I went back to the women and said, ‘Tell me exactly what you want us to do.’ And they said, ‘Don’t do anything for us, do somethingfor our children’.
In India, a “bride burning”– to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry– takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.
There are 2-3 millions prostitutes in India, and although many of them now sell sex to some degree willingly, and are paid, a significant share of them entered the sex industry unwillingly.
Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there’s not much else available commercially– except sex.
Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.
But they had learned an important lesson about how defeating poverty is more difficult than it seems at first.
One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.
Often we blame a region’s religion when the oppression instead may be rooted in its culture. Yet, that acknowledged, it’s also true that . . . it is often cited by the oppressors.
The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.
Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.
Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.
Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.
You don’t need to invade a place or install a new government to help bring about a positive change.