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Nicholas Kristof, the two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, knows this because he bought two of them.
"And I have the receipts to prove it," Kristof told a packed house at Franklin & Marshall College's Barshinger Center for Musical Arts on Thursday night.
Kristof said he bought the two teenage girls in Cambodia for a combined total of $350 to save them from a brothel, where they probably would have been infected with HIV.
"When you can have legal title to a human being you bought in the 21st century, it's an absolute disgrace," he said.
Kristof spoke Thursday as part of a weeklong series of activities at F&M exploring human rights issues.
Coincidentally, Kristof earlier this month recognized F&M professor Carol Davis in one of his columns for Davis' funding of a street theater troupe and school workshop program in rural Nepal focusing on personal health and hygiene, girls' education and maternal mortality.
Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, are authors of the best-selling book "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," which looks at women's rights in Africa and Asia.
On those continents, Kristof said, women and girls are being systematically exploited, neglected and killed in what he called "gendercide."
Boys are valued. Girls are not. "If a family only has so much food, the boys will eat, while the girls are starved," he said.
But if developing countries want to reduce poverty and boost their economies, Kristof said, they would see a greater return on their investments if they educated their women, as opposed to putting that money into brick-and-mortar projects.
Kristof once directed funding to a village in China that promised to use that money to educate its girls at a cost of $13 per year, per girl. Many of those educated girls then went on to secure white-collar jobs in large cities.
Those women then sent money back to their village, which prospered from their contributions.
"We face here some huge problems of patriarchal cultures, even misogynistic cultures," Kristof said.
When Microsoft founder Bill Gates once traveled to Saudi Arabia to speak to a group that segregated its men from its women, who were kept to the back of the room, Kristof said, Gates was asked by a man if he thought it was possible for Saudi Arabia to be a world leader in the technology field.
Kristof said Gates told the man that would be difficult if the country only utilized half of its "talent."
In his travels to developing countries, Kristof said he has seen women overcome incredible adversity to achieve great things. Like the illiterate African woman who was impregnated at age 13 and suffered from obstetric fistula, but went on to become one of the world's leading surgical authorities on fistula repairs.
"Just as in the 19th century, the central moral challenge of the world was slavery … in this century, the cause of our times, the central moral challenge, is going to be gender inequity around the world," he said.
