Sex worker-turned-author basks in glory of Kerala film award

 Noting that experience makes a person strong and bold, she said it was plenty of her experiences-whether good or bad, that made her capable to fight all odds and reach this stage of life.

It has been over 15 years since Nalini Jameela shocked the conventional mindsets of the society and upset the patriarchy by penning a path-breaking autobiography on her daring and frightful life as a sex worker.

Since then, she has been enjoying several identities in life raging from a best selling author and activist to gender expert and social relationship counsellor and now at the age of 69, she is a recipient of the prestigious Kerala State Film Awards. Jameela adjudged the special jury mention for costume-design in the movie “Bharathapuzha”, directed by Manilal, when the state government awards were announced here on Saturday.

For Jameela, it was yet another unexpected twist which the life had in store for her and she was bold enough to say that the lessons she had drawn from her early life as a sex worker was her base for any new achievement. “The state award was really unexpected…It was for the first time in my life that I did costume designing for a movie. I cherish this honour as one of the greatest achievements in my life,” Jameela told PTI.

Asked whether she would like to build a career in costume designing, she said she was not sure whether any mainstream film makers or production houses would give her an opportunity and if anything comes her way, she would definitely give it a shot. (Express photo by Janak Rathod)

Noting that experience makes a person strong and bold, she said it was plenty of her experiences-whether good or bad, that made her capable to fight all odds and reach this stage of life. “Bharathapuzha revolves around the story of Sugandhi, a sex worker in her mid thirties, hailing from central Kerala district of Thrissur.

Actress Siji Pradeep played the central character in the woman-centric film, which deals with several gender issues.
“While chosing costumes for the character, I actually saw myself in her… me as a sex worker during my young age. I never used costly sarees or ornaments in life and I do not even like to wear a bindi. I tried to reflect those characteristics in the heroine’s physical persona,” she said.

Jameela also said while designing outfits for the heroine and helping her with the mannerisms and body language of a young sex worker, the dreadful memories of the grim past came flooding back.

“I spent days with the film crew, especially the heroine, to provide all support they needed. There were scenes in the film which I could relate with that of my life…,” the activist explained. It was her long-drawn friendship with Manilal, the director, that brought her to the tinsel world.

When he had discussed the project with her, Jameela never imagined that she would be entrusted with costume designing. But, she made up her mind to take up the new challenge and managed to complete the work as per the expectations of the filmmaker. “I worked according to my own perspectives. But, the happiest part was that the director was convinced about what i was trying to say.. He had given me the liberty to follow my mind while designing and selecting costumes,” the elderly woman added.

A third standard drop out, Jameela was forced into prostitution at a very tender age following the death of her husband who had succumbed to cancer. While running from pillar to post to look after her family and raise her two daughters, she had no option but to take up sex work as a profession- which the conventional society viewed as immoral and unethical. The years-long life as a sex worker, police brutality, attack by goons and endless physical tortures inflicted by “clients”, has only given Jameela an added energy to fight the hardships and shatter the taboo attached to sex workers.

Before turning a sex worker and started loitering in bus terminus and railway stations soliciting ‘customers’, she had worked in brick kilns and domestic help to earn daily bread for her near ones. When she published the ‘Autobiography of a Sex Worker” in the year 2005 after retiring from sex work, it fast turned out to be one of the best sellers of Malayalam besides kicking up a widespread debate on the plight of the hapless community.

After the first book had been translated into several languages including English, she came up with another one “Romantic Encounters of a Sex Worker”, a memoir which revolves around the relationships she developed with the ‘clients’, in 2018. Besides being a member of several NGOs, she has also been working as a gender and social relationship counsellor and taking classes in colleges and universities on the subject.

Asked whether she would like to build a career in costume designing, she said she was not sure whether any mainstream film makers or production houses would give her an opportunity and if anything comes her way, she would definitely give it a shot.

She said the changed perspective and empathetic approach of the new generation towards sex workers and the LGBT people is a great solace for the community members. The 69-year-old woman also cherished a dream of bringing out the cinematic adaptation of her autobiography and setting up a care centre for elderly people. “Those who came from streets, worked in mud kilns and toiled in someone’s backyard as a domestic help will surely have a great strength and courage to fight the odds and shatter the taboos of this patriarchal society,” Jameela concluded.

(Source: Indian Express)

Sex workers hit by coronavirus lockdown, face hunger and work issues

The 21-day lockdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to fight the pandemic has put everyone under the fear of uncertainty. While all of us are trying to figure out our lives under the lockdown, there are certain sections of the society that are worst hit by this epidemic such as sex workers. The lockdown has escalated the risk of poverty and ill health for the sex workers, as there are no clients in the market. Isn’t that the responsibility of government to protect these vulnerable people amidst the lockdown who are struggling for their daily bread?

Add to hunger other finger pointing. There’s loathing and societal shame right now with people in their areas calling them names or being a potential source for disease.

No food, no money

Many sex workers don’t even have the money to afford food since the nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24. Around 80 brothels house close to 3000 sex workers in multi-storeyed dingy buildings located in the busy market area of GB Road, remained shutdown. Since the savings of these workers are meagre there is no other source to finance their daily expenses.

An India Today report noted that people are stuck in these dirty corridors and authorities are strictly monitoring us.

“We cannot even go down to buy groceries or medicines. Many of us are sick but now we have no means to even reach a doctor or call for help, let alone wearing masks. The police do not really listen to us. We anyway have little money left. We do not know when this lockdown will get over. I wonder if all of us will survive this,” said the work.

Lack of support from government

Till now there are no relief packages being exclusively announced for the sex workers. However some NGO and police personnel have voluntarily came forward to help them by ensuring proper food packets, masks and sanitizers. But this is not enough. The sex workers need urgent help from the government, so there is a kind of sustenance available for them.

Making this worse for sex workers is that community support from social impact organisations is also suffering. Rashmi Tiwari of Aahan Foundation wrote a powerful piece on SheThePeople saying “all the positive effects of such programs on the participants and ultimate recipients are slowly withering away.”

Uncertain future

“While many professions seeing a gradual decline in business, sex workers are witnessing a sharper fall. With almost no source of revenue, it is difficult to safeguard their children who are now at home all the time due to shutdown. These women cannot even benefit from the benevolence of the general public who are coming forward to lend a helping hand to other women,” notes Rashmi.

The sex workers are worried about the length of this lockdown and the impact on their business. Even after the lockdown ends and business resumes, there will be all sort of apprehensions among the clients, they worry. The business will take some time to regain its momentum which is another fear among the workers.

Various NGOs and people have been working continuously to support sex workers in different ways. Such as Aanchal Narang who raised money to help the sex workers of Kamathipura, Maharashtra amidst COVID-19 lockdown. She is out on the mission to help these workers, as their daily earnings have taken a hit due to dearth of customers. She also did a project work,named ‘Community Mental Health’ , with the sex workers and closely interacted with them to raise awareness regarding mental well being. Narang runs a put practice in Andheri West as a psychologist with a specialization in addiction,trauma,gender and sexuality.

Sangama, an NGO in Bengaluru is also working towards the rights and welfare of sexual minorities since 1999, has extended a helping hand to make the lockdown period a little easier for sex workers. 

Sangama will provide groceries to 350 families of sex workers. Each kit have suffice consumption for April and May and is worth Rs 2000. The NGO pooled the donations from various people and then using the money for the betterment of the sex workers. 

(Source: SheThePeople.TV)

A tale of two cities: What made Calcutta’s sex workers escape to a French colony in 19th century

A British law meant to protect its soldiers from venereal diseases inadvertently changed the landscape of Chandannagar for a while.

In the town of Chandannagar, famed for its colonial French architecture and inventive LED arrangements, lies Laxmiganj Bazar, a 500-metre stretch on the Grand Trunk Road with nothing to set it apart. The bazar has some small or mid-sized stores, a few residential buildings and a shopping complex, but nothing that bears a sign of its vivid past, when it sheltered sex workers being persecuted by a cruel British law in Bengal.

Calcutta sex workers escape to Chandannagar in the dead of the night in 1868. | Sambaran Das for Bodmaish Jobdo (2017).

Time has not been kind to Chandannagar’s heritage. Most of its French architecture has been razed for real estate, save for the road across the famed Chandannagar Strand, the promenade built along the Ganga in 1921. “The Chandannagar administration, since the time of the Communists, has suffered from a lack of understanding of both history and the need to preserve heritage,” said Bhabani Chandra Das, 85, a statistician and long-time resident. “Today, nobody under 35 probably knows what Laxmiganj Bazar was. The story of this town starts and stops at Strand, unfortunately.”

Chandannagar was established as a French settlement in the late 17th century. For the next hundred years or so, the French and the British kept fighting over it, alternately winning control. But through it all, sex trade in Chandannagar survived and the town gained a sizable population of sex workers.

A great influx to Laxmiganj Bazar came later. In 1868, the British enacted the Indian Contagious Diseases Act, or Act 14, which required all sex workers to register with the government and undergo tests for venereal diseases. The law had hoped to keep British soldiers from sex workers. But it did so by unleashing a wave of oppression on the sex workers, causing their exodus to Chandannagar.

Numerous farces were published in pamphlets to critique the Contagious Diseases Act or CDA (called Chouddo Ain, meaning Act 14, by the Bengalis). Among them was Bodmaish Jabdo (Evil Vanquished), writer Prankrishna Dutta’s tragic account of sex workers’ lives in 19th century Bengal.

The Laxmiganj Bazar. Photo: Devarsi Ghosh.

“Act 14 was a case of bad implementation of a thoughtless law, causing torture, end of livelihoods, and eventual displacement of the weakest sections of the society at the time, something that keeps happening to this day,” said researcher Surojit Sen. A longtime Chandannagar resident, Sen and illustrator Sambaran Das published a commentary on Bodmaish Jabdo in 2017.

Crisis of ‘Chouddo Ain’

According to historian Sumanta Banerjee’s Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Bengal, commercial sex work flourished in Calcutta and its outskirts in the 1800s. This was markedly different from the work of tawaifs in pre-colonial India, who would receive royal patronage, be engaged in the arts, and take part in social and cultural festivities.

Under the British rule, courtesans and concubines began to fade out, making way for the commercial sex worker, whose occupation was solely to provide pleasures of the flesh, Banerjee wrote. As he pointed out, only the most “rootless and displaced women” across the state would travel to Calcutta and its nearby urban pockets to join the profession.

British attitudes towards sex workers stood in sharp contrast to the inclusive manner in they which were acknowledged earlier in society. On the one hand, pricked by “Victorian morality”, the government attached a stigma to the profession and codified it as crime. But on the other, it turned sex work into an organised business for the sake of its soldiers – which is where the Contagious Diseases Act comes in.

Under the East India Company, British soldiers could not be stopped from visiting public brothels, many of whom got infected with venereal diseases. This caused loss of man hours and added to the healthcare burden of the administration. The British state tried to put a stop to to this after taking over the Indian administration from the Company. In 1864, it introduced the Cantonment Act, ordering the creation of official brothels within “regimental bazars” in a bid to control the spread of venereal diseases.

The policy failed spectacularly. The troops frequently travelled out of cantonments or escaped their barracks to have sex elsewhere, continuing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, Banerjee wrote. So, on April 1, 1869, the British introduced the Contagious Diseases Act in India, near-replicating a law passed in the United Kingdom in 1864.

A British soldier escapes Kolkata's Fort William after dark to visit the brothels. Illustration: Sambaran Das for Bodmaish Jobdo (2017).

The Contagious Diseases Act made it compulsory for sex workers in India to get registered with the government and undergo a checkup for venereal diseases. If found infected, the sex workers had to be quarantined and treated until they were fit to return to work.

Calcutta’s sex workers were stridently critical of the law for the humiliating manner in which they – and sometimes even other women – would be rounded up and registered, Banerjee wrote. If they refused to register – or were deemed unregistered prostitutes under the law – they were thrown into prisons. The sex workers also reasoned that the law was bad for business since it kept them in hospitals for long periods.

The sex workers with financial means bribed their way out, but the policeman on the street, under pressure to show results, ended up oppressing poor women. This led to an exodus of Calcutta’s sex workers. According to a government memo of 1887, quoted by Banerjee in his book, “more than half the native public women had left the city and sojourned in the suburbs and further away”.

Tale of two cities

The Laxmiganj Bazar red-light district was older than the brothels of Calcutta. According to Chandannagar historian Biswanath Bandyopadhyay, it came into being “because...of travelling businessmen who would come here in the late 1700s”, but it “flourished because of the” Contagious Diseases Act.

A handbill issued by the Ladies’ National Association prior to a by-election in the historic English town of Pontefract in 1872. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Scores of sex workers escaping Calcutta took refuge in Laxmiganj Bazar. 

“With the huge influx of prostitutes, the French government began taxing them, and the market became their official working space,” Bandyopadhyay continued. Some centuries later, “the Left Front government drove them out in the 1980s to help promoters create real estate. The prostitutes escaped to nearby towns of Chinsura and Kalna.”

Growing numbers drove down the prices of the sex workers in the 19th century. As Prankrishna Dutta’s contemporary Aghor Chandra Ghosh wrote in the farce Panchali Kamalkali (The Poem of the Lotus Bud), “Aat poisar mojur jara khejur chatay thakey/khatpolonkey khasha bichanaye succhey lakhey lakhey” (Labourers worth eight paisa who would earlier sleep on coarse mats made of palm leaves now got a chance to be comfortable on lavish beds of the best prostitutes).

Meanwhile, in Calcutta and the rest of British Bengal, the tyranny of the Contagious Diseases Act continued. “At least 12 women” were jailed every day for failing to comply with the rules, Banerjee wrote, while in prisons and hospitals, police discriminated between Indian prostitutes and those of European and Eurasian descent.

This turned bhadralok sentiment in favour of the sex workers. Where earlier, Calcutta’s middle class supported the law – they thought it would “vanquish” the “evil” of prostitution (hence the title of Dutta’s farce) – they now realised that it had become a tool to oppress the disenfranchised. They wanted it repealed.

There was a similar movement afoot in the United Kingdom. Women’s groups – including Josephine Butler-led Ladies’ National Association – found the regular examinations of women under the British law degrading. They demanded that it be repealed and got their victory in April 1886.

Ladies’ National Association next turned its attention to the Indian Contagious Diseases Act. The bhadralok politicians lent unflinching support, and the British army in India noticed that the tides were changing. Besides, only a few arrests had ever turned into convictions, and few sex workers actually got treated at hospitals. With a large part of the workforce somehow escaping the law, the government realised that the presence of venereal diseases had increased among the British troops.

The British army finally caved in. In September 1888, after more than 20 years, the Contagious Diseases Act was revoked in India.

Prejudices persist

Over the next century, prostitution dwindled in Chandannagar, owing to the rise of “educated middle class with moral values instilled by the Communists,” said Bandyopadhyay. Meanwhile, with the British gone, Calcutta regained its sex trade industry in the form of Sonagachi, said to be Asia’s largest red-light district.

“The business that all of Sonagachi brings, because of not just the sex trade, but the adjoining restaurants, bars and shops is unimaginable,” Sen said. “Of course, it is allowed to exist.”

Do the problems that came to light because of the 1868 law – be it sexually-transmitted diseases among sex workers or government oppression – still exist in 2019? Yes and no, said Bharati Dey, mentor at the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a collective of over 65,000 sex workers in West Bengal.

Formed in 1995, the organisation works as an advocacy group for sex workers, making their working conditions safe. In association with the National AIDS Control Organisation, the committee runs 49 clinics for routine health checkups of sex workers. “The organisation has empowered sex workers and given them the power to say no to a customer who does not want to wear a condom,” Dey said. According to a 2018 study by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, 1.6% of female Indian sex workers were HIV-positive or had AIDS in 2017, and 91% of sex workers used condoms in 2018.

Operating from North Kolkata’s Sonagachi, the organisation protects and stands up for sex workers against legal and extra-legal oppression, as documented in Shohini Ghosh’s 2008 documentary Tales of the Night Fairies. Not everything is rosy, of course.

“Why should sex workers register themselves in any government list?” Dey said. “Even today, often the police or the government approaches us with such requests. All sex workers have their identity proofs required to live as Indian citizens, so why can’t they go by their business independently?”

While Kolkata’s sex workers have organised themselves as a force, they have often faced societal prejudice and harassment. Locals protested against their requests to celebrate Durga Puja in Sonagachi in the early 2010s. The matter went to the Calcutta High Court. The sex workers won the case and have been celebrating Durga Puja since 2013, Dey said.

“There are so many issues that we are still fighting for,” Dey continued. “We want the removal of the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act and the even more dangerous anti-trafficking bill. Our rights are not recognised as we are still not covered under labour laws. The profession is yet to be made legal. There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.”

(Source: Scroll)

‘A step away from hell’: The young male refugees selling sex to survive

Photographer Heba Khamis spent a year and a half documenting the lives of ‘black birds’: the male Afghan and Iranian sex workers in Berlin’s Tiergarten

All photographs by Heba Khamis

The allure of romance is never far away in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, a vast 520-acre expanse home to manicured lawns, dense forest, a picturesque boating lake and the city zoo. As families lay out picnics and millennials fire up barbecues, those seeking something more illicit head to the park’s wooded north, where young male Afghan and Iranian refugees can be found selling sex to the hundreds of buyers who pass through Tiergarten each day.

Jochen* (71) and Mohamed* (21) sit in the Tiergarten

In 2017, Egyptian photographer Heba Khamis was studying in Hanover when a flurry of news reports about Tiergarten’s young male refugees made national headlines. “No one could get [photographic] access to the guys, but the German media were saying they were dangerous and to stay away [from them], that they were doing bad stuff,” said Khamis. “I felt I needed to see for myself.”

Initially accompanied by a male Farsi-speaking friend, Khamis spent ages searching for the refugees in Tiergarten, asking random park-goers if they’d seen or heard anything “unusual”. She stumbled upon a pair of ping-pong players, who said they knew nothing about the prostitution in the park, yet as Khamis spent more time in Tiergarten it became clear that the ping-pong tables and the area around them were at the very heart of the sexual activity. “If you didn’t pay any attention, you wouldn’t notice it,” says Khamis, 31. “But the prostitution was happening right in front of them [around the public toilets]. The elephant was in the room and no one wanted to see it.”

Mohamed, top, is one of many refugees who pretend to be gay or to have converted to Christianity to help strengthen his case for asylum. Obaied, 25, bottom, also works in a Chinese fast food van in another city

Khamis began to visit the park every day and, through persistence and with the aid of translators, managed to make contact with the “boys”, most of whom were ethnic Shia Hazaras from Afghanistan, a minority long persecuted by the Taliban, ranging in age from 15 to 32. Although they were wary of the press, one of the men, Ali*, became Khamis’s go-to guide, introducing her to other boys in the park and their collective way of life. Over the course of a year and a half, she ended up watching – and documenting – as relationships blossomed, long-awaited papers came through and the boys moved out of the park, or didn’t.

Germany legalised prostitution in 2002 and, in 2017, passed a law requiring sex workers to register with local authorities in order to prevent human trafficking and exploitation. But the 30-odd Afghan and Iranian men Khamis was photographing fell under no such support system, as refugees are barred from working legally or attending school while they wait for their documents. “When you are a refugee without papers, and you are Muslim and come from a background where gay sex is shameful and taboo, it is a very different situation,” she says. “These guys don’t represent ‘prostitution in Germany’ in any way. There are only a few of them, and this is a very different scenario.”

Heavily saturated in earthy browns and greens, Khamis’s photos have an eerily ethereal quality, the dappled light of the forest reflecting off the boys’ necklaces, their youth made evident by their protruding clavicles and bony backs.

‘I don’t steal, I don’t disrespect people, but I have to earn money,’ says Ali

The result is deeply unsettling, reflecting the boys’ experience of the park. “Once you are in the park,” says one of Khamis’s subjects Ahmed, an Afghan who had been selling sex in the park for three years, “you are one little step away from hell.” For Khamis, the boys’ search for belonging and humanity was what compelled her to continue photographing.

“When you look at them, [you can see] they’re not enjoying it at all. They hurt themselves, they have depression. On all of them you will find [self-inflicted] cigarette burns or cuts. Everyone wants to get out of the park.”

Drugs feature heavily in the boys’ lives, numbing them and providing a small respite from the agony of waiting to become “legal”, says Khamis. As Germany prioritises assistance to refugees from countries with an ongoing conflict, asylum seekers’ papers from non-conflict countries such as Afghanistan and Iran take longer to complete, and the applicants are more likely to be deported, says Khamis.

Hashem sleeps in the park

The singularity of their situation – engaging in culturally taboo work while waiting in political limbo – inspired Khamis to call the boys “black birds”, a nod to both the numerous blackbirds in the park and a play on the term “black sheep”. “When you are different in the family, you are the ‘black sheep’, and for me these guys were the same: their whole lives they’ve been undocumented, unable to ‘fly’, unable to live normal lives, unable to find anywhere that will accept them.”

• The female public toilet is often used for sexual encounters. (bottom ) Mujtaba is an Afghan refugee born in Iran. If deported, he will be sent to Afghanistan, a country he has never seen

While some boys were lucky enough to get their papers and move out of the refugee camps or even the park itself, others were required to find another means of escape. For some that meant entering into relationships with their regular buyers (the photo of one such couple won Khamis second prize in the 2019 World Press Photo portraits category), or converting to Christianity as means of claiming political asylum. Still others have remained in Tiergarten.

Omran lost his father, sister and brother when their house was bombed by the Taliban when he was six years old

Khamis began her photographic career covering the 2011 and 2013 revolutions in Egypt, then turned her focus to socially taboo subjects relating to the body, such as breast ironing in Cameroon and Egypt’s transgender community. The practice of focusing on such “unacceptable” issues has transformed her as a person, she says.

“When you work long term on stories it’s not just one image you deliver, you invest your whole life in these stories and they teach you lessons and change you in the long run,” says Khamis.

Roman receives €239 (£200) a month in social aid. After paying his bills, he has around €40 left. He works in the park when he runs out of money

“You become less and less judgmental. You no longer look at things from the surface of your own perspective; you try to see through the people instead. From outside [Tiergarten], you could look at these boys and say, ‘Go work in the black market instead [of doing sex work]’. But they have fought their whole lives, first being born in Afghanistan, then fleeing to Iran and finally to Europe, thinking they will have a nice life at last. Yet they no longer have a home – or a destination.

“This is [what] human failure [looks like]: sometimes we all fight so hard for something that once we finally arrive, we’re so tired from fighting that we just surrender.”

* All subjects’ names have been changed to protect identities.

(Source: The Guardian)

Nepal’s ‘Mother Teresa’ has rescued over 18,000 girls from sex trafficking

Anuradha Koirala works to help exploited Nepali women and children sold into sex slavery.

Inspired by Mother Teresa, Anuradha Koirala always knew she was destined to serve people. So she became a teacher, educating young children in Kathmandu, Nepal. But after two decades, she decided to pursue an even greater calling: protecting women and girls from abuse, trafficking, and exploitation.

On her morning walks past the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu in the early 1990s, Koirala would regularly encounter women begging on the street. She was drawn to them and began to engage the women in conversation — they all told her that they had been victims of some type of gender-based violence, she recalled in her 2015 TEDx Talk.

Koirala was far too familiar with their pain, having suffered extreme physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband.

"Every day, there was battering. And then I had three miscarriages that I think [were] from the beating. It was very difficult because I didn't know in those days where to go and report [it], who to...talk to,” she told CNN in 2010.

Her decision to change careers was triggered by her traumatic personal experience.

Koirala began educating the women about gender-based violence and the empowerment of women. She offered to help them support themselves if they stopped begging on the streets.

At first, just eight women took her up on her offer, and she gave them 1,000 rupees each from her meager earnings to start small street shops. Through a portion of their profit — the two rupees that Koirala would collect from each of them daily — she was then able to provide security and economic opportunity to other women in need.

Soon after, she took her mission a step further, founding the nonprofit Maiti Nepal in 1993, through which she has served exploited women and children for the last 26 years. Throughout her career as a humanitarian and activist, she has specifically focused on tackling sex trafficking, a rampant industry that forces young girls from underprivileged communities across the India-Nepal border to be sold into sex slavery.

“These are poor regions with high illiteracy rates. If a relative or friend turns up offering someone a job, it is often the girls’ parents themselves who encourage them to go, without realizing what is really happening,”she told the Guardian. “It is the perfect breeding ground for traffickers.”

Maiti Nepal, which now caters to over 1,000 children, has grown to include three prevention homes through which at-risk girls are identified and educated on the dangers of trafficking. The organization also runs 11 transit homes that operate as immediate shelters for rescued girls, two hospices that treat women and children infected with HIV/AIDS, and a formal school.

Today, Koirala is 70 years old and, touted as Nepal’s own “Mother Teresa,” continues to fight against sex trafficking through her organization, which hosts a series of initiatives, including awareness campaigns, female empowerment programs, and skills training sessions for children and women.

Maiti Nepal, in collaboration with local law enforcement, regularly conducts rescue operations and patrols 26 points on the India-Nepal border in an effort to stop trafficking. The organization has saved over 18,000 girls since the founding of Maiti Nepal, Koirala said at the Global Peace Leadership Conference in 2012.

“When I see their pain — their mental pain as well as physical pain — it is so troubling that I cannot turn myself away. This gives me strength to fight and root this crime out,” she said in a phone interview with the Borgen Project.

Maiti Nepal also assists in the apprehension of trafficking criminals and has aided in the prosecution of over 700 traffickers.

While some survivors of sex trafficking are able to recover from their trauma and go on to live full lives, Koirala recognizes that not all are so lucky. Some survivors contract HIV, and require antiretroviral therapy to control the virus. The treatment can slow its progression and reduce the chances of transmission, so the organization also offers access to the treatment to affected women and children. Its two hospice centers provide those suffering from AIDS a safe place and comfortable place to live.

Koirala has been widely recognized for her work and has been awarded numerous local and international awards, including the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian award. She was also named the CNN Hero of the Year in 2010, for which she won $125,000 to further her work.

“Just imagine what would happen if your daughter was standing there, and if your daughter was there, what would you do? How would you fight? So you have to join hands. You have to take each child as your daughter,” she said in a video played during the 2010 CNN Heroes program.

“I want a society free of human trafficking,” she added, as tears welled in her eyes. “I hope I will make it happen one day.”

(Source: Global Citizen)

They escaped ISIS. Then they got sucked into Baghdad's sex trafficking underworld

Nadia's handshake is strong, but her voice trembles as she says hello. Leaning against a window, she describes in painful detail the twisted journey that saw her evade the grip of terrorists only to fall victim to Baghdad's sex trafficking underworld.

Stories like Nadia's have become all too familiar in the wake of ISIS' defeat in Iraq. The decline of the militant group has given rise to another evil: human trafficking networks that thrive on the spoils of war, the displaced and the desperate.

And she was the perfect mark.

Nadia was living in Sinjar, northern Iraq, in 2014 when ISIS rounded up thousands of women and girls like her from the Yazidi ethnic minority and forced them into sexual slavery. But she says she managed to escape, fleeing with her family through scattered hills to an IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. CNN is not using Nadia's real name out of concerns for her safety.

Still, she was haunted by the fate of others who were not as lucky. She said she started sending money to a man she believed was a trusted friend, who she had met while on the run from ISIS and who said he was coordinating humanitarian aid for other Yazidis. Encouraged by their conversations and propelled by her desire to help, she began organizing demonstrations at the camp, demanding the release of Yazidi women.

Then the calls started. "I would get the threats by phone," Nadia said, explaining that she wasn't sure who was harassing her. "I wasn't afraid for myself, but for my little sister. They said, 'If you don't come, we know where your sister goes to school.'"

When she received a letter from an NGO supporting her application for asylum in the United States, she reached out to her friend, asking for help to get to the embassy in Baghdad. "He said, 'My sister, I can take you. I know a guy in the Iraqi parliament, I can take you to him.'"

On the road to the capital, she sensed something was wrong. "He kept stopping to talk on the phone and send messages," she told CNN. "I said, 'Take me back, I want to go back.' He said, 'No, it's ok, it is about a group of Yazidi girls I freed from Fallujah, they are waiting for us in Baghdad.'"

"He knew my weakness, I was happy when I heard that some of our girls were freed. He convinced me to continue the trip," she said.

When they arrived in a rundown Baghdad neighborhood, notorious for its drug gangs, the unthinkable happened. The old man, who her friend had told her was a parliamentarian, greeted them in a dilapidated building. "He said to me, 'You are mine now, you are mine now.'" He was the head of a sex trafficking gang.

Nadia was shocked. The friend she had trusted all along -- with her money and with her fears -- had sold her into sexual slavery.

"I started fighting ... I started hitting them. They both beat me hard," she said. She says they sedated her with an injection and everything went black.

When she came to, she said she was surrounded by empty bottles and dirty plates, naked and in pain from having been raped by multiple men. She says she thought it was as many as 10, judging by the mess they left behind. "I lost my life, I was destroyed," she said. "Three months they would torture me like this, every day."

Anti-trafficking NGOs try to spread their message through word of mouth, but they say there are some Baghdad neighborhoods so dangerous they don't dare go.

Nadia tried to run away, but each time her captors caught and beat her. One time they attacked her so brutally that she had internal bleeding and was taken to the hospital. She heard doctors talking about how they had to save her organs.

In the hospital room, Nadia said the head of the gang would sit at her bedside, stroking her hair and calling her his daughter. He told the medical staff that she had a mental illness and had fallen down the stairs.

When Nadia was released from hospital, she said another woman -- another victim of the gang -- was brought in to keep watch over her. Nadia begged the woman to let her go, but the woman just laughed.

The woman lifted her shirt, revealing a scar on her stomach she said she got when they stole one of her kidneys. "'This is what they did to me. I had two little children and they sold them,'" she told Nadia, before adding: "'you will be forced to stay with them, you will get used to this, all that is happening to you.'"

After months of abuse, just when Nadia thought her life would end, she was rescued. She said she wasn't sure who the men were that saved her, but they took her to a hotel run by a Yazidi and she was ultimately reconnected with her family.

Now, Nadia says she wants justice.

"I am fighting this," she said. "I am using what is remaining of my breath to be a voice for us all, so that this doesn't happen to anyone else."

"Everywhere, there are victims"
Statistics are difficult to come by due deficient identification guidelines and a lack of referral procedures in Iraq. A dearth of coordinated agencies tracking trafficking activities in the country also means that accompanying data is nearly nonexistent.

But by many accounts, human trafficking has become rampant in the refugee camps dotted across Iraq, as well as in cities like Baghdad, where modern day slavery and forced prostitution networks are growing. Agents from trafficking networks often promise to resettle refugees from Kurdistan, but instead bring them to hotels and brothels in Baghdad, Basrah and other cities across southern Iraq, according to reports from by both the US State Department and SEED, a Kurdistan-based nonprofit.

"When you look everywhere, there are victims," Dr. Ali Akram al-Bayati told us, sitting on a bench on the bank of the Tigris river. Pointing to families picnicking and teenagers snapping selfies, he said there was a lack of awareness within Iraqi society about what was happening behind closed doors.

Al-Bayati works to combat human trafficking as part of the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, which was set up and funded by the government. Ostensibly set up as an independent institution, the commission's mandate is to gather information, investigate cases and bring them to court, but al-Bayati says it lacks the finances and power to do so effectively.

Dr. Ali Akram al-Bayati works to combat human trafficking as part of the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, which was set up and funded by the government.

Nadia's case is among the many that the commission is trying to support. According to Nadia, the Iraqi justice system is failing her: the case is being buried in both Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad.

On paper, the Iraqi government has stepped up efforts to prosecute and convict traffickers, but al-Bayati said it has failed to tackle the sweeping nature of the problem. His claims are backed up by the State Department's 2019 Trafficking in Persons report.

Iraq's government "increased law enforcement efforts, but did not hold criminally accountable officials complicit in trafficking, including child soldiering and sex trafficking," the State Department said, citing reports that officials in key security positions had played a role in protecting traffickers from prosecution. "The government continued to lack implementing regulations for the anti-trafficking law, hindering its ability to enforce the law, bring traffickers to justice, and protect victims."

Inconsistencies in Iraq's 2012 anti-trafficking law, which criminalized some forms of labor and sex trafficking, has opened opportunities for wrongful convictions.

According to the State Department, the Iraqi government also failed to report what efforts it had made to pursue allegations that security and military personnel in IDP camps were complicit in sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and girls.

"If you are talking about human trafficking, of course when you investigate you will see some of the officials who are involved in that," al-Bayati said. "Whether they are higher or lower officials, of course it's not in their interest to reveal all the facts."

Naming the officials would be pointless. They are too powerful, and his own commission is too weak, al-Bayati says. He told us he had received subtle threats but when pushed he wouldn't go into detail at the risk of putting his life into more jeopardy.

Gaps in the government's referral procedures have also prevented many victims from receiving appropriate services -- the government-run trafficking shelters in Baghdad remained empty throughout 2017, according to the US State Department Trafficking in Persons report.

Al-Bayati said he was aware of around 150 reported cases of sex trafficking across Iraq in 2018. Only four to five women were placed in government shelters, he said.

Last year, al-Bayati said, 426 people were detained for alleged involvement in trafficking crimes -- only 53 were sent to prison.

But available figures aren't reflective of the scale of human trafficking in the country. Fear of retribution and stigma, as well as a lack of faith in the government and the judicial process, silences victims and those who work with them.

Still, there are those trying to help -- albeit, discretely.

Operating in plain sight
When we arrived at the address for the anti-trafficking NGO, there was no way to know that we were in the right place. There's no sign outside and the first-floor masquerades as something else. We aren't naming the NGO to protect the safety of its employees.

Such a level of secrecy came as a surprise given the relative security in the Iraqi capital these days. The NGO is afraid of getting targeted by gangs and militia groups operating with impunity beneath the city's vibrant veneer.

Inside a room, Ahlam sat in a plastic chair, trembling under a black abaya which concealed her face.

All we could see were the soft billows in fabric created by the wringing of her hands as she described how she became prey for sex traffickers in Baghdad.

"It all started with my older brother," said Ahlam, whose name has been changed for her safety.

Ahlam, a former ISIS bride, left her husband to start a new life in Baghdad, where she was sold into prostitution.

In 2014, Ahlam's brother joined ISIS in their home province of Diyala, north of the capital, quickly rising to the rank of Emir. He married Ahlam off to an ISIS fighter, but when her husband was detained a few months later, she moved back in with her brother.

Ahlam said her brother had become more radical and more cruel during his time with ISIS. She said he beat her and her sisters and imprisoned her in a room with no food. When she complained to another relative, her brother threatened to kill her.

A cousin ultimately helped her flee to Baghdad, but once she got there she had no one to turn to for help.

"I was in the street, going around lost. Baghdad is a big city, a crowded city," she said. "I got in a taxi. The driver asked me where I want to go, and I said I don't know."

Confused and scared, Ahlam poured her story out to him. He was sympathetic and offered to help. "I thought a savior had arrived. I said to myself finally there is good in the world. He said he could find me something with a relative," she recalled. "I said 'where?' He said, 'you will find out later.'"

First, Ahlam said she was brought to a casino, before being sold to a brothel.

"He brought me to another woman who took me to a house," Ahlam recalled. "I realized that the girls there work as prostitutes."

Iman al-Silawi, the head of the NGO where Ahlam sought shelter, says they try to identifying potential victims before they are trafficked.

The NGO where Ahlam ultimately sought shelter is focused on identifying potential victims before they become ensnared in these networks. They have teams working across the country with vulnerable populations, displaced people living in camps, those desperate for work, and others living in the streets.

They try to spread their message through word of mouth and alert potential victims to warning signs, but Iman al-Silawi, the head of the NGO, said there were neighborhoods they don't dare go to.
Ahlam says she begged to leave the brothel, but the madame beat her, broke her phone and sold her on again.

"She forced me to work as a prostitute. She would bring men into the house and she would force me to have sex with them," Ahlam said, sobbing. Ahlam was trapped in the brothel for a few months before seizing an opportunity to run away.

According to people who work with victims, Ahlam's story is representative of the way trafficking rings operate today across Iraq: in plain sight. Those with ties to the networks -- like the taxi driver -- keep their eyes out for vulnerable women and try to lure them in. And, with a large population of vulnerable people, those networks have swelled, their tentacles reaching across the country and up to the highest levels of government.

"What is my crime?" Ahlam asked. "What have I done to deserve this?"

She bowed her head and contemplated her future. Gone are her childhood hopes of a happy life, a loving husband, a family -- dreams that were first stolen from her by ISIS, then by those exploiting her vulnerability, and finally by her own government which failed to protect her.

(Source: CNN)

The living hell of children trapped in Bangladesh's brothels

Sold by traffickers, enslaved for years and raped many times a day … this is the life of tens of thousands of underage girls in Bangladesh.

After five years in the brothel, Labonni stopped dreaming of being rescued. Ever since she had been sold to a madam at 13 years old, customers had promised to help her escape. None had followed through. Over time, their faces began to blur together, so she couldn’t remember exactly who had visited before, or how many men had come by that day. There’s usually one every hour, starting from 9am.

“Sometimes I wake up and I don’t understand why I’m not dead yet,” she says.

 Girls wait for customers in Jessore brothel. Photograph: Allison Joyce

Now 19, Labonni says she’s resigned to life – and death – in Mymensingh, a brothel village in the centre of Bangladesh. Here, between 700 and 1,000 women and girls are working in the sex trade – many of them against their will.

Girls as young as 12 sleep five to a room; their beds only cordoned off by torn cotton curtains. Music blares from heavyset sound systems and homemade liquor is poured from plastic bottles to numb the pain. Men swagger shirtless down the alleys looking for girls. Ten minutes of sex will cost them TK400 (about £3.66) – but it’s money that mainly lands in the pockets of those running the brothel.

Like the majority of girls in Mymensingh, Labonni was trafficked into sex work. On the run at 13 years old, she left her six-month-old daughter behind to flee the abusive husband she had been made to marry the year before, in a ceremony that took place on the same day she started her period. “I didn’t know where I was going,” she remembers. “I thought maybe I could find work in a garment factory.”

A woman saw her looking tearful in Dhaka railway station, and offered her food and a place to sleep for the night. Two days later, Labonni was sold by her to the brothel for about £180 and forbidden to leave.

A graveyard for sex workers in Tangail. Photograph: Allison Joyce

Overnight, she became a chukri, or bonded sex worker – imprisoned within the brothel until she repaid hundreds of pounds in fabricated debts. “The madam who bought me said that I had to pay her back,” Labonni says in a flat voice. “She’d bribed the police to say I was 18 [the legal age for a registered sex worker] and told me I owed her more than £914. Then she confiscated my phone and locked me in my bedroom. She said that she’d hurt me if I tried to run away.” After two or three months, Labonni gave up trying to escape. “They always find you,” she adds.

A quick breakdown of the figures involved shows how girls like Labonni are a vital part of a hugely profitable business model for brothel owners in Bangladesh. For the past six years, since being trapped in the brothel, she has worked continually to pay off her phantom debt. Yet over those six years she has earned upwards of £46,500 for madams who enjoy lives of considerable luxury.

Until last year everything Labonni earned went to her madam. All she was given back was a £37 as a monthly allowance for food, clothes and toiletries. Labonni has now paid her original £914 “debt” back 50 times over.

Last year she was finally told she had paid off her debt, but she has yet to move on. Her mental strength is worn down by years of abuse. “I feel worthless,” she says. “My daughter doesn’t even know I’m her mum.” Even with her “debt” gone, she’s still obliged to pay half of her weekly earnings – approximately £78 – to the madams in exchange for electricity and a place to stay.

One of her regular customers, Mohammed Muktal Ali, is 30 years old. A married bus driver from the nearby town, he has been visiting Labonni every day for four and a half years, since she was 14. “All the girls here are helpless,” he says. “You can’t sell a boy to a brothel, but you can sell a girl because she has monetary value.” He doesn’t feel guilty for paying for sex with a trafficked teenager. “I am in love with Labonni. I’m 70% sure that one day I will rescue her.” Labonni doesn’t look up. “I don’t believe anything the men say to me any more,” she says later. “They all lie.”

Four floors down from Labonni’s bedroom, Farada, 33, says the number of trafficked girls has increased since she arrived at the brothel in 1999. She knows, she says, because she buys them. After 12 years entrapped in sexual slavery herself, she was given a girl as a gift by a customer eight years ago, moving from exploited to exploiter overnight. When the girl escaped, she bought a second, called Moni, for £137. “I paid £27 on cigarettes for the police, and they sorted all the paperwork,” she says, referring to the government-mandated certificates that state every sex worker is at least 18 and consents to engaging in prostitution. “Now the police charge more. It’s at least £450, which is very expensive, so the girls have to pay me back.” The younger the girl, the higher the bribe required by law enforcement, she adds.

These days, she makes about £187 every week from two girls, but says a third of that goes to local gang members who control the brothel.

A child waits outside their mother’s room while she works. Photograph: Allison Joyce

The money being made in this single brothel is an indicator of the vast profits generated by the global trade in women and girls. Sex trafficking is an enormously lucrative business.

Academic Siddharth Kara advises the United Nations and the US government on slavery and has shown through his own research that sex trafficking is disproportionately lucrative compared with other forms of slavery. He estimates that sex trafficking creates half of the total profits generated globally by modern slavery, despite only accounting for 5% of all trafficking victims worldwide.

He told the Observer: “The return on investment for sex trafficking is around 1,000% compared with much lower returns in exploitation for construction, agriculture or mining. The immense profitability of sex trafficking is … driven by the minimal expense associated with acquiring victims and the fact that the victim can be sold up to 20 times a day, generating tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars in profit per victim.”

Prostitution was legalised in Bangladesh in 2000, after the year-long detention of 100 sex workers by police sparked protests calling for the women’s freedom and equal rights. The women’s release heralded a new legal framework, but few protections.

Instead, the business of sexual exploitation has thrived in a country where women are oppressed in many ways. Across the country, one in five girls is married before her 15th birthday and only a quarter finish secondary education. Choice is a luxury few women here can afford.

While prostitution is legal, trafficking and forced labour are not. But poor enforcement of legislation in a country where women are easy prey means traffickers act with impunity. The Bangladesh government estimates that 100,000 women and girls are working in the country’s sex industry and one study reports that less than 10% of those had entered prostitution voluntarily. This investigation found hundreds of girls who spoke of being sold by strangers, family members or husbands without their consent.

In April the Dhaka Tribune reported that the conviction rate for people arrested in connection with trafficking is less than half a percent. While more than 6,000 people have been arrested in connection with human trafficking since 2013, only 25 were convicted. Last year only eight traffickers were convicted in Bangladesh.

 A girl of 14 waits for customers in a Jessore brothel. Photograph: Allison Joyce

While many girls sell sex from their homes or the street, more than 5,000 women and girls are split between 11 huge brothels countrywide. Some dating back hundreds of years, each brothel is registered with the government and monitored by the local police. Here, a triumvirate of powerful institutions – government, police and religion – watch over and approve the rape, enslavement and abuse of hundreds of thousands of prepubescent girls.

“The Bangladeshi police know everything that takes place in the brothels,” says Azharul Islam, programme manager of Rights Jessore, a local non-governmental organisation working to rehabilitate trafficked children working in the sex trade and return them to their families. “The brothel owners are involved in gangs, and our political leaders and law enforcement are involved in those gangs, too.” Corrupt government officials profit by accepting bribes and sexual favours in exchange for turning a blind eye to the abuse.

As part of this investigation, more than 20 underage girls in four of the brothels showed us their notarised certificates stating they were over 18. One girl admitted she was still 13. “It’s law enforcement, it’s the local mafia,” says Mahmudul Kabir, Bangladesh country director for the Netherlands-based NGO Terre des Hommes. “And it goes through the entire chain of power.”

The steady stream of women and children being trafficked into Bangladesh’s sex industry means that the girls are disposable to those making money out of them. The numbers killing themselves has reached a point where at least two brothels in central Bangladesh – Kandapara, on the on the outskirts of Tangail, and Daulatdia, on the banks of the Padma river – have had to built private graveyards to cope with the dead.

“There’s about one death a month,” says Shilpi, 57, who was sold to Daulatdia brothel in 1977. “It never used to be this many.” These days she conducts the funerals: washing each body before leading a team of 12 brothel guards through the thicket of weeds that shrouds the burial grounds; finally reciting a short prayer over the grave. She doesn’t know how many girls are buried there. She lost count after 100. “For a while, we tied a stone around their necks and threw the bodies in the pond,” Shilpi adds. “But sometimes they floated to the surface, so we had to find land.”

 A 15-year-old girl gets married. Many victims of trafficking said they were sold to brothels by their husbands, without their consent. Photograph: Allison Joyce

In Mymensingh, there’s no such graveyard – but not from lack of need. Instead, bodies are carried out to the countryside at nightfall; buried in unmarked graves by torchlight.

Public graveyards aren’t an option: the stigma that surrounds sex workers in Bangladesh forbids their burial in municipal ground. “Here we are shameful, bad women,” says Shilpi. “If a girl kills herself, people say it’s good riddance – it’s just a quicker way for them to get to hell.”.

Labonni has also tried to kill herself several times. “I’ll probably try again one day,” she says, sitting on the floor of the concrete cell that passes as a bedroom: her customers’ phone numbers are scratched into the wall. Meanwhile, she cuts herself daily.

Such deep-rooted mental health problems are endemic among Bangladesh’s bonded brothel workers, and make it harder for them to move on even when their “debts” are paid. Though there is little mental health support for the women, there is evidence that when it’s provided, it helps. One organisation working to rescue and rehabilitate underage trafficking victims is the Bangladesh National Women’s Lawyers’ Association. “When they first arrive at the home, they’re scared,” says BNWLA psychologist Sadia Sharmin Urmi. It takes consistent counselling to help them move forward, but within three months, she sees progress. “They know they are safe. That means a lot.”

For Labonni, the idea of ever getting help feels unlikely. “All my life, people tell me to have sex so that they can make money from it. How much do I have to earn to be free of this life?”

Escape now takes the form of daily video calls with her daughter, who lives with her elder sister in Dhaka. “I can’t raise her here and that hurts me, but I know she’s happy,” Labonni says. “One day, when she’s old enough, I would like her to know I’m her real mum.”

40.3million: The number of people living in some form of modern slavery across the world. More than half of the victims are in forced labour. Sex trafficking is a form of modern slavery that involves the use of coercion, abduction, fraud or force to profit from someone’s sexual exploitation.

99%: of the estimated 4.8 million sex trafficking victims across the world working in the sex industry are women and girls.

13,000: people are estimated by the UK government to be the victims of modern slavery in Britain today.

70%: of the world’s 4.8 million sex trafficking victims are in the Asia and Pacific region.

$150bn: The amount generated by the modern slave trade every year, according to UN estimates. Sex traffickers can earn up to £29,000 per victim.

(Source: The Guardian)