Mad as Hell

"But there are few fairy-tale endings in sexual trafficking..." 
That much was clear to me before reading these articles, but its truth becomes blindingly evident, especially Kristof's. I think Kristof's attempts to save those two teenage prostitutes were naive, shortsighted, small in the face of the scale of the problem, and likely taken as much out of a desire for a story as a desire to help. But I think it helped a little. And I think it did a hell of a lot more to fix the problem than I ever have. It was downright heroic. Still, in the face of this clear yet distant and ingrained wrong, what obligation do I have?

As an aside- it is a clear wrong. These girls were forced into sexual slavery and coerced to remain in servitude by means such as debts that are impossible to pay, drug addiction, and in many cases the application of violence. This is a clear violation of their rights to agency and a gross (in more than one sense of the word) violation of their bodily integrity. Some may argue that these girls had no other option. I do not disagree. If they turned to prostitution out of financial necessity, that is coercion all the same. Whether the circumstances or the sex traffickers are responsible for the coercion, it is wrong all the same. And that wrong is one we should seek to redress.

Kristof thinks I have an obligation to agitate for political intervention by my government. He agrees that his undertaking of buying prostitutes out of servitude isn't a real solution to the problem. It may make a meaningful difference in a few lives, but it won't work on a scale much larger than 4 digits. And sexual slavery and prostitution is an endemic, systematic wrong. He thinks the only way to fight this systematic wrong is to crush it with a bigger system. He points to the inability of Cambodian authorities to raid the Chai Hour II Hotel due to a counter-raid by the traffickers themselves and corruption/incompetence in the Cambodian police as evidence for needing a bigger stick. It seems to me that the only way this problem will really get solved is to offer a better option than prostitution, as many support and relief organizations are already doing in Cambodia and Malaysia. Still, it is not enough. There's a whole lot more money in perpetuating this system than in tearing it down, and I'm not sure it's possible to eradicate it completely. But any effort that goes to quashing this scourge is not an effort wasted. I agree with Kristof- we have an obligation to make sex trafficking a political problem in the U.S. and ensure that it becomes a foreign policy issue. Because as paternalistic and naive as it may be to think this is the United States' problem, this is a human problem. A violation of fundamental human rights and a sickening reality for many people. A sickening reality it is noble to ameliorate and hopefully eventually destroy.