22nd
News From Washington, January 2009
The confirmation hearing for Secretary-of-State designate, Senator Hillary Clinton, included a remarkable and inspiring exchange between Senator Clinton and Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Senator Boxer, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chair of its Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is passionate about the issue of sex trafficking, as the exchange below indicates.
Several months ago, IJM offered our constituents in California an opportunity to write to Senator Boxer and encourage her to become an “Abolition Senator” by calling upon President Obama to appoint cabinet members and diplomats who will make the abolition of slavery and trafficking a foreign policy priority. For all those IJM supporters in California who signed Abolition Senator postcards, and particularly for those members of Cornerstone Church in Livermore, CA who delivered 1300 postcards to Senator Boxer’s San Francisco office on December 12, the following exchange will be especially interesting. Thank you, Cornerstone, for encouraging your Senator to be a leader on the issue of sex trafficking!
The hearing transcript from January 13, 2009 follows:
SENATER BOXER: I don’t think we can look away from the plight of women around the world. Nicholas Kristof confronts this issue in a series of compelling articles…Kristof tells us the story of a Vietnamese girl who was kidnapped at age 13. She was sold into sex slavery in Cambodia. When she refused to see customers, she was tortured brutally with electric shocks and locked in a coffin filled with insects. And Kristof details another story in a piece called “If this isn’t Slavery than what is?” in which a young Cambodian girl had her eye gouged out by a brothel owner after taking time off to recover from a forced abortion. I’m introducing some legislation—one is a companion piece to Rep. Carolyn Maloney and another is the Afghan Women Empowerment Act. That’s just the beginning. Senator I know how deeply you feel about this so I wanted you to take a little more time to talk about your commitment to this particular issue and obviously I would be so pleased if we could work on legislation to fight this immorality.
SECRETARY OF STATE DESIGNATE HILLARY CLINTON: As Secretary of State I view these issues as central to our foreign policy, not as adjunct or auxiliary or in any way lesser from all of the other issues that we have to confront. I too have followed the stories…this is not culture, this is not custom, this is criminal. And it will be my goal to persuade more governments as I spoke with Beijing some thirteen years ago that we cannot have a free, prosperous, peaceful, progressive world if women are treated in such a discriminatory and violent way. I’ve also ready closely Nick Kristof’s articles over the last many months on the young women he’s both rescued from prostitution and met who have been enslaved, tortured in every way—physically, emotionally, morally and I take very seriously the function of the State Department to lead the US Government through the Office on Human Trafficking to do all that we can to end this modern form of slavery. We have sex slavery. We have wage slavery and it is primarily a slavery of girls and women. I look forward, Senator, to reviewing your legislation and work with you as a continuing partnership on behalf of these issues we care so much about. And finally, the work that the women of the Senate did in connection with First Lady Laura Bush on behalf of the women of Afghanistan has been extremely important. That program started in the State Department. It was assisted by an organization I helped to start in the White House called Vital Voices. Mrs. Bush has been outspoken on behalf of Afghan women…and other women facing oppression around the world…We’re going to have a very active Women’s Office a very active Office on Human Trafficking. We’re going to be speaking out consistently and strongly against the discrimination and oppression of women and slavery in particular because I think that is in keeping with not only our American values but American national security interests as well.
