Nicholas Kristof Interview (page: 5 / 7) Journalist, Author & Columnist	Print Interview

You mentioned Cambodia earlier. You bought the freedom of two young girls in Cambodia. Can you tell us about that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: Sex trafficking had been an issue that had bothered me a lot. When, in 2004, I decided to buy two girls from their brothels, there was a lot of debate in the journalistic community. Is this really appropriate to jump into the arena, to do this? The backdrop for that, which maybe I should have talked about more, was that earlier, I think in 1996, I had gone to Cambodia to write an article, and had spent one long afternoon in a brothel with two girls, a 14-year-old, a 15-year-old. The 15-year-old, in particular, moved me, because her mother had just tracked her down the previous week. Had found her there in the brothel, had wanted to take her home, but the brothel owner said, "I paid good money for this girl. You're going to have to buy her back from me." I remember leaving the brothel afterward, knowing that I had this great front-page story, and these two girls were going to stay behind and die of AIDS, and they were slaves, every bit as much as 19th century slaves had been.

The mother didn't have the money?

Nicholas Kristof: The mother did not have the money to buy her daughter back. And the brothel owner paid good bribes to the police, they weren't going to help the mother. And that was how the system worked. I went to another town, a little village called Svay Pak, where there were little girls who were being sold as virgins to anybody who'd want to buy them. That really gnawed at me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I felt kind of exploitative of these two girls, because I had gone in and gotten this great front page story, and they were going to stay and die of AIDS. And when I went back in 2004 to write about it, I didn't really want the same thing to happen again. So that was why I was searching for some other answer, and ended up buying them. I got receipts from the brothel, which is an extraordinary thing. You get written receipts for buying a girl. I took them back to their villages and an American group called American Assistance for Cambodia tried to set them up to start small businesses.

And one of them had a successful outcome?

Nicholas Kristof: Yes. One of them then, things worked out very well for her. The other one, a few days later, ended up going back to the brothel. She had a methamphetamine addiction and she was getting meth from the brothel, possibly as a deliberate way of creating a dependence. She desperately wanted to start over, but she could not, she just could not break that addiction. She needed that meth, so she went back to the brothel. I've met them both many times since then, and she still talks about trying to get away, trying to start over, but she's not going to be able to.

How much did they cost, these girls?

Nicholas Kristof: One girl cost $150 and the other $203.

Can you tell us about your current project? You're writing about women in developing countries.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: My wife and I, in covering the world, increasingly we came to see that one of the real central moral challenges was the status of women in the developing world. I think part of that was covering Tiananmen. We don't know how many people died in Tiananmen, but maybe it was 400, 500, 600, something in that order of magnitude. And then we realized that every year in China there were, if I remember right, about 30,000 baby girls, just in the first year of life, infants, who die because they don't get the same nutrition and healthcare as boys do. Thirty thousand extra girls who die. There are hundreds of thousands of women in China who are guaimai -- sold -- that can be the wives of peasants. Those kinds of institutional challenges never get attention. A woman dies in childbirth somewhere in the world, mostly in very poor countries, once a minute. That never gets attention. And so at one level we came to believe that the central moral challenge for this century -- equivalent to slavery in the 19th or the totalitarianism in the 20th -- is to address the gender inequity in the developing world. But secondly, as a purely practical matter, if you want to address poverty in the third world, you have to do that by educating girls and giving them a role in the economy. Part of that is that a country can't develop on one leg. It can't develop with half of its population.

The other part of it has to do with the dirty little secret of development, something that isn't talked about a lot.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One reason why people are poor is not just they have low income, but that they spend money badly. If you look at the poorest families in the world, people who have incomes of less than about a dollar a day per capita, then they spend about 20 percent of those incomes on a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, extravagant festivals and prostitution. Twenty percent goes to that. About two percent goes to educating their children, which is actually a good investment. It actually has a positive net return. The reason is essentially that men tend to control the purse strings. And there is rich literature showing that if you give women more control over those purse strings, more decision-making authority, then more money goes to educating children and to starting small businesses, and more for savings. So we have to figure out, if we want to address poverty, how to allocate that money more efficiently. How to get women into the economy. And that has to do with -- "empowerment" is kind of a buzz word, and a bit jargony -- but it has to do with that issue of empowering women.

So that is our big focus for the moment. The book will come out in early 2009 from Knopf.

Will it center on China?

Nicholas Kristof: No, it won't. It will center on Africa and South Asia. China, to us, strikes us as a model, in fact, of the opposite: a country that has figured out how to use women effectively.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. A hundred years ago, China was one of the worst places in the world to be born female. You had foot binding, you had child marriage, you had concubinage, you had a million constraints. Girls often didn't even get names, given names, just called "third daughter." These days, China educates girls. It gives them the autonomy to go and work in the factories. And indeed, the Chinese economic revolution over the last 20 years was very much the result of taking these village girls, who weren't contributing to the economy, letting them go to the coastal factories, and suddenly you have this economic explosion as a result. Then the girls in those factories, they tended to delay marriage, delay child-bearing, they reduced fertility, which added a demographic dividend as well, and then they tended to use that money more effectively. So that is the process that we need to see replicated in other countries as well.

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