Katy Grannan for The New York TimesSaima Muhammad, shown with her daughter Javaria (seated), lives near Lahore, Pakistan. She was routinely beaten by her husband until she started a successful embroidery business.
I mentioned Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's August 17, 2009 New York Times Magazine article here, and of all the print and pixels and sound that have flowed past my brain this year, it still stands out.
It's so powerful because even though I thought I knew about these things, I didn't. How many of us know these staggering statistics? Do we think about them? Do they mean anything to us in our relative comfort?
"It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine 'gendercide' far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century."
They continue:
"For those women who live, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal. If you’re reading this article, the phrase “gender discrimination” might conjure thoughts of unequal pay, underfinanced sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved. While a precise number is hard to pin down, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude. In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country."
The women's stories Kristof and WuDunn tell make forgetting impossible.
