If the supreme moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery, and of the 20th century the fight against totalitarianism, then, they write, "in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world".
The contention is as startling as the idea of a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist buying up prostitutes. I put it to them that, to some people, the claim will seem overblown. After all, you don't go lightly comparing the plight of women in developing countries today with slavery or, by implication, the Holocaust.
"This idea is a couple of decades in gestation," Kristof says. "Over those years, we reluctantly came to the conclusion that this really is the greatest moral challenge of this century."
Then WuDunn chimes in: "When you hear that 60 to 100 million females are missing in the current population, we thought that number compares in the scope and size. And then you compare the slave trade at its peak in the 1780s, when there were 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World, and you see there are now 10 times that amount of women trafficked across international borders, so you start to think you are talking about comparable weight."
There are a lot of NGOs that are currently working to stop human sex trafficking; a couple of the bigger ones are humantrafficking.change.org and ecpat.net, but if you do a web search you can find plenty more if you're looking for something to do about it.
That all said, though, there's only so much that NGOs can do - eventually, if things are really going to change, we'll need to see government action. Western countries, and especially the USA, have a lot of leverage they could put on countries that engage in this behavior (and a lot they could do to alleviate the underlying problems surrounding it). The U.S. allegedly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in part to save its women; why not exercise some authority here?
LINK: Half the Sky: how the trafficking of women today is on a par with genocide
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