Kristof: Girls For Sale

[La_Serpiente]

Girls For Sale

POIPET, Cambodia

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.

Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.

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Girls For Sale

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[auburnblu]

1. More should be done to put an end to this horrible practice

Unbelievable that this is still going on. Slavery still happening in places like Camodia and the Sudan is tragic. The U.N. should do something.

[Arbustosux]

2. So Kristof was hanging

in "an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution"????!

Maybe he was there with Neil Bush?? :)

[Demeter]

3. Regarding the gratuitous slap at women's groups

If Kristoff were paying attention, the women's groups (NOW, Ms. and sister travelers) have been informing anyone who will listen about this issue, genital mutilation, eternal war, Iraq, Iran, everything.

It is the LADIES' groups (Phyllis Schlafley and her ilk) who believe that everything is hunky-dory everywhere in the world, except here in the US, where there are these pesky, angry WOMEN trying to upset their little applecarts.