I once asked my Discovery Institute colleague, John R. Miller, to tell me his worst experience as George W. Bush’s point man in fighting slavery and human trafficking. He told me that he once saw children confined in hanging bamboo cages. Awful. Just awful.
The scourge shows no signs of abating, and with modern travel, could be worsening. NYT columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has a very good column today on the issue. The explicit details he recounts make for very disturbing reading, but they must be absorbed if we are to understand the depth of this evil. From “The Face of Modern Slavery:”
Srey Pov’s family sold her to a brothel when she was 6 years old. She was unaware of sex but soon found out: A Western pedophile purchased her virginity, she said, and the brothel tied her naked and spread-eagled on a bed so that he could rape her. “I was so scared,” she recalled. “I was crying and asking, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ ” After that, the girl was in huge demand because she was so young. Some 20 customers raped her nightly, she remembers. And the brothel twice stitched her vagina closed so that she could be resold as a virgin. This agonizingly painful practice is common in Asian brothels, where customers sometimes pay hundreds of dollars to rape a virgin.
Pederasty tourism needs to be stopped in those countries where it occurs. But that should not be the end of it, because the chances are slight. In addition, it should be a crime in every country to travel abroad for the purpose of engaging in pederasty—or doing it even if that wasn’t the reason for traveling. In other words, one’s home law should be able to punish the rape of children wherever in the world the crime occurs.
Kristof calls for a new international abolitionist movement to stop slavery:
So for those of you doubtful that “modern slavery” really is an issue for the new international agenda, think of Srey Pov — and multiply her by millions. If what such girls experience isn’t slavery, that word has no meaning. It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S. and around the world.
Quite right. This is an example of why using “abolitionist” in conjunction with “animal rights” is so crass. Slavery and trafficking are profound insults to human exceptionalism. It must be stopped.
