Article written by Nicholas Kristoff for The New York Times. Quite interesting! Read below...
When readers hear about 'modern slavery', they may roll their eyes & assume that’s an exaggeration. Slavery? Really? Modern slavery?. If you’re one of the doubters, then listen to Poonam Thapa, a teenage girl I met here in Nepal, where she is putting her life back together after being sold to a brothel'
Poonam
Thapa was poor and uneducated when a woman offered an escape in the form of a
well-paying job.
"You can have a better life," Poonam remembers the
woman saying. "And if you make good money, you will be respected by your
father. You can help your family."
So
Poonam, then age 12, ran off with the woman. When Poonam was eventually
deposited in a brothel in Mumbai, India, she was puzzled.
"I didn’t
even know what a brothel was," she recalls.
The
brothel owner, a woman, dolled her up in a skimpy dress, equipped her
with falsies, and gave her heels. Then the owner sold Poonam’s virginity
to an older man.
"The man raped me," Poonam says. "I didn’t know what he was doing. But I was bleeding and hurting and crying."
The
brothel owner sternly told Poonam to buck up — she had paid $1,700 for
Poonam and needed to recover her investment. So Poonam was locked inside
the brothel, forced to have sex with 20 to 25 men a day, and more on
Sundays and holidays. There were no days off, no trips outside the
brothel, and, of course, no pay.
One
day Poonam was hurting and refused a customer. She says the
brothel-owner beat her and burned her with cigarettes; she showed me the
scars.
Poonam
thus became one of 20.9 million people worldwide — a quarter of them
children — subjected to forced labor, according to the
U.N.’sInternational Labour Organization. In the United States, tens of
thousands of children are trafficked into the sex trade each year.
Men
visiting Poonam’s brothel paid $2.50 for sex and were sometimes
oblivious to the brutality, flattering themselves that the girls liked
their work. They see girls who often smile; no one is holding a gun to
their heads.
Poonam responded with what so many others have said: The smiles are on the outside, even as girls are crying inside.
"We
were told to smile, because a smile is money and will pull in
customers," Poonam said. The girls were also ordered to say that they
were over 18 and working voluntarily.
Then
one day police raided the brothel. Warned by the brothel owner that the
police would torture her if they found she was a child or trafficked,
Poonam claimed that she was 23 and working voluntarily, but the police
could see that she was a child and took her to a shelter.
Indian authorities returned Poonam to the care of Maiti Nepal, a leading
anti-trafficking organization. Now Poonam is studying to be a
social worker in hopes of helping other trafficked girls. A new study
suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder is frequent among those who
have been trafficked.
Anuradha Koilara, founder
of Maiti Nepal, notes that there has been a bit of progress against sex
trafficking of Nepali girls. A crucial step, whether in Nepal or the
United States, is ending the impunity for pimps and traffickers, and
Koirala says that Maiti Nepal has helped prosecute 800 people for
involvement in trafficking. In America as well, we need to prosecute
traffickers rather than their victims.
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