Stolen lives: Harrowing tale of girls sold into sexual slavery
BEFORE they were sold to the same brothel, Sayeda and Anjali were typical teenagers, growing up in similar circumstances a few hundred miles apart: Sayeda in the city of Khulna in Bangladesh, and Anjali in Siliguri in West Bengal, India.
They nurtured the aspirations of teenagers everywhere — to get out from under their parents, to find love, to start living out their dreams. Both were naive about the world and couldn’t have imagined the cruelties it had in store.
Raised in a tiny two-room house in a squalid neighbourhood, Sayeda spent much of her childhood on her own. Her mother would rise early and leave for the day to clean shops in New Market, one of Khulna’s commercial districts. Sayeda’s father was a cycle-rickshaw driver, ferrying passengers for a pittance. A struggling student, Sayeda dropped out of school before her teens, despite her mother’s admonishments that trouble would befall her.
Outgoing and free-spirited, Sayeda was quick to smile and made friends easily. What she loved most was to dance. When her parents were out, she would watch dance sequences from Hindi and Bengali movies on television, copying the moves.
Sayeda was beautiful, with a delicately chiseled face and almond-shaped eyes, and liked wearing make-up. She began to help out at beauty salons, learning about hairstyles, skin treatments, and cosmetics.
Worried about the attention she was attracting from boys, her parents married her off when she was 13. Child marriage is common though illegal in much of South Asia. The husband Sayeda’s parents chose was abusive, and she went back to her family.
When Sayeda returned home, she implored her mother to let her enrol in a dance academy. Her mother relented, and Sayeda began dancing at weddings and other events.
That’s when Sayeda became romantically involved with a boy who used to visit the academy. He told her he would take her to India, where she could earn a lot more as a dancer. Sayeda, imagining a future filled with promise, decided to run away with him.
Anjali, a graceful girl with bright eyes and high cheekbones, had similar reasons for wanting to leave home. Her family lived in a slum, in a makeshift dwelling. Raised primarily by her mother, who worked as a maid, she and her sister were so poor they fought over the few school supplies they could afford.
By 13, Anjali had dropped out of school — the norm for many children from poor families across India. She started working at a factory, packaging snacks. Reserved by nature, Anjali didn’t have many friends.
At the factory, Anjali met a young man who charmed her. Anjali knew her mother was on the look-out for a prospective groom for her, but she decided she wanted to be with the man she’d come to like. So, one evening in October 2016, Anjali put on a bright new dress and slipped out of the house. She took a bus to the train station to meet up with her boyfriend. To Anjali’s surprise, he was with another young man, but she boarded a train to Kolkata with them.
Searching frantically for Anjali that evening, her mother gathered that she’d been planning to elope for some time. Trafficking is a ‘growth industry’
ment of children for sexual gratification. Sayeda and Anjali, who told their stories to me, are just two of countless victims. As with most criminal enterprises, determining the scale of this atrocity is impossible, but it’s clear that sex trafficking of minors is a multibillion-dollar industry that spans the globe.
According to a frequently cited study by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), more than a million children were victims of sexual exploitation in 2016. Because detecting child prostitution is difficult, the report conceded that the actual number was likely far higher. The most recent Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, found that the number of victims of trafficking reported by countries rose from fewer than 15 000 in 2010 to nearly 25 000 in 2016.
The statistics represent only a fraction of
ment, but researchers believe it more likely reflects a grimmer reality — that human trafficking, including the trafficking of children for prostitution, is on the rise.
“We have 70 million refugees in the world at the moment. We have displaced people and increasing economic disparity,” says Louise Shelley, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and author of “Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective.” “This is a growth industry.”
The scourge of child sex trafficking has left virtually no country untouched, but some parts of the world have emerged as hubs of this illicit trade. One that has been especially ravaged is the region where Sayeda and Anjali grew up — the Indian state of West Bengal and its neighbour Bangladesh, which once were a single province known as Bengal.
The actual toll is unknown, but numbers reported or estimated, however, imperfect, point to a high volume of trafficking. In 2017 alone, 8 178 children were reported missing from West Bengal, nearly an eighth of India’s total that year.
A significant number of girls among them were almost certainly sold to brothels. The picture might be worse for Bangladesh: One government estimate suggested 50 000 girls are trafficked out of the country to India, or through India, every year — a figure that doesn’t include girls sold into prostitution within Bangladesh.
West Bengal is as much a destination as a source for girls who are trafficked into prostitution. Some end up in the red-light districts of Kolkata, a metropolis of more than 14 million people. Others are sold to brothels elsewhere in India — Delhi, Mumbai, Pune. (In India, commercial sex work is legal, but many activities associated with the trade, such as pimping or running a brothel, are illegal, as is engaging children in prostitution.)
Girls trafficked into the country are sometimes then trafficked to the Middle East and elsewhere. For most of the girls ensnared by this sinister enterprise, there is no escape. Many resign themselves to a life of prostitution. Not surprisingly, the biggest cause of this tragedy is the poverty that’s widespread in the region.
Most of the girls who are trafficked fall for promises of employment or marriage because they’re desperate to flee the grinding maw of their everyday life.
“In a society that values women less than men and in which families often view girls as a burden, there are also some who are sold into slavery by their own parents or relatives.
“It’s a socioeconomic problem resulting from poverty and illiteracy,” says Tathagata Basu, a police superintendent who has led anti-trafficking investigations in South 24 Parganas, one of the most affected districts in West Bengal.
In this fertile ground for trafficking, criminal networks behind the trade often operate with impunity. Some police officials are apathetic or corrupt, and officers assigned to anti-trafficking units are burdened with investigating all types of crimes in addition to trafficking.
In recent years, though, these teams have intensified efforts to find and rescue girls sold to brothels, often under pressure from anti-trafficking activists.