Just when you thought there could be no more bad PR for the war in Afghanistan, a crippling 60 Minutes investigation about celebrated author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson’s best-selling works, Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools, has cast doubts not only on the books themselves but on aid organizations in the region.
Author and adventurist Jon Krakauer, who once funded Mortenson’s nonprofit Central Asia Institute with thousands of dollars of his own money, added fuel to 60 Minutes’ fire by releasing the longform article “Three Cups of Deceit” [PDF] on Byliner. He had already alleged on the TV program that Mortenson “has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built.”
The worse thing about the Three Cups of Tea scandal is the possible damage it could do to legitimate fundraising efforts to help the Afghan people, especially since Mortenson is now being accused of using donations for his nonprofit to fund expensive marketing of his books. His books have made people feel empowered and hopeful about giving to the cause of Afghan education, especially for girls. The Daily Beast’s Michele Goldberg worries about the backlash:
If this were just about one author’s reputation, the story would have few repercussions outside the publishing world. But Mortenson is not just a memoirist—he’s also the single most famous champion of the transformative power of education for girls in poor countries. If his downfall leads to skepticism about his cause, it would be not just a scandal, but a tragedy.
We can’t let that happen; we need to stay focused on the very real needs of Afghan girls and women. It was partially in their name that the war was fought in the first place, the plight of Afghan women serving as an emotional tool to garner support for the U.S. invasion back in 2001.
Regardless of how that war was marketed, Afghan women and girls still face tremendous insecurity and require consistent attention and commitment from the international community. More than 70 percent of Afghan women and girls are victims of violence, girls’ schools are regularly bombed, one in eight Afghan women die in childbirth, and there are widespread campaigns to make vocal women’s rights voices vanish.
Since Afghan women and girls have borne the brunt of more than 30 years of war, U.S. policy in the region can never be successful until women’s needs–for safety, education, health care and increased political presence–are addressed. A society that has experienced so much war cannot heal by excluding 50 percent of its population. It’s vital to invest in women and girls, not only because that’s what the U.S. said it would do, but because it is the winning strategy.
As the media and public gasp over Mortenson’s alleged deceit, the spotlight must be turned back to where it belongs: on Afghan women and girls. We should not be deterred from helping to improve their present situation and ensure a brighter future.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Another Voice Raised Against Trafficking in the US
April 23, 2011
What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When we hear about human trafficking in India or Cambodia, our hearts melt. The victim has sometimes been kidnapped and imprisoned, even caged, in a way that conjures our images of slavery.
But in the United States we see girls all the time who have been trafficked — and our hearts harden. The problem is that these girls aren’t locked in cages. Rather, they’re often runaways out on the street wearing short skirts or busting out of low-cut tops, and many Americans perceive them not as trafficking victims but as miscreants who have chosen their way of life. So even when they’re 14 years old, we often arrest and prosecute them — even as the trafficker goes free.
In fact, human trafficking is more similar in America and Cambodia than we would like to admit. Teenage girls on American streets may appear to be selling sex voluntarily, but they’re often utterly controlled by violent pimps who take every penny they earn.
From johns to judges, Americans often suffer from a profound misunderstanding of how teenage prostitution actually works — and fail to appreciate that it’s one of our country’s biggest human rights problems. Fortunately, a terrific new book called “Girls Like Us,” by Rachel Lloyd, herself a trafficking survivor, illuminates the complexities of the sex industry.
Lloyd is British and the product of a troubled home. As a teenager, she dropped out of school and ended up working as a stripper and prostitute, controlled by a pimp whom she loved in a very complicated way — even though he beat her.
One of the most vexing questions people have is why teenage girls don’t run away more often from pimps who assault them and extract all the money they earn. Lloyd struggles to answer that question about her own past and about the girls she works with today. The answers have to do with lack of self-esteem and lack of alternatives, as well as terror of the pimp and a misplaced love for him.
Jocular references to pimps in popular songs or movies are baffling. They aren’t business partners of teenage girls; they are modern slave drivers. And pimping attracts criminals because it is lucrative and not particularly risky as criminal behavior goes: police arrest the girls, but don’t often go after the pimps. (In fairness, pimping is a tough crime to prove, partly because the star witness is often a girl with a string of prostitution arrests who leaves a poor impression on a jury.)
Eventually, Lloyd did escape her pimp after he nearly killed her, but starting over was tough, and she had trouble fitting in. When she showed up at church in a skirt she liked, four women separately came over to her pew with clothing to cover her legs.
“Apparently skirts need to be longer than your jacket,” she recalls. “Who knew?”
Then Lloyd came to the United States to begin working with troubled teenage girls — and found her calling. In 1998, at the age of 23, she founded GEMS, short for Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a program for trafficked girls that has won human rights awards and helped pass a landmark anti-trafficking law in New York State. On the side, Lloyd earned a college degree and then a master’s, graduating summa cum laude.
Lloyd’s story is extraordinarily inspiring, as is the work she is doing. One of the girls she rescued from a pimp later graduated from high school as valedictorian. But Lloyd’s memoir is also important for the window it offers into trafficking in this country.
Americans often think that “trafficking” is about Mexican or Korean or Russian women smuggled into brothels in the United States. That happens. But in my years and years of reporting, I’ve found that the biggest trafficking problem involves homegrown American runaways.
Typically, she’s a 13-year-old girl of color from a troubled home who is on bad terms with her mother. Then her mom’s boyfriend hits on her, and she runs away to the bus station, where the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp. He buys her dinner, gives her a place to stay and next thing she knows she’s earning him $1,500 a day.
Lloyd guides us through this world in an unsentimental way that rings pitch perfect with my own reporting. Above all, Lloyd always underscores that these girls aren’t criminals but victims, and she alternately oozes compassion and outrage. One girl she worked with was Nicolette, a 12-year-old in New York City who had a broken rib and burns from a hot iron, presumably from her pimp. Yet Nicolette was convicted of prostitution and sent to a juvenile detention center for a year to learn “moral principles.”
Our system has failed girls like her. The police and prosecutors should focus less on punishing 12-year-old girls and more on their pimps — and, yes, their johns. I hope that Lloyd’s important and compelling book will be a reminder that homegrown American girls are also trafficked, and they deserve sympathy and social services — not handcuffs and juvenile detention.
What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When we hear about human trafficking in India or Cambodia, our hearts melt. The victim has sometimes been kidnapped and imprisoned, even caged, in a way that conjures our images of slavery.
But in the United States we see girls all the time who have been trafficked — and our hearts harden. The problem is that these girls aren’t locked in cages. Rather, they’re often runaways out on the street wearing short skirts or busting out of low-cut tops, and many Americans perceive them not as trafficking victims but as miscreants who have chosen their way of life. So even when they’re 14 years old, we often arrest and prosecute them — even as the trafficker goes free.
In fact, human trafficking is more similar in America and Cambodia than we would like to admit. Teenage girls on American streets may appear to be selling sex voluntarily, but they’re often utterly controlled by violent pimps who take every penny they earn.
From johns to judges, Americans often suffer from a profound misunderstanding of how teenage prostitution actually works — and fail to appreciate that it’s one of our country’s biggest human rights problems. Fortunately, a terrific new book called “Girls Like Us,” by Rachel Lloyd, herself a trafficking survivor, illuminates the complexities of the sex industry.
Lloyd is British and the product of a troubled home. As a teenager, she dropped out of school and ended up working as a stripper and prostitute, controlled by a pimp whom she loved in a very complicated way — even though he beat her.
One of the most vexing questions people have is why teenage girls don’t run away more often from pimps who assault them and extract all the money they earn. Lloyd struggles to answer that question about her own past and about the girls she works with today. The answers have to do with lack of self-esteem and lack of alternatives, as well as terror of the pimp and a misplaced love for him.
Jocular references to pimps in popular songs or movies are baffling. They aren’t business partners of teenage girls; they are modern slave drivers. And pimping attracts criminals because it is lucrative and not particularly risky as criminal behavior goes: police arrest the girls, but don’t often go after the pimps. (In fairness, pimping is a tough crime to prove, partly because the star witness is often a girl with a string of prostitution arrests who leaves a poor impression on a jury.)
Eventually, Lloyd did escape her pimp after he nearly killed her, but starting over was tough, and she had trouble fitting in. When she showed up at church in a skirt she liked, four women separately came over to her pew with clothing to cover her legs.
“Apparently skirts need to be longer than your jacket,” she recalls. “Who knew?”
Then Lloyd came to the United States to begin working with troubled teenage girls — and found her calling. In 1998, at the age of 23, she founded GEMS, short for Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a program for trafficked girls that has won human rights awards and helped pass a landmark anti-trafficking law in New York State. On the side, Lloyd earned a college degree and then a master’s, graduating summa cum laude.
Lloyd’s story is extraordinarily inspiring, as is the work she is doing. One of the girls she rescued from a pimp later graduated from high school as valedictorian. But Lloyd’s memoir is also important for the window it offers into trafficking in this country.
Americans often think that “trafficking” is about Mexican or Korean or Russian women smuggled into brothels in the United States. That happens. But in my years and years of reporting, I’ve found that the biggest trafficking problem involves homegrown American runaways.
Typically, she’s a 13-year-old girl of color from a troubled home who is on bad terms with her mother. Then her mom’s boyfriend hits on her, and she runs away to the bus station, where the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp. He buys her dinner, gives her a place to stay and next thing she knows she’s earning him $1,500 a day.
Lloyd guides us through this world in an unsentimental way that rings pitch perfect with my own reporting. Above all, Lloyd always underscores that these girls aren’t criminals but victims, and she alternately oozes compassion and outrage. One girl she worked with was Nicolette, a 12-year-old in New York City who had a broken rib and burns from a hot iron, presumably from her pimp. Yet Nicolette was convicted of prostitution and sent to a juvenile detention center for a year to learn “moral principles.”
Our system has failed girls like her. The police and prosecutors should focus less on punishing 12-year-old girls and more on their pimps — and, yes, their johns. I hope that Lloyd’s important and compelling book will be a reminder that homegrown American girls are also trafficked, and they deserve sympathy and social services — not handcuffs and juvenile detention.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Interfaith Evening at Herzl ner Tamid a Success
No One Should Be Forced Educates and Engages Audience
About 200 people attended "No One Should Be Forced", hosted by MIPC and Herzl ner Tamid, on April 13. The purpose of the event was to build momentum and to educate about modern day slavery, both locally and internationally. The evening was successful in further motivating the audience to work together toward that goal. The event planning team chose April 13 intentionally, so that two significant holidays, Passover and Easter, would unite both congregations in this interfaith effort to further the universal message of freedom, rebirth, and renewal. Thanks to the good number from MIPC who attended.
About 200 people attended "No One Should Be Forced", hosted by MIPC and Herzl ner Tamid, on April 13. The purpose of the event was to build momentum and to educate about modern day slavery, both locally and internationally. The evening was successful in further motivating the audience to work together toward that goal. The event planning team chose April 13 intentionally, so that two significant holidays, Passover and Easter, would unite both congregations in this interfaith effort to further the universal message of freedom, rebirth, and renewal. Thanks to the good number from MIPC who attended.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Good food in TJ
Leslie Ferrell and Don Luis enjoy a homemade lunch for the work crew made by our good friend Rosa.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Day 5 Pictures from Tijuana
Steve Smith roofing a casa.
Steve Swedstedt painting his house.
Clara Vu paints her house.More News From TJ
Mayah Singh-Barrett and Christina Williamson sharing smiles during a Popsicle Break onCement Day (Monday) during Mexico Spring Break 2011.
Work Crew Lunches-Spring 2011News From Tijuana
Pink Panthers Take Popsicle Break
Wall are going up!
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