Now Usha is struggling to make ends meet, but she is the galvanic new boss of Kasturba Nagar, the heroine of the slum. When we went to visit her, our taxi driver had trouble finding her home. He stopped periodically in Kasturba Nagar to ask for directions, but each person the driver asked insisted that there was no such person--or else directed the vehicle away from the neighborhood. Finally, we called Usha to report our difficulties, and she came out onto the main street to flag us down and show us the way, explaining that each of the people who had misdirected us had sent a child running over to her, warning her that a stranger was looking for her. "They're trying to protect me," Usha explained, laughing. "The whole community is looking out for me."
The saga of Kasturba Nagar is unsettling, with no easy moral. After years of watching women quietly accept abuse, it is cathartic to see someone like Usha lead a countercharge--even if we're uncomfortable with the bloody denouement and cannot condone murder.
"Empowerment" is a cliche in the aid community, but it is truly what is needed. The first step toward greater justice is to transform that culture of female docility and subservience, so that women themselves become more assertive and demanding. As we said earlier, that is, of course, easy for outsiders like us to say: We're not the ones who run horrible risks for speaking up. But when a woman does stand up, it's imperative that outsiders champion her; we also must nurture institutions to protect such people. Sometimes we may even need to provide asylum for those whose lives are in danger. More broadly, the single most important way to encourage women and girls to stand up for their rights is education, and we can do far more to promote universal education in poor countries.
Ultimately, women like those in Kasturba Nagar need to join the human rights revolution themselves. They constitute part of the answer to the problem: There will be less trafficking and less rape if more women stop turning the other cheek and begin slapping back.
The New Abolitionists
Zach Hunter was twelve years old and living with his family in Atlanta when he heard in school that forms of slavery still exist in the world today. He was flabbergasted and began reading up on the subject. The more he read, the more horrified he was, and although he was only a seventh grader he thought he could raise money to fight forced labor. So he formed a group called Loose Change to Loosen Chains, nicknamed LC2LC, a student-run campaign against modern slavery. In his first year, he raised $8,500. Since then, his campaign has ballooned.
Zach, now in high school, travels around the country constantly, speaking to school and church groups about human trafficking. His MySpace page describes his occupation as "abolitionist/student," and his hero is William Wilberforce. In 2007, Zach presented to the White House a petition with 100,000 signatures seeking more action on trafficking. He also published a book for teenagers, Be the Change: Your Guide to Ending Slavery and Changing the World, and he is nurturing other LC2LC chapters in schools and churches across the country.
Zach is part of an exploding movement of "social entrepreneurs" who offer new approaches to supporting women in the developing world. Aid workers function in the context of an aid bureaucracy, while social entrepreneurs create their own context by starting a new organization, company, or movement to address a social problem in a creative way. Social entrepreneurs tend not to have the traditional liberal suspicion of capitalism, and many charge for services and use a business model to achieve sustainability.
"Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or to teach how to fish," says Bill Drayton, a former management consultant and government official who popularized the idea of social entrepreneurship. "They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry." Drayton is the founder of Ashoka, an organization that supports and trains social entrepreneurs around the world. They are called Ashoka Fellows, and there are now more than two thousand of them--many involved in women's rights campaigns. Drayton's brief history of the rise of social entrepreneurs goes like this:
The agricultural revolution produced only a small surplus, so only a small elite could move into the towns to create culture and conscious history. This pattern persisted ever since: Only a few have held the monopoly on initiative because they alone have had the social tools. That is one reason that per capita income in the West remained flat from the fall of the Roman Empire until about 1700. By 1700, however, a new, more open architecture was beginning to develop in northern Europe: entrepreneurial/competitive business facilitated by more tolerant, open politics.... One result: the West broke out from 1,200 years of stagnation and soon soared past anything the world had seen before. Average per capita income rose 20 percent in the 1700s, 200 percent in the 1800s, and 740 percent in the last century.... However, until about 1980, this transformation bypassed the social half of the world's operations.... It was only about 1980 that the ice began to crack and the social arena as a whole made the structural leap to this new entrepreneurial competitive architecture. However, once the ice broke, catch-up change came in a rush. And it did so pretty much all across the world, the chief exceptions being areas where governments were afraid. Because it has the advantage of not having to be the pioneer, but rather of following business, this second great transformation has been able steadily to compound productivity growth at a very fast rate. In this respect, it resembles successful developing countries like Thailand. Ashoka's best estimate is that the citizen sector is halving the gap between its productivity level and that of business every ten to twelve years.
Think how much more effective a women's rights movement could be if backed by an army of social entrepreneurs. The United Nations and the aid bureaucracies have undertaken a relentless search for technical solutions--including improved vaccines and new processes for boring wells--and those are important. But progress also depends on political and cultural remedies, and, frankly, on charisma. Often the key is a person with a knack for leadership: Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, Mahatma Gandhi in India, and William Wilberforce in Britain. It's important to invest in these emerging leaders as well as in processes, and aid organizations have largely missed the boat that Drayton launched with Ashoka.
"It does seem to be a major blind spot in development and government efforts," notes David Bornstein, who wrote an excellent book about social entrepreneurs called How to Change the World. The big donors, whether government aid groups or large philanthropic organizations, want to make systematic interventions that are scalable, and there are good reasons for that. But as a result they miss opportunities to bring about social change by failing to set up networks to identify and support individual leaders who can make a difference in the trenches. Donors typically aren't set up to make small, targeted grants at the community level--but such grants can become an important tool to achieve change. A few groups have operated as venture capital providers to support small-scale programs abroad, and in fact that is precisely what Ashoka does with its support of Ashoka Fellows. Likewise, the International Fund for Women, run by a former graduate school classmate of Sheryl's, Kavita Ramdas, since 1987 has supported more than 3,800 women's organizations in 167 countries. The International Women's Health Coalition, based in New York, is best known for advocacy, but it also awards grants to small organizations around the globe that support women.
Zach is a brilliant social entrepreneur. So are Ruchira Gupta and Usha Narayane. While women worldwide have generally not risen far in the ranks of political leaders, they often dominate the ranks of social entrepreneurs. Even in countries where men monopolize political power, women have formed their own influential organizations and have enjoyed considerable success in bringing about change. In particular, many women have risen as social entrepreneurs to provide leadership in the new abolitionist movement against sex traffickers. One of these is Sunitha Krishnan, an Ashoka Fellow from India who is legendary among those fighting trafficking. We had heard so much about her that when we finally met it was a surprise to see how tiny she is. And her diminutive stature, at four and a half feet tal
l, is accentuated by a congenital cleft foot that causes her to limp.
When Sunitha was a middle-class child in kindergarten, she took a slate and went to teach a group of poor children what she had learned in school that day. She was so moved by that experience that she decided to become a social worker. She studied social work in college and graduate school in India; her focus was on literacy. Then, one day, she was with a group of fellow students trying to organize poor people in a village, and a gang of men resented the interference.
"They didn't like it, and they decided to teach us a lesson," Sunitha recalls. She was telling us her story in her small, bare office in the shelter she runs in the city of Hyderabad, nearly one thousand miles southwest of the village in Bihar where Ruchira Gupta is fighting to keep Meena alive. Sunitha speaks in polished, upper-class Indian English, sounding more like a university professor than an activist. She is detached and analytical, but still quietly furious when she explains what happened next: The gang of men opposed to her efforts raped her. Sunitha didn't go to the police. "I recognized the futility of it," she says. But Sunitha found herself blamed and her family stigmatized. "The rape per se didn't impact me so much," she says. "What affected me more was the way society treated me, the way people looked at me. Nobody questioned why those guys did it. They questioned why I went there, why my parents gave me freedom. And I realized that what happened to me was a one-time thing. But for many people it was a daily thing."
Sunitha talking with children in her shelter in India (Nicholas D. Kristof)
That was when Sunitha decided to switch her career focus from literacy to sex trafficking. She traveled around the country talking to as many prostitutes as possible, trying to understand the world of commercial sex. She settled in Hyderabad, shortly before the police launched a crackdown there on one red-light district--perhaps the brothel owners hadn't paid enough bribes and needed a nudge. The crackdown was a catastrophe. Overnight the brothels in that area were closed, with no provision for the girls working there; the prostitutes were so stigmatized that there was no place they could go and no way for them to earn money.
"Many of the women started committing suicide," Sunitha remembers. "I was helping cremate dead bodies. Death was binding people together. I went back to the women and said, 'Tell me exactly what you want us to do.' And they said, 'Don't do anything for us, do something for our children.'"
Sunitha worked closely with a Catholic missionary, Brother Joe Vetticatil. He has died, but a picture of him hangs in her office, and his faith left a powerful impression on her. "I'm a staunch Hindu," she says, "though the way of Christ inspires me." Sunitha and Brother Joe started a school in a former brothel. At first, out of five thousand children of prostitutes who were eligible to attend, just five enrolled. But the school grew, and soon Sunitha started shelters as well, for the children and also for girls and women who were rescued from the brothels. She called her organization Prajwala, which means an eternal flame (www.prajwalaindia.org).
Although one red-light district had been closed, there were others in Hyderabad, and Sunitha began to organize rescues from those brothels. She prowled the foulest, most sordid neighborhoods of the city, fearlessly talking to prostitutes and trying to galvanize them to work together and inform on the pimps. She confronted pimps and brothel owners and gathered evidence that she took to the police, browbeating them to mount raids. All this infuriated the brothel owners, who couldn't understand why a sparrow-sized woman--a girl!--was standing up to them and making business so unprofitable. The brothel owners organized and began to fight back. Thugs attacked Sunitha and those working with her; she says her right eardrum was ruptured, leaving her deaf in that ear, and one arm was broken.
Sunitha's first employee was Akbar, a former pimp who had developed a conscience. He worked valiantly to help girls who were imprisoned in the red-light district. But the brothel owners retaliated by stabbing Akbar to death. When Sunitha had to tell his family that he had been killed, she acknowledged that she had to be more cautious.
"We realized over time that it was not sustainable," she says of her early approach. "I realized that if I'm going to be here for a long time, I have to be accountable to my team, to their families. I can't expect everyone to be a mad person like me."
Prajwala increasingly began to work with the government and aid groups to provide rehabilitation, counseling, and other services. Sunitha trained the former prostitutes not only to make crafts or bind books--the kind of thing that other rescue organizations do--but also to be welders or carpenters. So far, Prajwala has rehabilitated some fifteen hundred young women by moving them through six to eight months of job training that will help them start new careers. The rehabilitation centers are a curious sight in India: They are alive with the sounds of hammering and shouts, with young women pounding nails, lugging steel bars, and operating machinery. Prajwala also helps some women return to their families, or get married, or live on their own. So far, Sunitha says, 85 percent of the women have been able to stay out of prostitution, while 15 percent have returned.
Sunitha herself plays down the success. "There's more prostitution now than when we started," she confided grimly at one point. "I'd say we failed. We rescue ten people and twenty come into the brothels." But that is far too bleak an evaluation.
One warm and sunny day in Hyderabad, Sunitha's brisk efficiency evaporates as she leaves her office. The stern ferocity that she displays toward government officials melts and is replaced by tenderness as children at her school gather round, laughing and shouting. She greets them by name and asks them about their schoolwork.
A simple lunch of dal and chapati is served on battered tin plates to everyone in the compound. While nibbling on her chapati, Sunitha catches up with one of her volunteers, Abbas Be, a young woman with black hair, light chocolate skin, and white teeth. Abbas had been taken to Delhi as a young teenager to work as a maid, but instead she found herself sold to a brothel and beaten with a cricket bat to induce obedience. Three days later, Abbas and all seventy girls in the brothel were made to gather round and watch as the pimps made an example of another teenage girl, who had fought customers and tried to lead the other girls into a rebellion. The troublesome girl was stripped naked, hog-tied, humiliated and mocked, beaten savagely, and then stabbed in the stomach until she bled to death in front of Abbas and the others.
After Abbas was eventually freed in a brothel raid, Sunitha encouraged her to come to Prajwala to learn a vocational skill. Today, Abbas is learning to be a bookbinder and also counsels other girls about how to avoid being trafficked. Sunitha arranged for Abbas to be tested for HIV; she tested positive, so Sunitha is trying to find her an HIV-positive man to marry.
Sunitha and Abbas both want all brothels closed down, not just regulated, and Sunitha's voice carries growing weight in the region. A dozen years ago, it would have been absurd to think that a young female social worker, small in stature and with a club foot, could have any impact on the mobs that run the brothels in Hyderabad. Aid groups were too sensible to tackle the problem. Yet Sunitha brazenly marched into the red-light districts and started her own organization, in a way emblematic of social entrepreneurs. They can be difficult, seemingly unreasonable people, but these very qualities are sometimes precisely what allow them to succeed.
Abbas now works in this shelter and is trying to find a man who is HIV positive, as she is, to marry. (Nicholas D. Kristof)
On her own, Sunitha would have lacked the resources to wage her campaigns against the brothels, but American donors have supported her and multiplied her impact. Catholic Relief Services in particular has been a stalwart supporter of Sunitha and the Prajwala programs. The networks and introductions that Bill Drayton made for her, as an Ashoka Fellow, also magnified her voice. It's a prototype of the kind of alliance between first world and third that the abolitionist movement needs.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rule by Rape
The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, contro
ls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.
--EVE ENSLER, A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer
Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately grabbed national attention there. Ehlers had never forgotten a rape victim telling her forlornly: "If only I had teeth down there." Some time afterward, a man came into the hospital where Ehlers works in excruciating pain because his penis was stuck in his pants zipper. Ehlers merged those images and came up with a product she called Rapex. It resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed. When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers responded tersely: "A medieval device for a medieval deed."
The Rapex is a reflection of the gender-based violence that is ubiquitous in much of the developing world, inflicting far more casualties than any war. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined. A major study by the World Health Organization found that in most countries, between 30 percent and 60 percent of women had experienced physical or sexual violence by a husband or boyfriend. "Violence against women by an intimate partner is a major contributor to the ill health of women," said the former director-general of WHO, Lee Jong-wook.
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