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How One Artist is Helping Sex Trafficking Victims in India

Sex Trafficking Victims in IndiaEvery eight minutes, a child goes missing in India, becoming yet another one of the estimated three to nine million sex trafficking victims in India, many who are young girls between the ages of nine and 12. Extreme poverty, coupled with a lack of education and awareness about human trafficking, leaves women, young girls and young boys victims of sexual exploitation. However, one Indian artist has launched a campaign that uses art and technology to protect women and children from falling prey to sex trafficking.

The Artist

Leena Kejriwal grew up near Kolkata’s Sonagachi, the largest red-light district in Asia and a global sex-trafficking hub, where around 10,000 women and girls work as prostitutes. Thousands more are trafficked through the district to other brothels and sex trafficking destinations each year. “My awareness of the existence of a red light district happened as a child. I had heard tales of girls and women who were caught and put there. Every time our car passed the lane, we were told not to look to ‘that side’. Furtive glances gave me glimpses of girls and ladies standing on the roadside,” Leena described.

Leena’s childhood awareness that many women and girls around her were trapped as sex slaves spurred her to take action. She knew she had to do something, so in 2014 as a wife, mother and artist, Leena launched “Missing” at the Indian Art Fair. The goal of “Missing” is to bring mass awareness to the dark reality of the sex trafficking industry in India through a simple and engaging piece of art that speaks to everyone and transcends space and language barriers.

What is “Missing?”

The campaign is simple: erect cut-out figures of a young girl in parks, on schools, businesses and other sites throughout cities and towns, casting symbolic shadows to commemorate the millions of young lives lost in the dark shadow that is sex trafficking. Leena’s purpose with “Missing” is twofold—bring public awareness to sex trafficking and provide women, young girls and boys with knowledge so they can avoid becoming sex trafficking victims in India. Confirmed sites for the art campaign include New Delhi’s Gurgaon and Connaught Place, as well as Eco Park in Kolkata.

Leena, along with Satyajit Chakraborty of Flying Robot Studios, has also developed the “Missing” app. The app has a role-playing game that allows players to experience what a missing person goes through when she is trafficked into prostitution. The player, who assumes the role of the missing person, must assess risks and make choices throughout the game in order to find her way to freedom.

Awareness = Prevention

Leena also works in a trafficking prevention program in the remote Sundarbans area, a region that accounts for 44 percent of sex trafficking victims in India. The program, much like Leena’s “Missing” artwork and app, seeks to build awareness and empower both sex trafficking victims and potential victims, giving them a better understanding of their rights and the options available to them, along with consistent counseling.

Leena, whose motto is, “Why wait for a girl to get trafficked to save her?,” believes awareness equals prevention, and with her artwork and the app, she is opening up conversations and bringing public attention to the human trafficking industry in the hopes that Indian women and children will no longer be pulled unawares into the shadows of sex slavery.

– Sarah Musick
Photo: Wikimedia

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Sudara Helps Women and Girls Escape Sex Trafficking in India

sex trafficking in India
The trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world. This profitable industry generates an estimated $99 billion each year. Unsurprisingly, women and girls make up 96 percent of victims of sex trafficking. The action of sexual exploitation is a human rights violation. This exploitation robs these women and girls of integrity, dignity, health, security and equality.

Sex Trafficking in India an Ongoing Issue Despite New Laws

Sex trafficking in India continues to be lucrative and persistent, and poverty is a major factor. Many vulnerable women and girls are lured into the industry because of the promise of employment. When these women and girls are faced with the harsh reality of poverty, hunger and homelessness, many of them see this as the only option. Matters of poverty are sometimes so severe that parents will sell their own daughters into the trade. These women and children have no other options because they do not possess an education or the skills or the resources to escape sex slavery.

Although India’s Parliament passed a bill amending laws concerning sexual violence and making sex trafficking a criminal offense in 2013, this law will only be so successful. Trafficking is profitable, and corruption is widespread. Traffickers can easily pay off police officers to avoid the deserved charges, which leaves women and children still very much at risk and unprotected.

Sudara Provides Employment Opportunities for Sex Trafficking Victims

A mission-driven company exists on behalf of these women and children to not only empower them, but to provide them with dignified employment opportunities. Sudara is an online store that sells items such as clothing, bags, jewelry and children’s toys, yet there is so much story behind each of these items.

Sudara started in 2006 by partnering with a sewing center in India and taught six women how to sew a pattern for loungewear pants that have been named Punjammies. The previous year, founder Shannon Keith had just returned from a trip to India, where she heard many stories of women who were sold into sex slavery and women who were being picked up off the streets by local pimps.

From the beginning, Sudara’s focus and goal has remained the same: to empower women to live in freedom from sex slavery through safe, sustainable living-wage employment. Every pair of Punjammies robes and slouch pants are made in India, and every style is named after a woman at one of the centers.

Fifteen years later, Sudara has multiple sewing center partnerships with people from all over India and the United States. One of these center partners, Ivana, provides women who are at high risk of trafficking with valuable skills training on computers and tailoring. In addition, the center also offers counseling services for every woman as well as on-site childcare for their children.

Sudara’s mission also emphasizes providing a level of care that allows a woman who has been a victim of sex trafficking in India to heal from her past and facilitate training that leads to a self-sufficient future. Because of this, Sudara pays the sewing center partners a premium that goes towards medical care and counseling. This premium also goes towards job placement services and micro-loans for women who would like to start a business of their own.

Sudara’s Nonprofit Arm Helps the Most Vulnerable in India

Sudara also created a nonprofit organization, the Sudara Freedom Fund, to further its social impact goals. The donations made during checkout at sudara.org go towards the Sudara Freedom Fund and have helped fund safe housing for women escaping sex trafficking in India, equipment for new or growing sewing centers and back-to-school programs.

With the continuous support of donations to the Sudara Freedom Fund, one of their most recent successes is the Sunetha Home, which opened in 2017. The Sunetha Home is providing safe housing, meals and an education for 10 girls living in a red light district of India.

Although companies such as Sudara and its nonprofit, the Sudara Freedom Fund, are putting their efforts towards creating freedom for hundreds of women and girls who are at high risk of sex trafficking in India, it is not enough to end sex slavery once and for all. To do that, it is necessary to break the cycle of slavery for the next generation and the generations after that. By supporting Sudara and other philanthropic organization, many people are doing their part to combat the sexual exploitation that millions of women and children face.

– Angelina Gillespie
Photo: Flickr