Thank god I kept the receipt!

Good post, Naina. Keep up the good work!

I agree!

But this is fairly common isn’t it? Journalists run in pretty specific, circumscribed circles, so it’s pretty obvious that an American (particularly a white American who lives in a major, Northern city) can get profiled for doing something interesting with his money, while it takes a Nobel Prize to get coverage for homegrown South Asian activists to get even a column inch. It’s not just India that gets marginalized, it’s the whole “bridge and tunnel” world.

It would be (and was) reported as something horrific and bad — but it would not be reported as proving an essential primitive darkness at the heart of British civilisation, or as being the normative behaviour of British men.

Red Snapper’s comment reminded me that if this took place somewhere in Europe or America, it would be reported in a clinical fashion, but more importantly, as being outside the norm.

As I reading I was reminded about an article I read recently about modern day sex slavery in Britain. Girls from the poorest countries in eastern Europe, mostly Romania and Albania, are lured by organised gangs to England on the promise of a job as a maid or au pair. When they get here, because those countries are not in the European Union, they are effectively illegals, and the mafia pimps beat them up and force them to work as prostitutes servicing up to 30 men a day on the same damp mattress, kept locked away and not allowed to even go for a walk unnacompanied. This is modern (non primitive) Britain — interesting to see how these stories are contextualised differently. Effectively they are raped many times a day, beaten to an inch of their life if they rebel, are threatened with deportation by their pimps, told that if they rebel their families back in Romania will be informed and shamed by what their daughter is doing in London or Birmingham.

The tragic thing is that this trade and sexual enslavement happens everywhere — wherever there is money and a route between that money and desperate and poor women, there will always be wicked people to facilitate the meeting of men wanting to buy sex and those desperate and poor women. The demand from men is insatiable, and there is a complete failure by the men to see the woman whom they pay to degrade as anything other than a piece of meat.

We can start by bringing these disgusting episodes out into the open ourselves instead of being forced to by “foreign” reporters. I don’t agree with characterizations and generalizations, but when these reporters go over there, and use terms that sound derogatory, they are simply reporting that world as they see it (and probably in a way many other white Americans, their target audience, would see it).

You aren’t going to change people’s attitudes over there by making excuses and hiding dirty laundry. Why can one white guy with $50 effect more change than the hard working NGOs? Because shame is a powerful motivator.

The warlords in Waziristan aren’t going to stop honor killings because Nick Kristoff or anyone else writes about them, but neither did “moderate” president Pervez do anything until he was forced to deal with it due to exposure and embarrasment. Honor killings won’t end until more Pakistanis demand an end to them. Many do, but not enough.

I thought something was odd.

Sorry, Al-Mujahid. I shouldn’t comment after only one coffee.

I consider him the posterboy for the kind of bad journalism Naina addresses in her excellent post.