Nicholas Fucking Kristof
That sanctimonious bastard and his creepy attempts to buy Cambodian girls out of slavery are absolutely taken apart by the Bionic Octopus:
As an approach to solving the problem of sex trafficking, it’s worse than useless, it’s actively harmful. As many people have pointed out, buying prostitutes creates a market in prostitutes. Duh. But beyond that, it generates the illusion that, if enough people were as caring and generous and proactive as Nicholas Kristof, we could *each* buy a woman out of prostitution and then yay! there’d be no more prostitutes!
That piecemeal liberal-charity approach is actively harmful because it works to obscure the real root causes and material conditions that engender prostitution. So while everyone involved gets to feel that they’re doing their bit and making the world better (which, give them credit, they’re [mostly] genuinely trying to do), those underlying dynamics, which will continue to throw up prostitutes (and, for that matter, suicide bombers) as fast as we buy them out, go unaddressed.
Generalized, this method siphons people’s genuine goodwill and instinct to help others off in completely impotent directions, leaving the underlying problems untouched. And then, corollarily, when one of Kristof’s purchases ends up right back in the business a year later, the narrative move is to blame her, as being somehow incorrigible. As not wanting to be saved. As if buying her and dumping her right back in the exact conditions that sent her to the brothel in the first place, the only change being one hundred Kristof-supplied (and undoubtedly Times- reimbursed) dollars in her pocket, had a Sno-Cone’s fucking chance in hell of working out.