Social Conflict

Summarize the documentary.

One of the women introduced is Srey Rath, a young Cambodian woman. She is
discovered at a market stall selling goods. At 15 years old, she and her friends went to Thailand
to be a dishwasher, as promised by a certain job agent. However, instead of Thailand, they were
brought to the capital of Malaysia. They were given off to a gangster. The gangster then told
them that he paid for them and in order to be freed, they had to pay him back. Rath soon realizes
that the job was prostitution. Initially, Rath succumbed to resistance. With the first client, she put
up a struggle to keep herself from being read. As a consequence, the head gangster beat her up.
She was then beat, raped, and drugged by the head gangster and other thugs. This was for the
purpose of forcing her into submission. When she refused to comply, they threatened to kill her.
Eventually, she gave up and forced a smile on her face when serving her customers. She was
paid nothing, fed insufficiently, and confined in an apartment with other girls. Rath and other
girls then tried to escape their apartment by trying to cross to the neighboring building using a
wooden board tenth story high off the ground. They made it and reported to the police
department. However; they were arrested for violating anti-immigration laws. Rath was put in a
Malaysian prison for a year. Just when she thought she was close to freedom, a policeman sold
her off to a trafficker in Thailand. Another woman, Meena Hasina, was a former trafficked
prostitute. When she was nine years old, she was a victim of kidnapping. She was coerced to
prostitution at a very young age. At first, she tried to resist the customers. So, the owners beat,
raped, and drugged her. Eventually, she stopped resisting. The disciplinarian in the brothel was a
woman called Ainul, who beat Meena even for the smallest things, like crying. According to
Kristof and WuDunn, India is probably has more slaves under such circumstances that in any
other part of the world. Those who begging as slaves, eventually turn to prostitution. This is
because the stigma that comes with prostitution blocks other job opportunities. It is said that
prostitution is more common in “sexually conservative countries” such as India and Iran. Forced
prostitution is widespread in said countries. In a way, due to their conservative culture, men turn
to prostitutes to release sexual frustration. Societies ignore this, as long as the girls are part of the
lower classes. Meena’s children, Naina and Vivek, were held in captivity. She was almost not
allowed to see them. Her children were held captive as prevention to Meena running away.
Meena was stubborn and strong so she was a recipient of regular beatings. However, this also
helped her plan an escape. She escaped to go to the police and ask for help. She was subject to
mockery from the police, but made the brothel owners restrain from punishing her. The a
neighbor learns of the owners’ plan to kill Meena, so she tells her. She then fled to the town of
Forbesgunge. She was found by Ainul’s son and was told that she was allowed to live outside the
confines of the brothel under the condition that she continued to the prostitution job and give her
earned money to the brothel owners. However, Meena was still occasionally beat by Ainul’s son.
One day, a man named Kuduz, decided to defend her. Kuduz and Meena then falls in love with
each mother, get married and have two children. Yet, Meena still wanted to bring back two of
her children. She went to the brothel in hopes of rescuing them, but to no avail. She also received
no help whatsoever from the police. Woinshet Zebene is an Ethiopian girl. She was born to a
culture where women were kidnapped and raped for rejecting a man. A woman being raped
obligates to her to marry their rapist, since she will have a problem finding another husband.
Ethiopian law protects rapists from prosecution when they turn to marriage. When she was a
teenager, Woinshet was a victim of this cultural norm. According to Woinshet and her father,
stealing a goat is a grave offense while kidnapping a woman is not. Woinshet, at thirteen, was
kidnapped from her hut, by several men. For two days, she was raped and beat. Following her
escape, her dad refused to marry her off to her rapist. They then reported the rape as a crime.
Woinshet had to walk to a bus stop, wait for two days, just to have her pelvic examined.
Villagers told the family to settle the issue once and for all by agreeing to marriage. However,
they were firm in their denial. Woinshet was then again abducted and raped by the same people.
She tried to escaped, was recaptured and took to court. The officials sided with the rapist.
Woinshet disliked the idea of marrying young. She endured the accusation thrown at her for
breaking tradition, and wanted to resume her education. She fled from the compound were she
was held captive by her rapist, went to the jail, she was put in a cell for protection. Her rapist
roamed free. The judge finally sentenced her rapist to a ten-year imprisonment, but he was soon
freed. Due to fear, Woinshet left Addis Ababa to live with her father.

Integrate concepts learned from the previous lecture, specifically on the readings on Social
Conflict.
As Coser said, the disintegration of old tradition, the conflicting between contrasting
values, no longer restrained by medieval structure, calls for new forms of unification and
integration. The women in the documentary were brought up in rigid and traditional societies.
Like many other, they were victims of patriarchy. Their experiences are appalling and
heartbreaking yet at the same time, inspiring. These were tales of headstrong and brave women,
who resisted patriarchal values and challenge the status quo. This is not to diminish their
sufferings, but show how they fought against a system that oppressed them. First, we have Srey
Rath, who fought hard for resistance. Despite failure to get help from the police, she did not give
up. In a system that is against her, she resisted and fought back, which is why she lives to tell her
story. This clash of values and resistance against the existing social system made her successful
in her pursuit for freedom. Meena Hasina, who used to be a trafficked prostitute, and went
through a heart-wrenching series of torture and challenges, tried to resist her plight. In India,
where slavery is common, discrimination against the lower classes is a norm, and where men are
above women in power, Meena was at an obvious disadvantage. In a sexually conservative
culture, many women like Meena were forced into prostitution. Through prostitutes, men can
satisfy their sexual urges. This was an established structure. Just like Rath, Meena did not easily
submit to these structure. She restrained. She went to police whom did not help her at all and
sided with the prostitutes as well. This is an evidence of how officials want to maintain
established routines. Siding with Meena meant disrupting the current patriarchal structure. It is
commonplace for women to be coerced into prostitution, therefore intervention was a sign of
challenging tradition. Again, Meena, despite being a product of a system that is against her,
continues to resist. With her courage, she found ways to escape her plight. Her resistance has
created conflict. However, rejection of the rigid structure does not automatically result to a major
change in system. As Coser stated, unlike biological organisms, it is difficult to assign the death
and birth of societies. It is not clear-cut and there is always a continuity between the past and
present. This is why, even though people have resisted and fought against the system, the
structure has not entirely changed. To this day, women in India still undergo similar experiences
as Meena Hasina. Woinshet Zebene, also, was exposed to male-centered culture. Woinshet was
raped several times. In her culture, raped women were obligated to marry their rapists. However,
Woinshet and her father refused. Just like the previous girls, Woinshet rejected the current
system. Despite pressures from others to settle the problem by marriage, they stayed firm in their
decisions. Moreover, Woinshet, despite what she had gone through, wanted to become educated.
She was in a culture where women were not encouraged to go to school and receive education,
yet she wanted to. Also, she was against the idea of marrying young. Woinshet was basically an
antithesis of what a woman should be in her culture. Just like Dahrendorf established in the
second model of society, “every element in a society contributes to its change.” Resistance of the
status quo by a few people can eventually affect the structure of the society. It is also said that
every society rests on constraint of some of its members by others.

References:

Coser, L. A. (1957). Social Conflict and the Theory of Social Change. The British Journal of 
Sociology, 8(3), 197. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2307/586859

‌Dahrendorf, R. (2007). Toward a Theory of Social Conflict. The Journal of Conflict 

Resolution, 2(2), 170–183. Retrieved from http://www.csun.edu/~snk1966/Ralph%20Dahrendorf
%20Toward%20a%20Theory%20of%20Social%20Conflict.pdf (Links to an external site.)

Half the Sky Introduction Summary & Analysis. (n.d.). LitCharts.

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/half-the-sky/introduction