Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, is India's industrial and financial capital, and also its largest city. Located in the central region of India's western coast, it has a population of approximately 18 million, making it the sixth-largest city in the world.
The first National Study on Child Abuse, covering 13 states and a sample size of 12,446 children and released by Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury today, says that 53% of children faced some kind of abuse.
The ‘‘disturbing” fact was that 70% of the children never reported the abuse. Compared to those in the age group 13-18, younger children (5-12 years) faced higher levels of abuse.
Chowdhury said the dismal level of awareness about sexual abuse among children necessitated “mandatory sex education” in schools. Her statement comes at a time when Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have banned sex education in schools on the ground that it’s “not compatible with Indian culture”.
On the ban, Chowdhury said her Ministry was “concerned” and was in touch with the states. Saying there was a “pressing need” for sex education in school syllabi, she said: “Possibly the language and treatment will have to be changed.”
The Ministry is said to be working on an Offence Against Children (Prevention) Bill which is expected to be brought before Parliament during the monsoon session. The proposed Bill aims to define child abuse offence in a far more comprehensive manner.
Focusing on five forms of abuse, the study found that in both rural and urban areas, 48.4% of girls wished they were boys, a pointer to the discrimination they faced in family and society.
In case of sexual abuse, more than half the child respondents (53.22%) reported facing one or more forms of sexual abuse, either in the form of sexual assault or some kind of sexual advances. Almost 21% respondents admitted to severe forms of sexual abuse — fondling of private parts, exhibiting private parts or being photographed nude. Of these, 6% reported to have been sexually assaulted.
Across different ages, the severest form of sexual abuse victims turned out to be children in the age group 11-16 while instances declined between age 16-18 years. Seventy three per cent of sexual abuse victims were in the age group 11-18.
About 69% of children said they had faced physical abuse by way of beating, burning, kicking or had been harmed otherwise. Almost 65 % of physical abuse victims were children in the age group 5-12.
Almost half the children in the country have suffered emotional abuse in the form of verbal, mental abuse or some kind of humiliation like girl-child neglect. In this case too, the largest victims of emotional abuse (47%) were children in the age group 5-12.
The study also highlighted that among different types of child groups — child in family, school children, child labourers, street children and children in institutional care — child labourers and street children were most vulnerable to sexual abuse. According to the study, about 62% of children at work and about 55% of street children faced some sort of sexual abuse.
Child prostitution involving both boys and girls is very common today but female child prostitution is more common than male child prostitution.
Termed as the oldest profession, prostitution has become an integral part of 'all sorts' that make the world. Women who resort to this rarely get a sympathetic word from the society and their life is wasted away selling momentary pleasures for a meal and existence in cubby holes called 'cages'. If their plight is pathetic, worse still is that of the child prostitutes.
Today there is existence of 'kid porn' where children and not adults are chosen for sexual exploitation.
Ironically child prostitution is a special category of rigorous case of child labour and it raises more troubling ethical problems than child labour in general.
II. Extent
Many surveys have been conducted to find out the extent of child prostitution. Dr. Gilada's paper on perspectives and positional problems of social intervention" shows that,
"70% of women are forced into prostitution and 20% of these are child prostitutes."
Statistics of the survey done show:-
City Population Prostitute Population
Bombay 10 million 100,000
Calcutta 9 million 100,000
Delhi 7 million 40,000
Agra 3 million 40,000
A survey conducted by Indian Health Organization of a red light area of Bombay shows:-
1. 20% of the one lakh prostitutes are children.
2. 25% of the child prostitutes had been abducted and sold.
3. 6% had been raped and sold.
4. 8% had been sold by their fathers after forcing them into incestuous relationships.
5. 2 lakh minor girls between ages 9yrs-20yrs were brought every year from Nepal to India and 20,000 of them are in Bombay brothels.
6. 15% to 18% are adolescents between 13 yrs and 18 yrs.
7. 15% of the women in prostitution have been sold by their husbands
8. Of 200m suffering from sexually transmitted diseases in the world 50m alone were in India.
9. 15% of them are devdasis.
III. Cases
There are several causes of child prostitution but some of the most important ones are as follows:
1. Devdasi system:- many of the devdasis are the girls who were dedicated to the Goddess Yellamma by their parents at a very young age. They are the servants of God as they are married to the Goddess. This ceremony takes place twice a year. The main one is during the second fortnight of January at Karnatakas Saudatti village in South West of Miraj. Once the girl is married to a Goddess she cannot marry a mortal.
The procurers frequent the place inorder to get the fresh supplies of girls as 4000 to 5000 girls are dedicated every year to the Goddess.
Attaining puberty is a secondary thing as there is a ceremony known as heath Lawni (or touching ceremony) whereby the girl is made over to the highest bidder.
A study revealed that one third, of which three fourth are under fourteen years, are in Bombay's cheapest brothels. They belong to the low castes like Mahars, Matangs, etc. who give low priority to education. They are so poverty stricken that Fathers, brothers and husbands do not hesitate to sell their daughters, sisters and wives.
Prevention of devdasis Act has been in the statute book since 1935 and amended recently but the system continues even today despite governmental ban, Still the girls are dedicated to the Goddess and forced into virtual prostitution and made to entertain males in order to invoke the blessings of the deity.
It was estimated that in Delhi 50% of the prostitutes are devdasis and in Bombay, Pune, Solapur and Sangli. 15% of them are devdasis,
(2) It is also noticed that young and old men prefer young and new girls.
(3) Growing poverty, increasing urbanization, and industrialization, migration, and widespread unemployment, breaking up of joint family system etc. are also responsible for the prevalence and perpetuation of the child prostitution.
(4) The influx of the affluent and not so affluent people from Gulf countries in India has boosted the flesh trade in cities like Bombay, Hyderabad etc. The parents are forced to part with their daughters for as little as 2 rupees tow two thousand in the fond hope that they would get two square meals in the moneyed new world.
(5) Quick marriages without proper knowledge of the bridegroom's family background leading to a divorce initiates the gravitation of girls to the red light area.
(6) Another inaction is after rape. A fifteen years old girl was brought to Dr, Gildas Clinic as she was suffering from the symptoms of an STD she had been raped and sold by a self styled social worker. The poor girl was forced into silence by the threats of dire consequences.
(7) The children are not lured into it but are thrust into it. There was a case of a sixteen years old girl who was sold to a brothel owner by her father following incest. 8% of these girls are victims of incest because of the myth-that one of the causes for an STD is intercourse with a virgin.
(8) Many a times when a child who has lost both his parents is looked after by the relatives and these relatives too force the child into prostitution.
(9) Child marriages are a common phenomenon even today and the bride is very much younger to the bridegroom so the husband drives the innocent wife into prostitution. There is a case where a girl of 13 was married off to a man of thrice her age three months later he abandoned her and married another girl. She returned to her poor parents and three months later a man promised her a good job and took her to Bombay from where he went and sold her to a middle aged woman at Kamatipura for rupees ten thousand and did not come back to take her.
(10) Some of them are lured to Bombay the tinsel town. They dream of stellar roles in films and mostly end up as prostitutes in the cages.
IV. Who are these girls, where then they procured from? How and why?
Tribal Kolta women and girls from Garhwal hills are compelled to become prostitutes to rescue their family from debt bondage. Poverty stricken young girls from Bengal and Nepal are lured with promises of attractive jobs and marriage. The agents came to know about the existing condition in the areas of U. P. Tehri Garhwal. Dehradun etc. The local Rajputs used to keep the men as animals and exploit their wives, sisters and daughters too. The agents were successful in convincing these women well and hence brought them to Delhi and Agra and sold them to the brothels there.
The phenomenon of commercialized trafficking of their girls found an easy acceptability among kollas as Nadeem Hasnain, an anthropologist researched the Socio-economic and cultural variables responsible for the bondage. In his book Bonded for ever (1982) says. "… Centuries of exploitation and extreme degrees of material and non material deprivation and the resultant wretchedness have taken the fight out of them and they can hardly resist the temptation of getting some hundred rupees even at the cost of selling their offsprings and wives. It is an economic battle for life".
Nearly 5000 teenagers and women in a Tehsil of sangli district in South Maharastra wait for the month of June when the Arabs come and the year long poverty and hunger of these women, children, and babies is dispelled over night. The flesh trade flourishes from June to September and makes all the people connected with it happy.
In Rajashtan teenage prostitution is catching up as men sit and smoke hukkas while women fix bargains years after passing of the suppression of immoral traffic of women and children act. The children of the age group between 12 yrs to 20 yrs practice prostitution after school hours. Most of these children are later sold to the brothels of Agra and Delhi.
In big cities women procures are on a lookout for girls and they get girls from Basti, Gonda, Gorakhpur, Shahjahanpur, which are particularly notorious areas. Trilokpur police said that in a period of a year one thousand girls were sold in Doomariyaganj tahsil alone.
Nepal has a very large female population and majority of them are illiterate and are very gullible and can be lured under any pretext. They are very religious and succumb to the promises of being taken to temples in India. They are fair skinned and attractive and a promise to get them into films tempts them. There is widespread unemployment in Nepal and the girls are totally unexposed to the outer world.
About 40% of these girls are habitual bidi smokers so a little bit of the soporific can be mixed in the cigarettes for e.g. Ganja, Charas before abducting them. The Govt. of Nepal plans to ban smoking for women for this reason. The procurers find new ways of abducting them. One of the ways is giving them the 'magic paan' (betel) which is cocaine mixed, as most of the girls are abdicts of paan and beedi fall an easy prey to the cocaine intoxication.
Another bait is that of dowry which exists in reverse from in Nepal. A man can buy a bride and then he brings her to Bombay or anywhere and sells her at a brothel. Bombay seems to be an end of the rainbow when the daughters disappeared, the parents did not try to find out because they neither had the resources nor the ability to do so. They are assured that each girl can look after herself and if she does not reach so far. But when the girls started disappearing more frequently the rumours filtered back to the villages the neighbours were told that she was working in Bombay.
The parents do not accept the girls back but the money they send to them 80% of the girls crossing the Indo-Nepal border fall victims to racketeers who include Government officials of the two countries.
Girls are also brought from Karnataka, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh and are assaulted and raped till they submit to this shameful life.
V. Conditions
In the seamy and sordid world where each painted faced hides its own talk of abduction coercion an submission the 'gharwali' or the 'madani' rules by force and is helped by 'Goondas'. The prostitute is deprived of her earnings till the price which was paid to buy her is procured. If she utters a word of dissatisfaction she is whipped. They are kept in sophisticated cages by their owners. The child prostitutes who are minors and virgins are kept under strict vigil in reserve as they are in great demand. The Arabs and Koreans are used to paying thousands for these girls. The girls are never lodged at the same place permanently and they are shifted occasionally to a dozen of brothels owned by the procuress of their own country to avoid familiarity with the customers or police detection.
The procurer first rechristens the girl and the cautions them against revealing their real names and also disclosing there true addresses to the customers. Thereafter they are trained on the ethics of flesh trade never to turn away any customer, to treat all customers well equally courteously and superficially and never to discuss personal matters and keep themselves clean. They are also given one weekly holiday. The brothels where minor girls are kept, have two entries so as to escape during the sudden raids.
The girls have to live in a really unhygenic condition with very little food. A dozen girls have to live in a 10 x 10 room and that too without any medical check ups. These girls are forced to work round the clock. They are excused only when they are physically very weak.
Madams have quacks to treat them who dispense debilitating remedies and also use dangerous and unhygenic methods of abortion. The quacks inject coloured liquid in the infected areas as the treatment for various sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, scabies, venereal wart etc. making the children never totally cured thus extending their hold on them. The girls are seldom taken for treatment as sex with a minor girl is a crime so the madams are scared of the criminal proceedings.
For decades the most important red light areas have been enjoying the police protection. The policemen themselves go to the brothels for tea snacks and girls. They inform the brothel keepers in advance about the raids which are scheduled to take place.
The police, the brothel keeper, and pimps share the major part of the earnings of the prostitutes and the rest of it that percolates down to the prostitutes is a mere pittance. It is alleged that the police and abet the running of the brothels. They accept the hospitability, money and free use of the girls. The police helps the brothel keeper even by bringing back the ones who have run away. In a case where a girl named Geeta who was ten years old was rescued by a hawker after many attempts was returned back to the brothel keeper by the inspector himself on the same day.
The escapes by the victims and recovery by the police are rare. The recoveries do not account for even 2% of the actual number of girls procured it different places.
VI. Effects
Practice of child prostitution is economically unsound, psychologically disastrous, and morally dangerous and harmful on even and individual child. One can hardly imagine the extreme trauma that a child under goes. There is a case of a child prostitute who lost her speech after being raped by one who had hired her. She is now placed in a deaf mute school for speech recovery.
The case of Tulsa a Nepali girl is more pathetic. Since the age of 13 she was sold and brought by many people and shifted from brothel to brothel and was forced by five to seven men every day. In this process she ended up with many diseases. She was taken to J. J. Hospital at Bombay. She was said to be suffering from meningitis, tuberculosis of brain, bone and chest and had an STD in advanced stage. The police took over sixteen months a file a charge sheet. Finally she was repatriated to Nepal. The culprits in the Himalayan. Kingdom were tried and imprisoned for 20 years.
Child prostitutes become ready recruits for flesh trade for they are rendered unfit for any other trade or calling not being educated or having any knowledge of any other trade.
Child prostitution itself is a criminal activity and serves as a catalyst for further criminal association in other fields. The helpless children are turned into mere pawns in the criminal syndicates which lead to a steady deterioration of morals.
50m of the worlds 200m prostitutes who suffer from STD are in India and they are mostly found to be affected by tuberculosis, meningitis scabies, chronic pelvic injections anaemia, syphilis, chaneroid. Tineacrutis, vevercal war etc. This was the scars that the child prostitution leaves on the child prostitutes can not be erased but to a certain extent can be minimised by the medical help.
Daughters of women in prostitution are particularly vulnerable to prostitution as:
There is a more covert if not overt acceptance to earnings through prostitution. Their mothers are respected in the family as they send money for their needs. Living in the red light area exposes them to early sexual knowledge and abuse. Their mothers may die early (e.g. from contracting HIV) leaving the daughter with no other options.
Daughters of WIP are also vulnerable to being married off at a very young age as their mothers are worried for their safety. However, these marriages often leave a girl just as vulnerable, as her husband or his family may also be involved in prostitution. WIP tend to look for alliances in their village itself. Most of the time, factors at the village have compelled these women to enter prostitution. These factors remain unchanged when they seek alliances for their daughters. As a result, the daughters’ lives may not improve after marriage and they remain as vulnerable as their mothers were.
Lost Innocence
Each year, literally thousands of girls are sold into prostitution in India. While no formal statistics exist, it is believed that two million women and children work in India's brothels. Approximately 25,000 children, between five and 15 years of age, live and work in Bombay alone. The estimated number of children involved in prostitution is increasing by 10 percent each year. About 15 percent of prostitutes in Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Calcutta, Hyderabad and Bangalore are children. Nearly 50 percent of prostitutes were minors when they entered the trade.
Some girls are kidnapped, and some are trafficked or enticed from their villages with offers of employment, while others are born into the trade. After they are sold to the brothel, the girls are held captive for two to three years before they are allowed out on their own. The girls are beaten, gang raped and routinely abused. In Bombay, the girls charge between £1 and £5 (US $2 to $9) for sex. Customers pay the brothel and the money goes to pay off the girl's debt (the price she was bought for). This system of debt bondage keeps the girls in perpetual slavery.
|
