ARP

The late Nelson Mandela once stated, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Along with Mandela, the Half the Sky Movement believe in the same concept. “75 million primary school-age children are not in school [and] [m] ore than half are girls”(Half the Sky Movement par. 3) Even in an issue that affects millions of people, somehow girls end up at the bottom of the pit. On the Half the Sky section under PBS.org, it says, “20% of girls are not in primary school globally while 16% of boys are not.” The question that surfaced when being introduced to these statistics is whose fault is it? In a The Guardian article titled “70 Million Children Get No Education, Says Report,” Shepard implicitly points her fingers at the rich countries [who] have failed to keep their promises to help poor countries improve their education systems. However, from the statistics, I believe that the issue is more than just poverty; I believe the concept that a man’s education is more important than a woman’s is also a factor. Why is that? My view on the situation is that society expects women to only be housewives because if they got an education and decided to become a doctor or lawyer, apparently they are not a suited parent.

Half the Sky has come up with ways to promote children to attend school regularly. Amid these strategies are offering rewards for kids who do well in school, providing sanitary female products and making sure all children have access to bathrooms, and bribing their families with cash grants in exchange for keeping them in school and getting regular medical check-ups. According to the World Bank, it has helped raise high school attendance by ten percent for boys and twenty percent for girls.

Being...

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...t the stories that I have came in contact with, human trafficking can happen anywhere. As I was reading how “The investigation revealed at least five foreign nationals, including one minor, were victims of sex trafficking, the police department said. They were victims of sex trafficking at several locations in Winston-Salem,” I could not believe my eyes (Hinton, par. 27).

It just so happens that they were caught in my city. The place where I grew up. Could I have been a victim?

Yes, that might have been one incident. Still, they just so HAPPENED to be caught. If the investigation has been going for four years then they apparently had to be getting it under wraps. The likelihood that there are others out there is very high, in my opinion. I do not blame people for hesitating to believe the facts because it is not something that we want our country to be known for.