Hundreds of organizations that aim to help children and families living in poor African countries exist today. When watching television, we are bombarded with images of both malnourished children and what many people may consider un-progressive societies. Since this new—dare I say—trend, has begun, I have been trying, although often unsuccessfully, to become more concerned about these young children, specifically girls, in the Eastern world. In fact, my most challenging New Year’s resolution is to try and feel more compassion for others. As journalist Canice Leung claims about Westerners like herself: “We live in relative utopia, but we turn away from the world’s women, who face oppressive poverty, discrimination and violence.”
After reading her article concerning the book Half the Sky by journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, I decided it was time to learn more about the experiences that women face in other countries. So, I recently picked up the book and began reading it for myself. It tells stories about women who are trafficked, drugged, beaten, killed, and forced into prostitution in Africa, Asia, and India. As the book’s subtitle, “Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” states, it also aims to fight this oppression by helping particular organizations like American Assistance for Cambodia. I deeply admire that the book aims to bring these issues closer to home; it creates awareness about the turmoil that many of these women face. It also makes these issues important in a society that often dismisses both the impoverished children in Africa and the violence, oppression, and discrimination that occurs to women in the East.
However, as I was reading it, I began to question the book as well as the many organizations that try to help these women. Despite its strengths, Half the Sky seems to re-establish many stereotypes. It depicts the West as good, innocent, and moral, and the East as “Other.” It does not outline or even acknowledge the role that Westerners often play in increasing prostitution and violence towards minorities, both abroad and in the United States, where the authors are from. Although the issues addressed do take place in the East, where some cultural groups seem to consider their women as burdens and as inferior, Westerners are certainly not innocent. Yet, is it not these “good and innocent” Westerners who are supposed to save the poor and malnourished inferior “Others” from their fate by sponsoring children and families?
Although I agree with and encourage female empowerment, it sometimes seems as though the very empowerment that many of these organizations want to achieve is one related to Western civilization and its idea of progress. Despite the book’s profound hope to change the situation for the millions of suffering women worldwide, an optimistic view that I can certainly appreciate, there always seems to be an underlying notion that these countries need to “progress” as Western society apparently has. Despite my efforts to find ways to “help” these battered and suffering women across the world, I do not have any answers to this confusing and complex issue. All I have are questions: when it comes to female empowerment, is there a right or wrong way to achieve it? How do Westerners proceed in terms of helping women from other countries? What should our role and responsibilities be?
