21st century abolitionist movement?

**Incognito** · 6th-January-2009

I wasn't sure where to post this: under politics (my preference) or here (feminist flipside). Hope it's in the right forum

Sex trafficking: Time to launch a 21st-century abolitionist movement

The trafficking of girls into brothels represents a modern form of slavery. There would be powerful symbolism in President-elect Obama reminding the world that the war on slavery isn't yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Barack Obama's presidency marks a triumph over the legacy of slavery, so it would be particularly meaningful if he led a new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery — like the trafficking of girls into brothels.

Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.

Glance at Pross from her left, and she looks like a normal, fun-loving girl, with a pretty face and a joyous smile. Then move around, and you see where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.

Yes, I know it's hard to read this. But it's infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be.

Pross was 13 and hadn't even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner — a woman, as is typical — beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

Pross paid savagely each time she let a potential customer slip away after looking her over.

"I was beaten every day, sometimes two or three times a day," she said, adding that she was sometimes also subjected to electric shocks twice in the same day.

The business model of forced prostitution is remarkably similar from Pakistan to Vietnam — and, sometimes, in the United States as well. Pimps use violence, humiliation and narcotics to shatter girls' self-esteem and terrorize them into unquestioning, instantaneous obedience.

One girl working with Pross was beaten to death after she tried to escape. The brothels figure that occasional losses to torture are more than made up by the increased productivity of the remaining inventory.

After my last column, I heard from skeptical readers doubting that conditions are truly so abusive. It's true that prostitutes work voluntarily in many brothels in Cambodia and elsewhere. But there are also many brothels where teenage girls are slave laborers.

Young girls and foreigners without legal papers are particularly vulnerable. In Thailand's brothels, for example, Thai girls usually work voluntarily, while Burmese and Cambodian girls are regularly imprisoned. The career trajectory is often for a girl in her early teens to be trafficked into prostitution by force, but eventually to resign herself and stay in the brothel even when she is given the freedom to leave. (In my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, I respond to the skeptics and offer some ideas for readers who want to help.)

Pross herself was never paid, and she had no right to insist on condoms. (She has not yet been tested for HIV, because the results might be too much for her fragile emotional state.) Twice she became pregnant and was subjected to crude abortions.

The second abortion left Pross in great pain, and she pleaded with her owner for time to recuperate. "I was begging, hanging on to her feet, and asking for rest," Pross remembered. "She got mad."

That's when the woman gouged out Pross' right eye with a piece of metal. At that point in telling her story, Pross broke down and we had to suspend the interview.

Pross' eye grew infected and monstrous. The owner discarded her, and she is now recuperating with the help of Sina Vann, the young woman I wrote about in my last column.

Sina was herself rescued by Somaly Mam, a trafficking survivor who started the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia to fight sexual slavery. The foundation is working with Dr. Jim Gollogly of the Children's Surgical Center in Cambodia to get Pross a glass eye.

"A year from now, she should look pretty good," said Gollogly, who is providing her with free medical care.

So Somaly saved Sina, and now Sina is saving Pross. Someday, perhaps Pross will help another survivor, if the rest of us can help sustain them.

The Obama administration will have a new tool to fight traffickers: the Wilberforce Act, just passed by Congress, which strengthens sanctions on countries that wink at sex slavery. Much will depend on whether Obama and Hillary Clinton see trafficking as a priority.

There would be powerful symbolism in an African-American president reminding the world that the war on slavery isn't yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a regular columnist for The New York Times.

2009, New York Times News Service

**Percy** · 6th-January-2009

I spent a considerable part of four years working with 'working girls', my RNGs (Rude, nasty girls), in Melbourne.

Most of the brothels were owned and run by women.

In one such one brothel a particular girl was driven to work each day by her mother. She was picked up again after her shift and the mother took the money.

In another I worked with a very unlikely hooker (she was plain as a pikestaff) whose father had 'deserted' the family. (He hadn't). The girl had a job - straight from school at 16 - in a bank where her mother persuaded her to take out a $30,000 loan. The mother used it to buy a car and to go overseas on holiday. The girl was retrenched, leaving her with a huge debt at 18. The mother put her in the brothel.

I managed to track down the dad - who had written to her every week for five years; the mother intercepted the letters and destroyed them - who came and took her out of there.

I have a hundred stories like that.

It is all too easy for journalists, feminists, manginas and the like to harp on about Thai women or Cambodian women and 'sex-slavery' and wicked MEN !!! (tm) but they say very little about home-grown women's abuse of women.

**Incognito** · 6th-January-2009

Quote from Percy

I spent a considerable part of four years working with 'working girls', my RNGs (Rude, nasty girls), in Melbourne.

Most of the brothels were owned and run by women.

In one such one brothel a particular girl was driven to work each day by her mother. She was picked up again after her shift and the mother took the money.

In another I worked with a very unlikely hooker (she was plain as a pikestaff) whose father had 'deserted' the family. (He hadn't). The girl had a job - straight from school at 16 - in a bank where her mother persuaded her to take out a $30,000 loan. The mother used it to buy a car and to go overseas on holiday. The girl was retrenched, leaving her with a huge debt at 18. The mother put her in the brothel.

I managed to track down the dad - who had written to her every week for five years; the mother intercepted the letters and destroyed them - who came and took her out of there.

I have a hundred stories like that.

It is all too easy for journalists, feminists, manginas and the like to harp on about Thai women or Cambodian women and 'sex-slavery' and wicked MEN !!! (tm) but they say very little about home-grown women's abuse of women.

That's true, Percy...often men do get blamed. In this article, though, it says that this girl was abused by a woman...and that women are often the cruel tyrants who run these brothels.

Quote: "Pross was 13 and hadn't even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner — a woman, as is typical — beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced."

**Percy** · 6th-January-2009

This has raised my anger levels again !

The abuse by mothers in particular is something that people just do not want to see or hear about.

Many use their daughters in a vile twist on the 'Let's you and him fight' game.

It is "Let's you and him fuck, and I can have the money as well as the laugh".

The men carry the blame of course. Dirty beasts. Men !! (tm)

**Incognito** · 6th-January-2009

Quote from Percy

This has raised my anger levels again !

The abuse by mothers in particular is something that people just do not want to see or hear about.

Many use their daughters in a vile twist on the 'Let's you and him fight' game.

It is "Let's you and him fuck, and I can have the money as well as the laugh".

The men carry the blame of course. Dirty beasts. Men !! (tm)

People need to hear these stories, though they are difficult to imagine and difficult to stomach. This myth that women are "purer" and "less aggressive" than men is utter nonsense...it's a harmful myth that needs to be abolished.

**Percy** · 6th-January-2009

Yes, I noticed that Tera.

It is unusual.

Unusual that women are mentioned as the wicked ones, that is.

**Percy** · 6th-January-2009

It is also noticable that the thrust of the article was not so much for the poor girls, but on President-Elect, King Obama the Wonderful and Saintly, to interfere with other countries.

The Obama administration will have a new tool to fight traffickers: the Wilberforce Act, just passed by Congress, which strengthens sanctions on countries that wink at sex slavery. Much will depend on whether Obama and Hillary Clinton see trafficking as a priority.

There would be powerful symbolism in an African-American president reminding the world that the war on slavery isn't yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

I fail to see the sybolism of a piebald man who claims to be black when he is just as much white. Is hypocricy a positive symbol now?

And to expect Hillary to do anything that doesn't line her own pockets is a sardonic laugh.

Have you seen that Hilary is having a 'benefit' concert to pay off her debts incurred in her failed run for the Presidency? The gall of that woman is just astounding.

**haahoo** · 6th-January-2009

I have known a few women who "pimp" their kids in several ways, its a trick of some single mothers to keep a man, using their kids..

When I was locked in the funny farm, I used to hear peedos etc saying that the easiest way of getting access to kids was simply to find single mothers who had kids that sort of age and work their way in..

Sickening.

**Incognito** · 6th-January-2009

Quote from Percy

It is also noticable that the thrust of the article was not so much for the poor girls, but on President-Elect, King Obama the Wonderful and Saintly, to interfere with other countries.

I fail to see the sybolism of a piebald man who claims to be black when he is just as much white. Is hypocricy a positive symbol now?

And to expect Hillary to do anything that doesn't line her own pockets is a sardonic laugh.

Have you seen that Hilary is having a 'benefit' concert to pay off her debts incurred in her failed run for the Presidency? The gall of that woman is just astounding.

I heard she is also asking Obama to help her get out of that debt!

**Incognito** · 6th-January-2009

Quote from haahoo

I have known a few women who "pimp" their kids in several ways, its a trick of some single mothers to keep a man, using their kids..

When I was locked in the funny farm, I used to hear peedos etc saying that the easiest way of getting access to kids was simply to find single mothers who had kids that sort of age and work their way in..

Sickening.

That is sickening!

**christianj** · 6th-January-2009

Sorry, cannot relate to any propaganda that hails from the New York Times, an already proven stronghold of feminists and their psychotic twin, liberals.

Secondly, any article that does not include both sexes when it's a known fact that both sexes are treated in that fashion then my sympathy level automatically evaporates..

**Incognito** · 6th-January-2009

Quote from christianj

Sorry, cannot relate to any propaganda that hails from the New York Times, an already proven stronghold of feminists and their psychotic twin, liberals.

Secondly, any article that does not include both sexes when it's a known fact that both sexes are treated in that fashion then my sympathy level automatically evaporates..

I understand all of that except the lack of sympathy part. You're the second person I've heard say they don't have sympathy for women who are abused. What about men? Do you have sympathy for them? Or is it just abused women you care less about?

**chevalier** · 6th-January-2009

Tera he didn't ay he had no sympathy for women. He was talking about the sympathy the article was meant to generate and since it does not mention the men who are forced in to slavery then the sympathy the article tried to cultivate evaporated. That is how I read it anyway.

Also he mentioned both genders. He never said that he only had sympathy for men.

Don't be so quick to get offended you are doing good right now. Relax a little take a few deep breathes.

I am glad that the article points out that women are the ones running the sex slave trade there and that it was women who were being abusive.

Maybe people will see that sex slavery isn't a gender issue as much as it is a humanitarian one.

**shaazam** · 6th-January-2009

I suppose Tera being a confirmed feminit apologist supports abortion as a step forward in feminit ""empowerment "" and "liberation"

at least those young girls indentured to work in Asiaia brothels have a hope of escape but not so the truncated babies trashed by Mommas

"right to choose"

they are working to institute 24 week abortion here in Victoria Australia at "her" choice abortion that cannot be refused by doctors

they strain at gnats and swallow a camel - Bible

**nevosopelo** · 6th-January-2009

[quote=TERA;124320]I wasn't sure where to post this: under politics (my preference) or here (feminist flipside). Hope it's in the right forum

Sex trafficking: Time to launch a 21st-century abolitionist movement
There would be powerful symbolism in President-elect Obama reminding the world that the war on slavery isn't yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

Nothing truer than this statement.

We all know how the state is introducing legislation which results in the slavery of men to work for an abusive matriarchy.

Even when they are not married by way of forcing on men increased taxes which will go to pay the child support and, to which they have no rights of custody and to alimony money to slutty ex-wives.

NEVO