Internal Link – Slavery
The actions of the US with regard to opium force families to sell their daughters into slavery
Galien 8 (Michael, The Atlantic, Mar. 30 2008, http://www.theatlanticright.com/2008/03/30/the-opium-brides-of-afghanistan/)IM
Afghans call the young girls who are being sold “loan brides.” Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, has called on opium farmers not to “give their daughters for money; they shouldn’t give them to old men, and they shouldn’t give them in forced marriages.” However, for the farmers there’s no other option left: if they don’t repay their loans by selling their daughters, they’re killed. This isn’t the first time that such a situation exist, even though the American and Afghani view on opium has made matters worse: in 2000 the leader of the Taliban banned poppy growing. Then too, farmers were forced to sell their young daughters. The main question is, of course, what to do about it. We can’t let them grow poppy, we can’t let them continue to destroy the lives of many thousands of people, just to earn a living. On the other hand, the Afghan government and its US ally can’t destroy the crops either; they’re ruining many lives when they do so. It seems to me that the Afghan government, the US and other allied nations – such as the Netherlands – should repay the Afghan farmers; give them money so they can pay back their loans and they don’t have to sell their daughters. Not only that, we should also teach them how to grow other crops; they’ve got to produce other products. That means that the West has to invest bigtime in Afghan farmers, but we can’t allow the “opium brides” practice to continue. Besides, the worse the situation becomes for Afghanistan’s opium farmers, and there are quite many of them, the more likely it is that they’ll turn to the Taliban, and turn their backs on the country’s central government, let alone its Western allies.
Internal Link – Abuse
Child brides are routinely beaten and abused by their husbands
Smith 10 (Mary, June 1 2010, http://www.newsoxy.com/world/child-brides-flogged-13260.html)IM
Child brides were flogged by their husbands in Afghanistan. The Afghan brides were flogged (lashes) after the children escaped from their local village. The brides, Khadija, 13, and Basgol, 14, were sent back to their home village where they received the lashing. The teenage brides were fleeing on a bus when the officers found them. Upon returning to their home village, they were brutally flogged for the runaway attempt. This situation is common in Afghanistan, even though marriage of girls under 16 and public flogging are both illegal. After their weddings, Khadija and Basgol complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Some girls have reported being routinely beaten, fed rat poison by their husbands, and forced to become suicide bombers, according to sources who have visited a shelter for escaped child brides in Kabul. Others have been killed by their fathers for fleeing their husbands. A study from the United Nations Children's Fund, (Unicef), found from 2000 to 2008, that brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Even though the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16. Tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.
Impacts
Impact – Human Rights
Child brides are a violation of human rights
NYT 9 (Sheri Stritof, Aug. 6 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/magazine/09BRI.html?_r=1)IM
Poor health, early death, and lack of educational opportunities lead the list of problems attributed to child marriage. * Child brides have a double pregnancy death rate of women in their 20s. * In developing countries, the leading cause of death for young girls between the ages of 15 and 19 is early pregnancy. * Additionally, from having babies too young, child brides are at an extremely high risk for fistulas (vaginal and anal ruptures). * The babies of child brides are sicker and weaker and many do not survive childhood. * Child brides have a higher risk of being infected with sexually transmitted diseases. * These young girls are at an increased risk of chronic anemia and obesity. * Child brides have poor access to contraception. * These young girls have a lack of educational opportunities. * Being forced into an early marriage creates a lifetime of poverty. * Statistically, child brides have a higher risk of becoming a victim of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and murder. According to "Factsheet: Early Marriage" (page 4), a report issued by the United Nations, these early marriage unions violate the basic human rights of these girls by putting them into a life of isolation, service, lack of education, health problems, and abuse. The UNICEF paper states: UNICEF is opposed to forced marriages at any age, where the notion of consent is non-existent and the views of bride or groom are ignored, particularly when those involved are under age."
Impact – Slavery
Slavery is the ultimate form of dehumanization – both physically and psychologically
Painter 6 (Nell, Feb. 14 2006, Oxford University Press, http://blog.oup.com/2006/02/slavery_a_dehum/)IM
Slaves retained their humanity thanks to the support of families and religion, which helped them resist oppression. Nonetheless, slavery was, and is, a dehumanizing institution. Assaults on the bodies and minds of the enslaved exposed them to trauma that was both physical and psychological. By the end of the eighteenth century, branding, amputation, and other extremely brutal forms of punishment became rare as means of controlling slaves. But beating continued, causing slaves’ most catastrophic physical and psychological trauma. Every ex-slave narrative includes scenes of physical torture inflicted by owners (female as well as male), overseers, and fellow slaves forced to administer their masters’ punishments. The narratives also comment on the emotional pain of parents, children, and spouses, forced to watch their kin being beaten. Artists have depicted the physical torture of slavery in countless images, such as “Slave Lynching” by Claude Clark (1915–2001). The enslaved woman’s nakedness before a crowd of onlookers adds further humiliation to the physical pain of the beating. Painter_claudeclark_slavelynching_1946_5 In addition to physical injury caused by beating, slaves suffered from the chronic conditions caused by overwork, scanty rations, and insufficient clothing. Frederick Douglass recalled going barefoot and ill clothed all winter and suffering from frostbite as a child. Stealing food to stanch constant hunger earned many a slave a whipping. Years of hard work, often in swampy conditions, left their signs within slaves’ bodies. The skeletons of enslaved children and adults working in eighteenth-century New York City bore the traces of lesions denoting excessive, repetitive stress. The remains found in the African burial ground in lower Manhattan indicate that about 50 percent of New York’s colonial Africans died before the age of twelve, and 30 to 40 percent of those children died in infancy. Many of the 40 percent of the skeletons in the burial ground belonged to preadolescent children and show the thickening of the skull associated with anemia and osteomalacia (weakening of the bones due to poor diet and nutrition). The skeletons’ enlarged muscle attachments are attributable to the heavy loads children were forced to carry. The skeletons also show signs of arthritis in the neck bones and lesions on the thighbones from muscle and ligament tears, caused by carrying heavy loads.
Dehumanization makes all impacts of nuclear war, genocide, and environmental destruction inevitable
Berube 97 (David, prof of Speech Comm. June/July 1997, Nanotechnology Magazine, http://www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/faculty/berube/prolong.htm)IM
Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.
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