffrey Sachs, who has an idea which, if it worked, could have equally as
huge an impact on the world. When I have some more time, I'll post more links to
the various articles I mentioned as well as information about Grameen and other
projects like it.
Fouad Ajami also had an op-ed in the WSJ which I'm
still trying to get through. I read a book of his that I enjoyed, although I've
heard the sequel to it, the Dream Palace of the Arabs, is somewhat more
controversial. Hm.
Posted: Thursday - January 27, 2005 at 08:42 PM
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