One Simple Step

By Seth -
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are a husband-wife team who've enrolled in the battle they consider to be the "greatest moral challenge of this century." Ed Pilkington details their war on injustice in a recent Guardian article.

The outrage is "gendercide;" it is the subject of their book Half the Sky and the focus of their life mission.

"Gendercide," as detailed by Kristof and WuDunn, includes (but is not limited to) sex slavery, "honor" killings, genital mutilation, and infanticide. The numbers of women affected are truly staggering. For example, 60 to 100 million females are missing in the current population---a statistic the authors use to justify their comparison of this injustice in scale and scope to the slave trades of old and the Nazi Holocaust.

When the authors of Half the Sky encountered these brutalities firsthand, they were shaken by how "open" and "blatant" it is, such as police standing nearby as a young girl's virginity is auctioned off---not to help her, but to ensure her return to her "owners" if she were to escape.

The lingering question is: how could mankind do this to one of his own? How could men purchase women and become rich off of their sexuality? How could families kill their daughters deemed to have disgraced the family? How could those in power turn a deaf ear and blind eye to all of this?

WuDunn's conclusion: "the disregard of women as human beings."

This is a common thread held throughout historical injustices---the victimizer stripping the personhood status away from the victims, thereby justifying himself in committing unthinkable crimes upon the weak.

Consider the arguments of those like Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason.com, used to support embryonic stem cell research. Regarding fertilized embryos, Bailey writes, "we do in fact know that these embryos are not people." This argument---that the pre-born are not persons---is the one used not only to argue for embryonic stem cell research but also for the daily killing of abortion.

That, then, is all it takes---the one simple step to justifying injustice: dehumanize/devalue the victim. The victimizer simply needs to assert that the victim is not a "person," that she is not valuable. Once society buys into this lie, the masses will walk by in apathy as the victims cry for pity.

This was seen in the slave trade and the Holocaust. WuDunn and Kristof argue that it is happening with women across the globe.

And, most assuredly, this is what is happening to the pre-born.

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