My colleague is researching a very interesting topic for a joint project with various foundations. The topic is a little controversial to say the least. The organizations want to look into human trafficking in India. My foundation primarily works in HIV prevention and given that most trafficked individuals are young girls who've just reached puberty, this population is a high risk target audience for my foundation. Thus there is a deep interest in serving them and hence my colleague is researching the entire prostitution cycle, right from the time a girl enters the trade till the time she manages to escape.
While presenting her research, my colleague shared many factoids about this industry, which I found very scary and disturbing. Facts such as the girl when trafficked is most probably between the ages of 10- 15. Most often relatives act as buyers and pay the child's parents a one time amount ranging anywhere from $30- $100. If not a relative, sometimes when the girl is married, her husband sells her to the pimps at a similar price. Once in the city, the relative sells her to a brothel - an unorganized one most often, where he receives $1000 for the girl. The girl is then mentally and physically abused and turned submissive, and sold to clients. A virgin fetches ~$100 for the brothel, and the rates vary according to the girls beauty and age. As women grow older, they hardly make Rs 100, which is around $2.5 per client and cater to 4- 5 clients on a good day. Thus, if they work 20 days a week, they make an average salary of Rs 8000 ($200) per month, which is a bit more than what a domestic help earns in nice areas in urban India.
I had an opportunity to visit a shelter built by Apne aap, an organization which has been mentioned in several women's rights books. The founder herself is a very inspiring personality and has been a prominent activist in women's rights movements at the national and international level. She has opened around 10 shelters in red light areas across the country, and provides education and vocational training to prostituted women and their children.
I visited their Najafgarh shelter. Najafgarh is about 40 min from Delhi. Ironically, the shelter is based in a small village called Prem Nagar, which is one of the red light villages in the area. The village was once inhabited by shepherds. As urbanization grew, there were no farmlands and grazing areas, and their sheep died. The men were mostly alcoholics and drug addicts and had no skills to earn a living. The women of the village were then forced to enter prostitution. A few of them initiated the trade and started earning a lot of money. Once the husbands saw this, they started sending their women on the highway close by to earn a living for the family. Since the village is located near the highway and an army cantonment, there is no dearth of clients for the women. They often wake up in the middle of the night around 3 am, form groups of 4- 5 and stand on the highway. They get back home by dawn and tend to their large families. If the mother is tired all day and is asleep, the older children take care of their younger siblings.
We had an opportunity to visit the shelter, a few homes and got to talk to the women and the chief of the shelter.
The shelter was a 2 room shelter with a small yard in the front. About 10 girls aged 10- 18 were sitting there for their daily English lesson. The teacher was this Israeli West bank settler (which infuriated my Lebanese colleague) who was clueless about what was expected of her or about the organization in general and was teaching basic English to these girls. While learning English, the girls were also fiddling with a sewing machine which the organization had provided them for 'vocational training'. A young girl from Harvard was present there too. She had received grants of $12000 and $15000 in the past two years and had donated her time and money to the community to start vocational training. She had received excellent progress reports from the chief of staff about the progress of the shelter and trainings, however was completely let down when she arrived in India a week ago. The women never came to the shelter. The vocational training was a joke, where a tailor came 2 days a week and taught how to make handkerchiefs, and the English teachers were temps who kept coming and going every month!
The village itself was very filthy, with trash everywhere and pigs frolicking around in open drains. In the middle of this filth was a beautiful house, newly built and painted..when I asked who it belonged to, the chief of staff proudly said, "Oh its mine! I just built it this January" :) Wonder where the Harvard grant went! Towards a beautiful cause I guess.
This experience raised a lot of thoughts in my mind and my colleagues and I had an interesting conversation thereafter. Fistly, the women will choose to change their ways only if their new vocations were to provide a livelihood which equals or exceeds their current income. These vocation changes will not happen in a few days or months or even years; this would need deeper skill building and a will to stay away from selling themselves. Given that they have no shame left about selling their bodies, and that their peers and community encourage this behavior, there is no social stigma and hence no societal pressure to give up their livelihood. The will to change their vocation is low, and so is the skill, and thus upskilling will take a lot of efforts. It might be best to forget the older generation and focus on upskilling the young girls in the target group of 12- 18 years. Skills that will provide the women a social stature and a fixed income every month would be a better skill set than a vocation which will need them to search work for themselves. A segmented approach needs to be employed for the young girls. Students interested in studying further should be encouraged and provided coaching for specific topics they might be struggling in. A variety of trainings should be offered- such as training for managing their own money, basic accounting, beautician training, making and selling household food products to cooperatives, sewing skills etc. These can be further cemented by bringing role models from these vocations to show the girls what success looks like in these areas. A choice of these trainings would provide a vision for their own futures and could help create a 'will' for doing something different with their own lives.
There are other ways to rehabilitate the group but in my mind, a strong commited sponsorship from a single organization with a focused approach and continuity in the social workers could do wonders for this community.
