Translator: Janet Paton Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
[Imagine being sent to prison
for leaving your home without your husband's permission,
refusing to marry your rapist
or running away from an abusive husband with your child,
then being sent to prison for kidnapping - with your child ... ]
I was cleaning my room when he entered.
He tied my hands and feet.
He pulled me towards him.
I wanted to scream,
but he covered my mouth with his hand.
I ran twice around the house. He had a massive iron rod in his hand.
He said, "I will piss in your mouth, you bitch!
Why did you take the pills! Why didn't you tell me!"
When I was living with him, it was like dying every day.
[Half of Afghanistan's female prisoners are detained for "moral crimes".]
[United Nations, 2010]
(Music)
Narrator: This is the story of countless women
stuck in a justice system run by men prejudiced by culture and tradition.
He said, "It is very easy to kill you,
so don't tell anyone about this."
The authorities walk all over the law.
They don't care about women's rights, and they try to veil the truth.
I am completely innocent. They imprisoned me, but I am not guilty.
[Film by Clementine Malpas and Leslie Knott]
(Music)
"To understand something," Socrates said, "you must name it."
Let's name the story you just saw and all global injustices against women
"gender apartheid."
I chose the word "apartheid" for two reasons.
The first reason is that violence against women
is the most common, most pervasive human rights abuse on the planet.
And secondly, because it's seemingly impossible to end it.
But we all know apartheid can end
even when it's impossible and it takes a while,
which it will in Afghanistan,
the worst place on earth to be born a woman.
It has the lowest literacy rate for women and the highest maternal death rate.
One in seven women die giving birth.
And under Sharia law,
two men can verbally accuse a woman of a crime,
say adultery, or leaving the house without permission,
and she is deemed guilty and an outcast, as are her children.
The lucky ones, like the women in the film,
like Gulnaz, who refused to marry her rapist -
the lucky perpetrators of these moral crimes are sent to prison.
The alternative is being stoned to death.
I'm a journalist and humanitarian filmmaker,
which means I travel to exotic places which will never host a Club Med,
to tell the stories of people who have no opportunity to speak for themselves.
More often than not,
I'm relating the suffering of the most disenfranchised.
The women and children in war zones like South Sudan, and Afghanistan,
and Iraq, and we know so many more.
The job is a barbed gift.
My work chips away at the invisible inequities of life.
But the news is mostly bad, and the latitudes simply change.
So why bother?
That's the second question people usually ask me.
The first one is "Can you introduce me to the Dalai Lama?"
(Laughter)
I'll get to him in a minute.
But first, I'm going to admit something really embarrassing.
Doing a TED Talk has been on my bucket list for years,
(Laughter)
and I've often imagined myself on the stage,
pretending I'm really intelligent
and at the same time, trying to logically explain
why I'm a perversely lucky journalist
who gets to forego pantyhose and at the same time piss off the Taliban.
Now, I'm not a serious person, as you can tell,
but my work is very serious.
In fact, "Je suis Charlie," as are you even if you don't know it.
Evolutionary biologists say that external stress is the only factor
that causes an organism to change and adapt to a new life.
And humans, we're the most powerful force on the planet,
and that includes all of us, right?
Now I'm looking out here, and I can see people thinking,
"Ugh, I am not an activist.
I don't know how to start. I don't know where to go.
How long is this woman going to talk?"
And I feel like that too sometimes.
Especially because working in a refuge camp,
every day is like Groundhog Day.
It just goes on and on.
But the difference is that I experienced a life-changing epiphany
in the produce department of my local grocery store.
I know how to change the world even if it's impossible
and it will take a very long time.
It happened six years ago.
I had just returned from my fourth trip to Afghanistan
where I was covering an exclusive access story
to the hundred million dollar Taliban detention center
at Bagram Airforce Base.
My crew and I had toured the facility
and observed the 24-hour cameras on the Quran,
to make sure that there were no US military transgressions.
I had seen the hot pot-pies,
the state of the art medical and exercise facilities,
and I was impressed.
But I was really confused when the commanding officer said to me
"We're turning this prison over to the Afghans in a year."
But how do they run their prisons now?
And why would we give them the keys to all these high priority Taliban prisoners?
And the general,
which I bet you all remember, General David Petraeous,
that brilliant military strategist and incredible public servant
who had one moment's bad judgement with a war zone journalist; not moi.
(Laughter)
He assured me that political negotiations and training had been taken care of.
So, stay with me here.
We're going around this Afghan corner to the produce department.
So I'm walking to the helicopter, Black Hawk rides are part of it -
perks of war zone journalists.
And one of the prison guards whispers to me,
"You should see the women's prisons!"
Now, for a woman who cultivates dangerous enthusiasms,
this guy was my Afghan Deep Throat.
So I say to my reluctant driver, "I'm going to give you a hundred bucks,"
and we negotiated the IED laden dirt road 30 miles
to the nearest women's prison, which was in Parwan.
Afghanistan has 32 provinces; 32 women's prisons.
Got there and gave the prison director a hundred bucks.
No problem. I'm in.
It used to be, when I first started going to Afghanistan,
six months after shock and awe,
you could give Karzai a hundred bucks and get in there.
Now it takes like several suitcases of hundred bucks,
and he's not even president anymore.
So I get inside.
There's snow on the ground outside, and inside, in one concrete room,
are 38 women and 18 children with no heat.
And Gulnaz, the woman in the film, had just given birth a week earlier
to her baby daughter on the floor, without a doctor in attendance.
I had to promise my driver a new windshield,
but we stayed for seven hours and got their stories,
and they were incredible.
I went back home.
CNN and NBC, they were vying for the exclusive access footage
to the hundred-million dollar Taliban facility.
But no media outlet, no magazine, no newspaper, no TV,
would run the Afghan women's story.
I offered it for free. I pitched it for seven months.
The standard rejection was: people have compassion fatigue.
They don't want to hear about Afghanistan, about these poor women.
There's nothing they can do.
So I became disheartened. I became disgusted.
I decided I was going to change my career to knitting!
And then finally,
this very brave editor-in-chief of Marie Claire magazine
broke ranks and said, "I'm going to bust this story out.
I just can't stand it anymore."
And so, that was October 2011. And I'm headed to the produce department.
Things are good. Plenty of organic choices.
The story is coming out. They're going to do a huge spread.
The only problem is that the designer, Tom Ford,
did not have time to make the really cool T-shirts
the magazine was going to sell so we could help these women and children,
and so his problem became my problem.
Because I knew for the first time in my life, 12 years career,
that my article was not really going to be able to help these women
who were locked in Afghan prisons.
This was a painful admission.
So I thought, well, I already do so much! Way more than other people.
Why does it have to be me? Why can't someone else step up?
I went so far as to compare myself: I'm sure Nelson Mandela has felt the same.
(Laughter)
This is where we're going to go.
And that's when a woman walked up and accusingly pointed at the arugula
and said, "Can you believe they're charging $11 a pound,
and it's wilted?"
I stare at her.
Then I began to sob like a crazy woman.
I get it. I cannot change the world!
It's impossible!
But what I realized was that even if I -
(Fixing her microphone) I bet I can do this. I'm a journalist!
(Laughter)
So, what I realized was
that I can write truthful, genuine stories
that can change people's minds, and they can take action,
and then their world would change
even if it's impossible and it will take a while.
So armed with this revelation, I decided I had to know
why some people stepped up all the time - you know who you are -
and some people, well, they just wanted arugula.
So, for example, ask yourself why is it, after you try desperately
not to meet the eyes of the homeless guy who is standing on the corner
with that cardboard sign that says "Will work for food, but prefer not to,"
do you finally fish some money out of your pocket - or not?
Why do we give?
I asked myself this, and I came up with really good reasons.
I give because I can alleviate the problems or at least try to.
I give because I'm a good person if I do.
I give because I'm an absolute slimeball
if I'm drinking a double caramel macchiato that costs five bucks,
and I don't give to that guy.
Or maybe I just need a tax write-off.
Well, whatever the reason,
if we examine the motivation behind our giving,
no matter how worthy the cause, the silent noun is always "I."
In the end, you might be forced into child marriage,
but if I give some money, we both get to feel better.
So giving in the conventional sense
is motivated by our own needs, when we're honest, not theirs.
And this explains why giving to others often feels more like an obligation
than an inspiration.
Okay, so in 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow studied human motivation,
and he created a chart called Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I applied this motivational chart to giving.
According to Maslow,
humans share universal needs that motivate us to take certain actions.
First, there are deficiency needs, which are driven by survival and lack.
Ninety-eight percent of the entire world lives on less than $2 a day,
and they live in the lower four,
most of them in the first two levels of these deficiency needs.
So, if your child is dying of starvation or lack of clean drinking water,
you are not going to be thinking about your neighbors problems, nor arugula.
Okay, and then, when these needs are met, we raise up to the cognitive needs.
But if you look at this chart, even at the highest levels
of self fulfillment, self-actualization, mastery,
say Sam Walton's net worth,
our motivations are still driven by needs.
So, we evolved Westerners - that's us -
the humans that are up in the top three categories,
we're very needy Barney Fife characters
that are driven now by what we think we need:
more power, more money, more knowledge, more sex,
a better job, a better spouse, a better world.
At least until you get to transcendence, according to Maslow,
and that's where the Dalai Lama resides.
I'm pretty sure, because he personally told me,
that compassion is black and white,
and that I needed to be as forgiving of George Bush,
as I was of the Iraqi children.
Now, I was pretty sure this was a lifetime assignment.
(Laughter)
And then he went on to say that W was also the American president
that has done the most for the Tibetan refugees.
And guess which former first lady is the biggest champion
of human rights for Afghan women?
Laura Bush.
So back to the produce department, dragging the needs chart in there.
And here's what I realized.
I was motivated, driven, passionate, and risked my life to help other people
because it made me feel good.
In fact, the deal was it was like my drug of choice.
And this is why our good intentions are often misguided.
We are serving our own needs before the needs of those we serve.
Hear it again.
We are serving our own needs before the needs of those we serve.
Which is why 600 billion in international aid is impotent.
We all need food, and water, and rest,
and some of us think we need fresh arugula.
This personal transparency into my own needs
allowed me to see what other people need
and how the world can change.
I can't change the world, but I can tell the truth.
I have a tiny pedestal that keeps me off the street corner
yelling, "The end is coming!"
And in those articles, or in those films, I can invite you to change your mind
to see the world as it truly is and as it can be.
And then you can do what you can do, and then the world will change
even if it's impossible and it's takes a while.
I know this because I went home from the produce department
and posted a plea on Facebook.
I needed some help to design a T-shirt,
because Marie Claire would run it in the magazine.
I had 24-hours!
I had a Boise based company that designed the very cool, not-guilty T-shirt.
It went in the magazine's article,
and we sold $25,000 worth within two months,
which we then donated and got literacy teachers and school supplies
in 11 of those 32 prisons.
I started the Afghan Women's Justice Project
to keep this program afloat.
Now, AWJP is still alive and well. It's tiny.
We have a website with volunteers that ship these T-shirts out of my garage.
But we still fund the literacy teachers and the kids's school supplies.
We even bought a van for the kids.
Now, 130,000 people have signed our petition to end gender apartheid
and stop imprisonment for moral crimes without due process.
And our stories in Marie Claire
created a groundswell of international press
that forced President Karzai to grant amnesty to Gulnaz and her daughter,
and they're free today.
And for me, I've stopped complaining about arugula, although I never did.
And I've also stopped giving, and I invite you to do the same.
Instead, do something.
Do anything but nothing, for someone else.
It will change their world. It will change your world.
And eventually, the world will change even if it's impossible.
Thank you.
(Applause)