Half the Sky #1

"In the wealthy countries of the West, discrimination is usually a matter of unequal pay or underfunded sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In contrast, in much of the world discrimination is lethal."       By Nicholas D. Kristof


Can you believe that a little Indian girl dies every four minutes only because she is born female? It is actually happening in 21 century. As the quote shows, the images of gender equality in our mind--People who live in wealthy countries, are sex discrimination in employment, occupational segregation by gender, pay gap, etc. However, knowing how many females die from "genderside," these issues started to sound like a luxury problem to me. I don't mean to disparage the hardship that western women undergo, but at least, it is not a matter of survival.

I was unable to hold back my tears when I read the story of Meena. The author calls it modern slaves, but slaves certainly have better lives than those women who are sold to brothels and held in captivity. I can't and don't want to believe that this is happening somewhere while I'm writing this post. More heartbreaking part is, "Those who start out enslaved often accept their fate eventually and sell sex willingly, because they know nothing else and are too stigmatized to hold other jobs." They end up confine themselves to what they do and never learn what they can do. In that sense, presence of organizations like Apne Aap and AAFC are like a ray of sunshine because they offer actual help to those people, rather than having an armchair argument. I was glad to find out that many people care about this issue and try to make changes.