Girls For Sale

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
January 17, 2004
New York Times

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This article, along with others written by the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, serves as a powerful reminder of the stakes involved in intractable conflict. It also reminds us that our goal is justice -- not just the cessation of overt hostilities.

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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.

The rest of the article is available from the New York Times.