The Girl Effect: A Harrowing Survivors Story
As Introduced in ,Half The Sky, by Sheryl Wudunn and Nicholas Kristof. It is the story of Srey Rath and not only her story of survival but overcoming the inhumane violations she lived through. In this publication it highlights the myriad Human Rights violations in the world directed specifically at Girls and Women. The wide variety of violence and violations have been to the extent of myriad that it has claimed the lives of more Girls and Women in the last half century than all the wars combined in the last century. In 2021 the statistics have not shifted extraordinarily since this initial publication. Awareness, movements, and policies have indeed moved drastically but statistics and data in fact remain to be desired.
Courtesy of- PBS Corporate Communications
Show Of Force Good
INTRODUCTION
The Girl Effect
“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.”
— MARK TWAIN
“Srey Rath is a self-confident Cambodian teenager whose black hair tumbles over a round, light brown face. She is in a crowded street market, standing beside a pushcart and telling her story calmly, with detachment. The only hint of anxiety or trauma is the way she often pushes her hair from in front of her black eyes, perhaps a nervous tic. Then she lowers her hand and her long fingers gesticulate and flutter in the air with incongruous grace as she recounts her odyssey.
Rath is short and small-boned, pretty, vibrant, and bubbly, a wisp of a girl whose negligible stature contrasts with an outsized and outgoing personality.When the skies abruptly release a tropical rain shower that drenches us, she simply laughs and rushes us to cover under a tin roof, and then cheerfully continues her story as the rain drums overhead. But Rath’s attractiveness and winning personality are perilous bounties for a rural Cambodian girl, and her trusting nature and optimistic self-assuredness compound the hazard.
When Rath was fifteen, her family ran out of money, so she decided to go work as a dishwasher in Thailand for two months to help pay the bills. Her parents fretted about her safety, but they were reassured when Rath arranged to travel with four friends who had been promised jobs in the same Thai restaurant.The job agent took the girls deep into Thailand and then handed them to gangsters who took them to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Rath was dazzled by her first glimpses of the city’s clean avenues and gleaming high-rises, including at the time the world’s tallest twin buildings; it seemed safe and welcoming. But then thugs sequestered Rath and two other girls inside a karaoke lounge that operated as a brothel. One gangster in his late thirties, a man known as “the boss,” took charge of the girls and explained that he had paid money for them and that they would now be obliged to repay him.’You must find money to pay off the debt, and then I will send you back home,’ he said, repeatedly reassuring them that if they cooperated they would eventually be released.
Rath was shattered when what was happening dawned on her. The boss locked her up with a customer, who tried to force her to have sex with him. She fought back, enraging the customer. ‘So the boss got angry and hit me in the face, first with one hand and then with the other,’ she remembers, telling her story with simple resignation. ‘The mark stayed on my face for two weeks.’ Then the boss and the other gangsters raped her and beat her with their fists.
‘You have to serve the customers,’ the boss told her as he punched her. ‘If not, we will beat you to death. Do you want that?’ Rath stopped protesting, but she sobbed and refused to cooperate actively. The boss forced her to take a pill; the gangsters called it ‘the happy drug’ or ‘the shake drug.’ She doesn’t know exactly what it was, but it made her head shake and induced lethargy, happiness, and compliance for about an hour.When she wasn’t drugged, Rath was teary and insufficiently compliant — she was required to beam happily at all customers — so the boss said he would waste no more time on her: She would agree to do as he ordered or he would kill her. Rath then gave in. The girls were forced to work in the brothel seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. They were kept naked to make it more difficult for them to run away or to keep tips or other money, and they were forbidden to ask customers to use condoms. They were battered until they smiled constantly and simulated joy at the sight of customers, because men would not pay as much for sex with girls with reddened eyes and haggard faces.The girls were never allowed out on the street or paid a penny for their work.
‘They just gave us food to eat, but they didn’t give us much because the customers didn’t like fat girls,’ Rath says. The girls were bused, under guard, back and forth between the brothel and a tenth-floor apartment where a dozen of them were housed.The door of the apartment was locked from the outside. However, one night, some of the girls went out onto their balcony and pried loose a long, five-inch-wide board from a rack used for drying clothes. They balanced it precariously between their balcony and one on the next building, twelve feet away. The board wobbled badly, but Rath was desperate, so she sat astride the board and gradually inched across. ‘There were four of us who did that,’ she says.’The others were too scared, because it was very rickety. I was scared, too, and I couldn’t look down, but I was even more scared to stay.We thought that even if we died, it would be better than staying behind. If we stayed, we would die as well.’
Once on the far balcony, the girls pounded on the window and woke the surprised tenant.They could hardly communicate with him because none of them spoke Malay, but the tenant let them into his apartment and then out its front door.The girls took the elevator down and wandered the silent streets until they found a police station and stepped inside.The police first tried to shoo them away, then arrested the girls for illegal immigration. Rath served a year in prison under Malaysia’s tough anti-immigrant laws, and then she was supposed to be repatriated. She thought a Malaysian policeman was escorting her home when he drove her to the Thai border — but then he sold her to a trafficker, who peddled her to a Thai brothel.
Rath’s saga offers a glimpse of the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world, a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century.
Many have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism.We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world.
The owners of the Thai brothel to which Rath was sold did not beat her and did not constantly guard her. So two months later, she
was able to escape and make her way back to Cambodia. Upon her return, Rath met a social worker who put her in touch with an aid group that helps girls who have been trafficked start new lives. The group, American Assistance for Cambodia, used $400 in
donated funds to buy a small cart and a starter selection of goods so that Rath could become a street peddler. She found a good spot in the open area between the Thai and Cambodian customs offices in the border town of Poipet.Travelers crossing between Thailand and Cambodia walk along this strip, the size of a football field, and it is lined with peddlers selling drinks, snacks, and souvenirs.
Rath outfitted her cart with shirts and hats, costume jewelry, notebooks, pens, and small toys. Now her good looks and outgoing personality began to work in her favor, turning her into an effective saleswoman. She saved and invested in new merchandise, her business thrived, and she was able to support her parents and two younger sisters. She married and had a son, and she began saving for his education.
In 2008, Rath turned her cart into a stall, and then also acquired the stall next door. She also started a ‘public phone’ business by charging people to use her cell phone. So if you ever cross from Thailand into Cambodia at Poipet, look for a shop on your left,
halfway down the strip, where a teenage girl will call out to you, smile, and try to sell you a souvenir cap. She’ll laugh and claim she’s giving you a special price, and she’s so bubbly and appealing that she’ll probably make the sale.
Rath’s eventual triumph is a reminder that if girls get a chance, in the form of an education or a microloan, they can be more than baubles or slaves; many of them can run businesses. Talk to Rath today — after you’ve purchased that cap — and you find that she exudes confidence as she earns a solid income that will provide a better future for her sisters and for her young son. Many of the stories in this book are wrenching, but keep in mind this central truth: Women aren’t the problem but the solution.The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity. Consider Rath once more.We had been so shaken by her story that we wanted to locate that brothel in Malaysia, interview its owners, and try to free the girls still imprisoned there. Unfortunately, we couldn’t determine the brothel’s name or address. (Rath didn’t know English or even the Roman alphabet, so she hadn’t been able to read signs when she was there.) When we asked her if she would be willing to return to Kuala Lumpur and help us find the brothel, she turned ashen. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to face that again.’ She wavered, talked it over with her family, and ultimately agreed to go back in the hope of rescuing her girlfriends.
Rath voyaged back to Kuala Lumpur with the protection of an interpreter and a local antitrafficking activist. Nonetheless, she trembled in the red-light districts upon seeing the cheerful neon signs that she associated with so much pain. But since her escape, Malaysia had been embarrassed by public criticism about trafficking, so the police had cracked down on the worst brothels that imprisoned girls against their will. One of those was Rath’s. A modest amount of international scolding had led a government to take action, resulting in an observable improvement in the lives of girls at the bottom of the power pyramid. The outcome underscores that this is a hopeful cause, not a bleak one.
Honor killings, sexual slavery, and genital cutting may seem to Western readers to be tragic but inevitable in a world far, far away. In much the same way, slavery was once widely viewed by many decent Europeans and Americans as a regrettable but ineluctable feature of human life. It was just one more horror that had existed for thousands of years. But then in the 1780s a few indignant Britons, led by William Wilberforce, decided that slavery was so offensive that they had to abolish it. And they did.Today we see the seed of something similar: a global movement to emancipate women and girls.
So let us be clear about this up front:We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.That is the process under way — not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen.
This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you’ll just open your heart and join in.”
Half The Sky
Courtesy of- Sheryl Wudunn and Nicholas Kristof
Courtesy of- Vagisil
