Op-Ed Columnist
Published: June 1, 2011
KOLKATA, India
The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-
grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is
at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to
a brothel.
Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the
world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne
Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the
daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M.
has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often
expected to become prostitutes.
M. seemed poised to escape this fate with the help of one of my heroes,
Urmi Basu, a social worker who in 2000 started the New Light shelter
program for prostitutes and their children.
M., with her winning personality and keen mind, began to bloom with the
help of New Light. Both her parents are illiterate, but she learned
English and earned excellent grades in an English-language school for
identity to protect her from gibes from schoolmates.
the center of the 21st-century slave trade. This country almost certainly
has the largest number of human-trafficking victims in the world today.
If M. is sold to a brothel, she will have no defense against H.I.V. and
other sexually transmitted diseases. Decisions about using a condom are
made by the customer or the brothel owner, not by the girl. In one
brothel I slipped into to conduct some interviews, there was not a single
condom available.
The police make more effort to help girls like M. than they did a few
years ago, and in a column a week ago I described a police raid on a
brothel and the rescue of girls inside ages 5, 10 and 15. Yet the police
confiscate the very young girls, and then the brothel owners have to pay
Now at age 10, M. is running out of time. Her parents have pulled her out
of her school in Kolkata and are sending her back to their native village
hundreds of miles to the west.
grandfather insists upon it. M. has a scholarship through New Light to
This leaves Basu and me with an extremely bad feeling, fearing that once
she is back in the village and away from her protectors at the New Light
shelter, her grandfather could sell her to a trafficker for transfer to a
red-light district anywhere in India.
When we ask M. what she thinks, she looks down and says in a small voice
Then again, she is unlikely to be consulted. And traffickers offer
families hundreds of dollars for a pretty girl.
to film a television documentary. Ferrera fell in love with M., and M.
with Ferrera; they spent much of their time giggling together.
heartbreaking to lose such a beautiful spirit to a life of violence and
We got nowhere. Her parents have bought M. a train ticket back to the
letters to M. in hopes that this may make her family nervous about a
sale. And Basu is counseling M. on what to do if she is sold to a
What I do know is that it is surreal that these scenes are unfolding in
the 21st century. The peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the
1780s, when just under 80,000 slaves a year were transported from Africa
to the New World.
These days, Unicef estimates that 1.8 million children a year enter the
commercial sex trade. Multiply M. by 1.8 million, and you understand the
need for a new abolitionist movement.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 2, 2011, on page A29 of
Brothel..
|
|