Talk about an intense summer read! If you’re bold enough to take on a book that will wrench your heart, but leave you inspired and encouraged at the same time, pick up Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn.
In their book, Kristof and WuDunn reveal the modern day slavery of today: sex trafficking—a scene that will horrify you, real stories and interviews that will make you sick to your stomach of the treatment of women, and details that will paint a graphic reality of what happens when a fifteen year old girl is kidnapped and forced to work in a brothel. (Quite a bit different and even more horrifying than what we see in the popular movie, Taken.) Kristof and WuDunn brilliantly break into the underground slavery of today and call us to join the fight as current day slave abolitionists.
Prepare for tears and a knotted up stomach as you read stories of young girls who were kidnapped and bound into prostitution, raped, and maligned. For example, you will meet Meena, an Indian Muslim who was only eight or nine when she was kidnapped and trafficked to a brothel. She was demoralized, beat, raped, and drugged into obedience of her brothel owner to serve customer after customer after customer—ten or more a day, for seven days a week. You will also read success stories of women and a couple who were rescued from the brothels and pursued prosperous lives. The more you read, the more you will wonder, “How can something as horrific as this still exist today? I thought slavery ended!”
“Far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries” (p. 11).
The reason prostitution still exists at such a large scale level is for the same reason slavery existed in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries; people viewed blacks as unworthy, unequal, etc., and people today view these young girls who are captured and forced into the world of sex trafficking as “subhuman” as well. For example,
