Save the world with a change.org petition! (UPDATES)

Here’s a link to a facebook posting by A Mighty Girl (a girl-empowerment website that happens to sell girl-empowering books and media) that a friend “shared”; I imagine that if you’re a facebook user, the link will work for you, but not if you’re not, so here’s the text:

Take action to ‪#‎BringBackOurGirls‬ 

Over 270 Nigerian girls between 15 and 18 years old were kidnapped from their school two weeks ago by Boko Haram militants, a terrorist group whose name translates to “Western education is sinful.” The school’s principal, Hajiya Asabe Ali Kwambula, told the New York Times yesterday that 53 girls managed to escape while 223 are still missing. The girls have reportedly been taken to a terrorist camp deep in the forest, although new reports have come in this week from remote villages that some of the girls have been “auctioned off to Boko Haram members for 2,000 Naira” — about $12 — for forced “marriages” or sex slavery.  

Nigerians have been holding mass protests this week calling on President Goodluck Jonathan to deploy every means possible to find the girls. You can join the international call to action to bring back the girls by supporting two petitions that have been building momentum: 

 – A Change.org petition to President Jonathan at http://chn.ge/1ioL496 

– A TakePart petition to Nigerian officials and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at http://bit.ly/1rUgsPa 

You can learn more about the kidnappings in these articles in the NY Times at http://nyti.ms/1rSD7eZ or in the New Yorker at http://nyr.kr/1mZgi9F 

While this kidnapping is shocking in its scale, the kidnapping and trafficking of girls and women is a tremendous global problem. The U.S. State Department estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year and 80% of those trafficked are women and girls, mostly for sexual exploitation. 

To learn more about this problem and how communities are fighting against it, we highly recommend “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” at http://www.amightygirl.com/half-the-sky and the accompanying documentary, for ages 13 and up, at http://www.amightygirl.com/half-the-sky-documentary 

For an excellent though challenging novel about one girl’s experience being trafficked into prostitution, we highly recommend “Sold” for readers 14 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/sold 

The recently released film, “Girl Rising,” also explores the challenges faced by many girls in developing countries at http://www.amightygirl.com/girl-rising 

To learn about several organizations working to end sex trafficking, visit Half the Sky’s resource page at http://bit.ly/1lEYjTS

I copied over the whole thing so as to not appear to be cherry-picking, but didn’t do the necessary additional work to make the links clickable, but you get the idea.

The penultimate links are all to products this website sells, but that’s not really my beef.  It’s the idea that an American attaching their name to an online petition is “taking” a meaningful “action” that will, in any way, “bring back” these girls.

The Boko Haram terrorist group is not some kind of fringe group, and this kidnapping is not an isolated event.  The Nigerian government is already pursuing them aggressively; CNN actually has a pretty good summary.

This is not too different from the “kony” campaign from a couple years ago, in which teenagers thought that by buying bracelets and sharing a video they could Make a Difference and Take Action.  It’s like the countless other change.org petitions and other campaigns to “share” your support for a cause via facebook or other social media.

Now, it’s true that even small monetary donations can, in the aggregate, make a difference.  But people are being conditioned to think that you don’t really need to make any sacrifice other than a trivial sacrifice of mere seconds of your time to do something — and the skeptic in me wonders whether, far from motivating people to take a next step, these sorts of meaningless actions give people the false impression that they have already “done something,” and they just move on to the next tweet or facebook item.

UPDATE:

Apparently we have moved from “tweeting to save the world” to actually suggesting that the US should step in, in terms of the statements of politicians and blog comments alike — but we’re still in fantasyland; it’s just that instead of imagining that a twitter campaign will change the minds of the girls’ captors, we’re imagining that the U.S. military could neatly and surgically swoop in and rescue the girls, risk-free.  As National Review writer Tom Rogan says, sending in U.S. troops is, in fact, a risky endeavor.  Remember how quickly Somalia went from U.S. troops being blinded by the reporters’ cameras’ flashes to Black Hawk Down?  How many U.S. troops’ deaths are we OK with to rescue these girls?  (And would a rescue be a one-time deal, or do we need a long-term engagement to defang Boko Harem and prevent their continued attacks on villages and schools?)

Of course, Rogan goes on to say that we should send in the drones — but even this isn’t a simple solution.  What happens when a drone is shot down?  Or when a drone kills the girls, or when the captors figure out what’s going on and use the girls as human shields rather than simply as slaves?

There is no answer.  We as Americans want to think that we can fix the rest of the world, and it even seems to me that this idea has taken an even firmer hold more recently.