Day one of the Civil Rights Summit held at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act started on a high note with a powerful trio of panel discussions and commenced with an awe-inspiring dialogue between Harry Middleton, former director of the LBJ Presidential Library, and former President Jimmy Carter. The pair discussed a wealth of topics from Carter’s presidency to the 1982 opening of The Carter Center in Atlanta and its global impact in leading peace negotiations, developing health and agriculture programs, and elections monitoring. Hitting home for this writer was the subject of Carter’s newest book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power.
Carter takes the forces that denigrate and violate women to task and addresses the plight of women in the world today.
Carter says about his book…
“For the last 32 years, we have gotten to know the lives of people in a fairly intimate way in the most remote areas of Africa, Latin America and poor countries around the world. We have seen an unbelievable prejudice and persecution of women and girls. The most horrible statistic that I know is that we believe about 40 million people were killed in the second world war – the most violent war in history. Four times as many baby girls in this generation have been killed by their own parents. They strangle the little girls at birth because they are poverty stricken, can’t afford a large family and they don’t know much about birth control. They only want [to have] boys. We know in China and India they put a mandate on family size. One is best; two is most. There’s a new movie titled It’s a Girl, and in it a woman from India says she and her husband have strangled eight girls. [Subsequently], in these countries there is a shortage of wives.”
How they’re bypassing this issue …
“They import them as slaves where women are [sold] cheaply. They are involuntary slaves. Slavery at this moment is greater than it has even been. It amounts to about $32 billion per year. The State Department said there were 800,000 slaves sold across the border. Of those, 80 percent are young girls sold into sexual slavery.
“In the U.S. last year, there were 100,000 girls sold into sexual slavery. Atlanta is the No. 1 trading point for imported girl slaves from other countries because we have the busiest airport on earth. A lot of our passengers comes from the southern hemisphere. A brothel owner can buy girls cheaper if she is from the south with brown skin, averaging $1,000. If she comes from the northern hemisphere with white skin, she might cost $2,000 to $8,000. It’s what’s going on in our country and around the world.”
On what he considers the worst human rights violation on earth …
“In places like Egypt, 98 percent of females [have] had [their] sexual organs mutilated. In some countries, it’s 95 percent. In about half the countries in Africa, more than half the females have their genitals mutilated with ‘cutters.’ Sometimes they sew up the orifice so they can only urinate or menstruate. When they get married she is cut again so she can have sex with her husband and deliver babies.”
