Changing Lives

I

It was Raji who sent me the link to this video,while commenting on my post on child sex and abuse.
I was moved by it and felt disturbed. It is easy to talk about principles.To go through personal losses and sufferings and then talk about them in public,is an altogether different matter.A rape usually ends the life of a girl.The rest of her destiny is like a caterpillar in a cocoon, never going to get the chance to be a butterfly.To gather the smouldering  remains of a  life and start a  new journey with  a mission set apart for others, is next to impossible.

Sunitha Krishnan has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery, a multimilion-dollar global market. In this courageous talk, she tells three powerful stories, as well as her own, and calls for a more humane approach to helping these young victims rebuild their lives.

Dr Sunita Krishnan is an extraordinary person. She makes us think about our own social commitments and how insensitive most of us have become to the problems of the underprivileged around us. How much can one Sunita do? How long can we remain silent? It is shameful to notice that she gets the help of American organizations to get her tasks of raids and rescues done. The police wouldn’t have helped otherwise.

There was an overwhelming response to Sunita’s talk.  Her organization is gaining recognition as the leading force against trafficking of women and children in India. She was honored with the' Real Heroes' award in April 2008. It is also worth mentioning that Prajwala was recently awarded with the prestigious AGFUND International Award for its pioneering work to combat trafficking women.

For most of us it would be hard to believe such things happen in our country. Teenage girls are forcibly kept as slaves and traded. I have posted a link to an actual raid in a brothel to rescue the girls. Sunita’s initiative is involved in routine raids of such brothels with the help of local police.

Dr. Sunitha Krishnan is the chief functionary and co-founder of Prajwala. After gaining a doctorate in social work, she had founded the organization along with a friend of hers. He  was a Christian missionary and  died in 2005. Prajwala  means "eternal flame." It is dedicated to removing/  rescuing  women from brothels. It begins with helping their children. In 1995 she started a school with five children. Today, aside from this boarding school for HIV positive kids, Prajwala runs 17 schools across the city of Hyderabad with 5,000 children.Her organization deserves help from all kind hearted people.

About two million people are trafficked each year within India or from neighboring countries. Most are inducted into the sex trade at age 10 or even earlier, usually destined for big cities and tourist areas. Prajwala has developed a network of informants in the sex industry to help conduct what have become trademark brothel raids. Most of the young women rescued are already veterans of the trade. Many are actually very reticent. 

Malini, one of her inmates responds. When we asked the police, "Why are you hitting us?" they said "because you do this immoral work." And I said, "Well, why are you catching us? You should go after our house madams, not us. But they just beat us some more".

“The rape per se was not so much of an issue for me.  Sunita talks about her own experience of rape.”I don't know, for some reason I was never traumatized by that, the fact that I was raped. But what happened after that made me think [about] the way my family treated me, the way the world treated me, the way people around me treated me. The sense that thousands and millions of children and young people are being sexually violated and that there's this huge silence about it around me angers me. This huge normalization of that angers me”. 

Prostitution is a very lucrative organized crime she says. She's been beaten up 14 times since starting Prajwala, the price for rescuing thousands of children from what she calls "the world's oldest form of slavery."