Martha's Recommendation - Half the Sky by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

It is nice to live in a world where we can look back and feel happy about all the progress we've made as a society. Americans have thrown off tyrants, established democracy, abolished slavery, enfranchised women, won two world wars, eradicated a long list of diseases, and - when comparing against global standards - eliminated poverty. We should feel proud of what we've accomplished. But we can't stop now. In Half the Sky, Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn argue that the global sex trade is the great moral issue of our time and that we must take up this fight with as much dedication and energy as William Wilberforce and Frederic Douglas took up theirs. 

This book tells dozens of stories about real women and girls around the world who are victims of a litany of horrible crimes including sex slavery, rape and beatings, honor killings, and genital cutting. The stories are graphic, sparing no detail, precisely because Nick and Sheryl want to shock you into recognizing what is happening and doing something about it. In the opening pages they cite evidence that people are significantly more likely to make a charitable donation if they are hear a personal story rather than a statistic. Consider the following two appeals:
 

•  "Angeline, an eight-year-old from Cambodia, needs $50 to buy a school uniform so that she can stay in school. Girls with good school attendance are much less likely to be kidnapped and sent to brothels." 
• "Over 600,000 women every year are trafficked across international borders for sex. Donate today."

Both are true, but the first is much more effective at getting people to act. That fact is used in the book to devastating effect. As I made my way through this book I found myself repeatedly welling up with tears of sadness and anger at the brutality that so many women face. By the end I agreed with Nick and Sheryl: there is no more important human rights issue today than sex slavery. 

I won't recount any of the specific stories here. I'll just speak in generalities. (Skip this paragraph if you don't want to be shocked.) In short just imagine story after story of innocent little girls, usually 8 to 13 years old from hopelessly poor families in the developed world, being offered lucrative jobs "washing dishes" a few hundred miles away. Upon accepting the jobs they are tricked and instead taken to brothels where they are imprisoned, beaten until they can bring themselves to smile at customers without crying, and are then put to work ten to twenty times per day, seven days a week. They are not paid, can never leave the brothel, cannot keep any children that they have, and frequently die of AIDS or other STDs before they reach twenty years old. If this shocks you, trust me, I left out most of the details. 

Upon convincing you that there's nothing more important than ending the sex trade, Nick and Sheryl move on to how we can best fight it. My gut reaction was to ask for the name of the charity that sends in police and soldiers to rescue these girls and arrest the brothel owners and traffickers. There are a few charities that do this. Nick himself once posed as a customer in a brothel in Cambodia and rescued two girls by offering to buy them. The brothel owner charged him less than $300 and gave Nick a receipt. But this work is extremely dangerous and expensive. Prevention efforts do a lot of good for a lot less money. Building schools, providing school uniforms, deworming children, and micro loans help kids stay in school and give families sufficient income so that they don't have to sell their daughters or take them out of school to work. No one wants to take the uncomfortable position that it's better to use your money to prevent someone from becoming a sex slave than trying to rescue an existing one. Thankfully there are charities that do all of these things, so you can direct your giving to the ones you feel are doing the most good, and leave the impossible tradeoffs to researchers and think tanks.

Martha told me that this book was influential in her feminist awakening, that it gave her one of her first windows into the plight of women around the world. She described growing up believing that a woman's job is to raise a big family. Nick and Sheryl on the other hand take for granted that more education and fewer children per mother are always good, both for women themselves and for planet Earth. There is no debate in the book about whether smaller families are better, it's just assumed that everyone agrees this is true. Martha explained that the concept of smaller families and female empowerment going hand in hand was alarming at first, but that as time went on she came to appreciate both sides. Today she feels like the most important thing is that women be able to choose how to approach work and family size. American women usually have this luxury. The women in Half the Sky do not. 

So then what to do about sex slavery? Nick and Sheryl had lots of advice. Thankfully they boiled it down to 4 things you can do in the next ten minutes (plus one from me): 

1. Go to www.globalgiving.org or www.kiva.org and open an account. Both sites are people-to-people (P2P), meaning they link you directly to a person in need overseas, and this makes them an excellent way to dip you toe in. 
2. Sponsor a girl or women through Plan International, Women for Women International, World Vision, or American Jewish World Service. This is a great way to get kids involved by choosing someone together and exchanging letters and photos. We will be doing this for our next family night.
3. Sign up for email updates on www.womensenews.org and www.worldpulse.com. Both distribute information about abuses of women and advice on actions that readers can take. 
4. Join the CARE Action Network at www.careaction.org. This will assist you in speaking out, educating policy makers, and underscoring that the public wants action against poverty and injustice.
5. And here are two charities I found myself which are doing great work
• Care.org - for $143 you can keep a girl to secondary school for a whole year.
• Destiny Rescue has rescued thousands of sex slaves around the world. You can save one yourself with a donation of $1,500.   

Right now you might be saying "Well, the way I give back is by paying tithing." That's great. Nick and Sheryl actually mention in the book that secular Americans could learn a lot about charitable giving from their religious compatriots. And the Mormon Church does sponsor maternal care and immunization programs in the developing world which probably have an indirect impact on sex slavery. But since our Church does not disclose any meaningful data on how it spends its money, none of us actually knows whether 80% or 0.8% of total tithing revenue goes toward humanitarian aid, much less what percent of that aid goes towards women's issues in general and sex slavery in particular. I'm not asking anyone to stop paying tithing, but only to consider that there are women and girls out there who need us, and that we can directly impact them with just a few clicks and a little bit of money.

Thanks, Martha, for your recommendation. This one certainly fit the bill of "impactful" and has changed the way I think about the needs of women around the world.