Emancipation Tourism, Continued

He did the deed. In Poipet, Cambodia, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof bought two slave-prostitutes’ freedom, he writes in today’s paper, concluding his two-part series. (For our note about part one, see “Emancipation Tourism?” below.)  Kristof admits he has no idea what will come of this. “[W]ill emancipation help them?” he writes. “Will their families and villages accept them? Or will they, like some other girls rescued from sexual servitude, find freedom so unsettling that they slink back to slavery in the brothels? We’ll see.” Geez. “We’ll see” strikes me as an unsettling conclusion, and Kristof doesn’t say whether he’ll stick around to help them, if helping them is even possible. In an accompanying forum, Kristof acknowledges that his actions here won’t solve the larger problem of slave-trade prostitution in Cambodia. “But the first step,” he writes, “has to be awareness of the problem, and that’s why I’m writing these columns.” Unfortunately, given the space constraints of his columns, Kristof could only begin to explore the complexities of the issue. 

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