A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off on Facebook

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/8xpqy3/a-teenage-girl-in-south-sudan-was-auctioned-off-on-facebook

86 76 8 years ago

news.vice.com

Not to sound insensitive, but I think some of the worlds problems are caused by the fact that it's easier for people to get emotional about a specific incident they can put a face on than a systematic problems.

reasonablemann• 8 years ago

No reason to 'think' that, incidents involving a single person do tend to generate a stronger emotional response.

"The statistics of large-scale killing don't convey emotion"

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/09/6661503...

cortesoft3• 8 years ago

The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

mikeash6• 8 years ago

While I totally agree, it also seems to me that this sort of thinking is almost always used as an excuse not to care about anything, rather than a call to care more about the bigger stuff too.

coldtea2• 8 years ago

it also seems to me that this sort of thinking is almost always used as an excuse not to care about anything

Caring is overrated. Unless one does something about what they care for, it's not just useless but also harmful (e.g. stressful to the person caring with no effect towards solving the problem).

alexandercrohde2• 8 years ago

Well I'm not sure you can discard a point because people tend to use it wrong.

If somebody doesn't want to care about something the "reason" they give is likely not important, at the end of the day it's an emotional decision. If you want to make people care about something, I recommend offering them a situation where they can sleep better at night when they care.

fgbfyhvfghu• 8 years ago

This reaction is well understood by the media. When they want to humanize an issue they will go to great lengths to dig and find relatable and shocking ways to tell a story. That they do not is more telling about the interests of the people that fund them, all billionaires that profit from mass suffering and the exploitation of labor and vulnerable populations.

ddingus• 8 years ago

Then again, a whole lot of us know someone got sold too.

Nail the fuckers somehow. That is not OK.

Delmania• 8 years ago

Isn't this evolution at play? Getting emotional over every large scale systemic issue we encounter would overwhelm us, so the larger the numbers the more we dehumanize?

starbeast3• 8 years ago

When discussing a teenage girl being auctioned off on facebook, that does kind of come across as just a wee bit insensitive and prefacing it with 'not to sound insensitive' doesn't in fact assuage that in any measurable way.

Single incidents sparking outrage are a force in society that we are not going to get rid of any time soon. The last thing we need is people outraged over an incident of slavery to be told to be apathetic, as the people who help promote it, which now apparently includes facebook, aren't going to suddenly be all reasonable if everyone shouts less about single incidents. While the solutions that are required may be structural, everything ever complained about is an incident.

grecy• 8 years ago

I realize this is horrific for many living in the Western World, but I think it's important to keep it in perspective.

Does anyone really think it wouldn't have happened without Facebook? That it hasn't been happening for thousands of years?

It's not like the invention of Facebook created this.

This is also the epitome of "think of the Children". I realize that in our culture auctioning off children is not acceptable, but who's to say we know what's right? maybe we're OK auctioning off rabbits or religious artifacts but another culture would find that horrific. So should we just say that whatever we deem OK is fine?

NedIsakoff• 8 years ago

But its easier for politicans in that country to blame $FB then to blame their own country people.

darpa_escapee• 8 years ago

Backpage and SESTA would like to have a word with you.

amingilani• 8 years ago

I come from a country where child marriages are fairly common, despite being illegal — but the law isn't enforced.

The marriages aren't arranged on social media yet, but I don't see why in a few years with easier access to the internet, and with younger people arranging marriages, more of these won't be done.

I don't think Facebook is to blame for this, and I do think it's unfair that Facebook is being asked to solve a problem governments haven't been able to for decades — but they're in a better position than anyone was.

but who's to say we know what's right?

However, I gotta disagree with you there. Some things we can all agree are wrong. It's a short list and it includes things like slavery, forced prostition, rape, murder, etc. But that list definitely includes selling children to the highest bidder.

saagarjha5• 8 years ago

I don't think Facebook is to blame for this, and I do think it's unfair that Facebook is being asked to solve a problem governments haven't been able to for decades — but they're in a better position than anyone was.

It really isn’t, but you have to look at it from the government’s perspective: it’s much more convenient to pin the blame on Facebook, which presumably should already have policies in place to stop things like this–of course, all the while forgetting that the same thing applies to the country and its laws itself.

mikeash6• 8 years ago

I don’t think Facebook is to blame for the problem, but they’re also not innocent here. They facilitated the transaction. It’s little different from fencing stolen goods or being a hit man’s agent. Just because governments haven’t figured out how to eradicate theft or murder doesn’t mean you’re in the clear for helping to make it happen.

analognoise• 8 years ago

Fuck cultural reletavism, we can use logic and reason to discern that auctioning off anyone is barbaric, let alone a child bride.

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

So should we just say that whatever we deem OK is fine?

Yes, pretty much. What other option is there? Has any culture not done exactly this?

saagarjha5• 8 years ago

I realize that in our culture auctioning off children is not acceptable, but who's to say we know what's right? maybe we're OK auctioning off rabbits or religious artifacts but another culture would find that horrific.

Generally we consider auctioning off people to be different enough to classify it as human trafficking, which is seperate from selling animals or objects.

matt40772• 8 years ago

Almost tautologically, without Facebook this "auction" would have had to be done using an inferior option.

Maybe it would still have happened. But in at least some cases, that inferior platform will be worse enough for the crime not to occur. Even if it's just because EBay's design is stuck in the 90s.

In any case, the "somebody else would have done it" argument didn't work in Nuremberg, and is generally recognised as a terrible conflation of morality with practicability.

DoreenMichele13• 8 years ago

"When worlds collide."

This is news primarily because putting it on Facebook made it visible to First World residents and made them feel complicit in the transaction. Otherwise, we mostly don't really care that there are child brides being auctioned off in Third World countries (etc). "Not Our Problem."

And the outrage is problematic for a variety of reasons. Historically in the US it was common for girls to get married at age 14 to 16. Deciding that age 18 is the age of legal adult consent etc is somewhat arbitrary.

That doesn't mean I approve of auctioning off young girls for marriage, but you need to look at a variety of factors and judge this in context. The practice of a bride price does two things: It compensates the parents for providing a valuable wife who will most likely never have wealth and power in her own name because that primarily goes through men in most countries the world over and the problem is more severe in less developed countries. It also is intended to insure that her husband has the capacity to provide for her.

What you see in less developed countries is less education overall and less opportunity overall and less use of effective birth control overall. So you wind up with inherent issues where getting laid at all is highly likely to lead to pregnancy and a lot of cultural practices grow out of that reality.

I'm a former full-time wife and mom. I was also one of the top three students of my graduating high school, a National Merit Scholarship winner, etc. A friend of the family once told me "Everyone expected you to be a millionaire by the age of 30. What the hell happened?" And I pointed to my kids and said "That happened." basically.

So I've spent a lot of years reading up on women's issues and history and so forth, trying to figure out why in the hell I never got the two career couple lifestyle that I expected to have and that I felt was my due in life. And it's led me to think long and hard on what I have come to think of as "human sexual morality" and the myriad things that grow out of trying to resolve the issues rooted in "people hunger for sex and then that can lead to babies, disease, social drama, etc."

How do you resolve those humanely and in a manner that treats all parties well?

Bride Price is one way some cultures try to make sure that women -- who will not have careers of their own and power of their own -- are properly cared for by upstanding citizens who are productive and take care of their family because they are good men.

It can easily go weird and bad places, but selling children into slavery isn't actually the goal of having a bride price.

I would love to see a better world. I seriously doubt we get there by jumping to ugly conclusions about other cultures and assuming the absolute worst and refusing to take context into account.

watwut3• 8 years ago

Bride Price is one way some cultures try to make sure that women -- who will not have careers of their own and power of their own -- are properly cared for by upstanding citizens who are productive and take care of their family because they are good men.

It most certainly does not ensure anything like that. It ensures that they are owned by men with money while having little to zero ability defend themselves, escape or make decisions about their own lives. It ensures that buyer will consider himself entitled to demand from her while the opposite will be seen as transgression - after all he paid money for her.

There is not guarantee that buyer is upstanding citizen or good man. Men with money beat their wifes, abuse their wifes and so on and so fort.

How do you resolve those humanely and in a manner that treats all parties well?

You don't and this arrangement is not even trying. It is about power and control. Those who have more power end up having their way over those with little power - just like with any other relationship.

DoreenMichele13• 8 years ago

I already said I don't approve of the practice.

But the reality is that the actual solution here is:

1. Turn the country into a developed country.

2. Eradicate sexism so women can have money and power in their own right.

This cannot be done overnight.

Even if you pull that off, there will be women who actually want to be home with their children when they are little. When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, I had female colleagues who expressed regret that they could not be home with their children. They could not afford it. They envied me the fact that I had been home with my kids.

So there doesn't appear to be a perfect solution here. But I can assure you that marrying a man who can afford to feed and house you is better than marrying a man who can't afford that, all other things being equal, especially when you can't possibly have a real career yourself that will provide for you.

rayiner2• 8 years ago

It ensures that they ... [have] little to zero ability defend themselves, escape or make decisions about their own lives.

In these societies all that is the baseline. The wife will be a piece of property no matter who the husband is. The bride price doesn’t create that situation.

nixarian2• 8 years ago

A lot of women trade the lives of their children for that career they feel is their "due" in life. Do you look at your children and wish you'd sacrificed them for wealth, like those other women have?

cortesoft3• 8 years ago

Do you look at men who work instead of staying home to care for their children as having 'sacrificed' their children for their wealth?

dang• 8 years ago

Taking an already-inflammatory thread directly into gender flamewar is one of the most bannable things you can do on HN. Please don't post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since you've posted trollish comments before, I've banned the account. This sort of thing will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please gratify these impulses elsewhere.

starbeast3• 8 years ago

As a counterpoint, in Sudan it goes to here - https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/26/africa/sudan-death-senten... - and people shouting judgmentally about that to Sudan has helped save that girl's life. Perhaps outrage over this might help this other girl before she ends up stabbing her husband. Might even be good for the husband.

inawarminister• 8 years ago

Just want to note that the country in this topic is SOUTH Sudan, not Sudan.

mikeash6• 8 years ago

I don’t think it’s about feeling complicit. It’s about Facebook being actually complicit.

Your age of consent discussion is way off base. Most US states put the age of consent below 18 and getting married at 16 is legal all over the place. The outrage isn’t about a 16-year-old girl getting married, it’s about her being sold.

nradov• 8 years ago

Delaware and New Jersey banned child marriage this year. I expect many other states will soon do the same.

sneak• 8 years ago

Historically in the US it was common for girls to get married at age 14 to 16.

A misleading statement. It is common in the US for people to die in a car crash, but it is still only a small percentage of people. The median marriage age was much higher, then and now.

lostgame• 8 years ago

There have some incredibly inappropriate comments in this thread, two of which I've already had to flag.

Please, everyone, respect that this is a very serious issue that isn't to be used as fodder for humour.

It's one thing to make a jab at Zuck or Facebook - it's another thing entirely to try to make any aspect of this situation funny.

Thank you.

skissane3• 8 years ago

Facebook doesn't want this kind of stuff on their platform. But, it can be very hard for them to stop it.

What language were the postings in? The article screenshots one English post, but possibly many of the others were in some local language. Facebook might not employ anyone with language skills in that language. Automated translation software often performs poorly with less common languages, if it is available at all. Even if the postings are all in some major language, they may have been using local slang or jargon, and unless Facebook has staff in or from that country, they may lack the cultural context to understand properly what is going on. Even if someone from that country reports it, it could be very difficult for Facebook's staff to fairly judge the report if they lack the necessary cultural and language skills to interpret it.

sorokod3• 8 years ago

"Facebook doesn't want this kind of stuff on their platform. But, it can be very hard for them to stop it."

So, in other words, this is the price of doing business?

skissane3• 8 years ago

Anyone who runs a website with user-submitted content has this problem. If you allow users to post content in any language, how can you effectively moderate their postings if you don't understand the language they are posting in? There are thousands of minority languages in the world, it is infeasible (even for a company as big as Facebook) to retain staff with language skills in all of them.

The other option is to ban the use of minority languages. Only major languages are allowed. But, from a human rights perspective, that is an affront to diversity and freedom, and is contributing to the endangered state of many of these languages. But, if you allow minority languages, you run the risk that people are advocating or organising human rights violations in that minority language (slave trading, advocating for genocide, etc), and the platform can't stop it because it can't understand it. So, it is a tradeoff, which threat to human rights do you prevent, because you can't feasibly prevent both.

legostormtroopr• 8 years ago

Obligatory disclaimer: Facebook has massive overreach, human trafficking is evil, etc...

I love to hate on Facebook, but given the near ubiquity of Facebook, and the internet, is this Facebook's fault? Isn't this just a consequence of ubiquitous technology?

There were so many different human technologies and inventions used in this tragedy, why lay the blame on Facebook, if we rewrote the headline, which of the following technologies are also to blame:

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off using the World Wide Web

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off using the Internet

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off using DNS & TCP/IP

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off using mobile phones

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off using written and spoken human languages

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off using money and the abstract concept of trade

AvocadoPanic• 8 years ago

If we were to make an ordered list, in decreasing 'horribleness' of all the things that are 'wrong' in South Sudan, would this even make the top ten?

A teenage girl in South Sudan was auctioned off on Facebook

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