demand for it. >> well, there is much more on the art scene in hong kong on our website www.aljazeera.com. there you'll find the day's other top stairs as well. we're covering the nuclear talks that are taking place in the lausanne. [ ♪♪ ] . >> there are 100,000 girls, american girls, home-grown girls trafficked into sex slave each year in the u.s. when shawna goodwin resisted, her mother shot her with shoirn, shawna goodwin remembers -- heroin, shawna goodwin remembers falling on the water bed in a rush. that was her initiation. "a path appears," the latest book by nicholas kristof and doesn't

sheryl wudunn highlights problems in the u.s., and was turned into a pbs series examining domestic violence. >> it was a 1938 survey, half of americans said it was appropriate for americans to adult. >> the husband and wife pair recruited celebrity activists as they looked at ways to tackle poverty. >> you do need to work together to raise a child and break them out of poverty. >> it's easier to help a 6 month 6-month-old. lives. >> when i met cheryl. she worked for "the wall street

shawna goodwin, first of all, didn't go to school. she did go. failed the first or second grade. she remembers the one time. her mum took her to a friend's house, they go to a temp's house.

the mother tried to get her to spend time with the family. >> when shawna resisted, her mother shot her with heroin. shawna goodwin remembers falling back on the water bed in a rush. that was her initiation. >> god. another shocking statistic that you mentioned is that 15% of american men regularly purchase sex. >> i think that we can dramatically improve the situation. and that involves ending the impunity. for pimples, so shawna - she was arrested 167 times for prostitution. her pimp never, not once. if you start arresting pimples, that will reduce the incentive to traffic the girls. >> and the johns. >> 3,000 men buy sex on any

given day, 300,000. they almost - almost none of them are ever arrested. a lot of them have revocation, they have things to lose. if you were toas one it 1% -- to arrest 1%, that will create perspective, demand would drop 25%, meaning fewer girls would be trafficked. >> episode 2 looks at poverty with the actress jennifer garner, who is from west virginia. what did you find in west virginia was perpetuating the cycle of poverty? >> we tend to think of poverty in terms of metrics of income and wealth. there are cycles. i think that the better metric of child poverty is how many books are in the home, how often you are hugged or read to. there we have situations with 20% of kids born in

west virginia are born with drugs or alcohol in the system. often kids are having kids, bad for the mum and child. in a situation of hopelessness, people self-medicate with substances. they get arrested. and with a criminal record they are less employable, there's fewerons, and there's a -- few jobs around and there's an miasma of hopelessness. there's poverty in west virginia or africa or asia, it's a sense of despair, and self destructive behaviours that make that self-fulfilling. you have break-in about this so often that the path to escape is education. the path to scep is education, it's a foundation, it's not the end all. it was with education, you can start thinking for itself. you can build the strategy for

life. that is important. when you don't feel as though you know how to add two and two, you don't have a sense of confidence. you feel you have to go with the flow are or that you are not going to challenge whatever your status quo is. it needs to begin early, in the first two years. more and more research. that says that is the part that matters the most. partly because of way of the brain transforms and the way goes. when you are in your teenage year, your brain is growing. the most rapid growth is 0 to 5 in the first 1,000 days of life. it starts in the wound. when you drink and smoke, it has been act later. >> there are two big efforts to tackle poverty at home and abroad. if we don't start early enough, it's easier to help a 6 month old than a struggling

16-year-old down the road. the second is that one of the best ways to create a better environment with the police is job. >> whose responsibility is it really to make sure that starting from babies all the way up to adolescence and later in opportunities. >> it takes a village, and one of the things that drives me up the wall is when we hear a narrative about personal responsibility. there is plenty of responsibility. there is self destructive behaviour among the poor and rich. in the book in the documentary, we described a 4-year-old boy in west virginia, johnny, who can't speak because he didn't get a hearing screening, and people were not aware that he was death. the time his brain is developing, he's not getting the auditory simulation until too late.

that is not johnny's fault, it's our fault as a society that we do not provide screenings for at-risk kids in west virginia. for the rest of his life he may not be able to participate or contribute to society. >> it was something as simple as a screen. if you are not educated, and you yourself is not raised, by your parent, and your parents never hugged or kissed you. so you never had exposure to books at an early stage. you wouldn't think about doing that. at some point the responsibility was shired or has to be an intervention. and not in the tense that you were innovating sa sense of responsibility. you need to work together to raise a child to break them out

of that cycle of poverty. is that the responsibility of government. i think that it is a shared responsibility. government can play a role. certainly through social services. there are many programs that have been proven through randomized controlled trials to be perspent tough. it's a shared responsibility. if you look at a problem like team pregnancy. 30% of teenage girls become pregnant. there is a huge problem, how do we address it. clearly those kids in film have a role. they should be more responsible about unprotected sex. schools have a responsibility to provide sex education, parents have responsibility. government also has a responsibility to provide access to reversible contraceptives to at risk kids. we need a full pattern here, full cooperation here with

government, parents, schools, and people themselves, all showing responsibility. >> when you talk about contraceptives, reminds me of a theme i have seen through your writing in books and the current series, the belief that education on top of the ability for a woman to control and break the cycles, yet there's a cultural resistance to contraception in a lot of cases. internationally, we, meaning the u.s. policy makers. have made a mistake in focussing on a military toolbox to address security challenges whether in iraq, afghanistan, yemen, whoever it may be, and obviously a military toolbox is useful. in the short term, especially, it can do what others can't.

we underuse the education toolbox. and one reason why they are effective is that if you educate a boy, it doesn't have an effect on children. if you educate a girl, it will be a dramatic effect. if you want to reduce the youth bulge in the population which corresponds in security, to terrorism. then you need to reduce that and you do that in part by educating girls today. >> you talk about that in your ted talk, you quote larry summers, saying that that is the greatest return on investment. educating a girl. >> that's right. educating a girl. she actually herself tends to have fewer kids when she is educated. it's hard when we talk about population control. people criticize china when they are promoting their one-child policy. yes, my goodness, it's severe.

we were so glad - we were in china at the time, and glad that i was able to have three kids. americans are not subject to that. we are grateful for it. on the other hand, if you look at countries in africa and india - right now, they have been able to bring maybe 100 million people in the entire continent out of poverty because of all the policies that they've been trying to implement to improve the poverty there. however, at the same time, because of the growth in population. there are new - maybe 100 to 200 million more people in poverty, so they have 400 million people under the poverty line. when you add up - crossing up the families, large families, it's a huge number. it makes a big difference. >> still ahead on "talk to al jazeera". half of americans used to think

it was okay for a man to beat his wife. i'll talk about domestic violence today with nicholas kristof and doesn't --

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[ ♪♪ ] i'm stephanie sy, my guest on "talk to al jazeera" is journalist nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn. you won a pulitzer prize in '89 for the coverage of

tiananmen square. you were the first married couple to receive the pulitzer prize together. was collaboration? >> yes, certainly. we were married - we were married. we never were able to write stories, we wrote separate stories, but covered many aspect of that period of china. relationship. >> we both edit each other. when i met cheryl, she was working for "the wall street journal", i for the "new york times". it's better collaborating as a rifle. >> i read so much of what you have written over the years, in the last week, and it occurred you have evolved to become for some a moral compass. was that your intention. >> no, it was not our intention, and i think it evolved naturally.

and i don't think of myself as a moral example as. people are far more philosophic am. as i mentioned, there are some people that are role models, i could not put myself in their category, we have so many that are here or heroins, they are at the front lines, bringing about the solution, dedicating the lives to how to improve society. >> if you are in journalism, or writing books. in a sense you have a spotlight. if you are in the righting business, and when you sign that on an issue that is not illuminated, you can sometimes make people upset. make them spill their coffee in the morning in a way that will bring that on to the agenda, i like to think that's what we aspire to do. >> nicholas kristof and sheryl

wudunn - thank you so much for talking to al jazeera. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. [music] >> hello, and welcome to the news hour. we're in doha with the top stories on al jazeera. vanuatu's president appeals to the world for help. >> you can only image of being in this house as the cyclone struck. >> it's a thumbs up from john kerry after nuclear talks in iran and switzerland. >> two fre