HUMAN Trafficking
"Their captors urinate on them, abuse them, torture them & rape them until they no longer have a will to rebel."
Diana Scimone
The Day My Life Changed
By Diana Scimone
I thought I’d seen it all. I’d traveled to nearly 40 countries as a journalist writing about human rights and religious rights abuses.
But one Saturday in Mumbai, India, I saw something that changed me forever.
It was spring of 2001 and I was doing a story about women and forced prostitution. My contact was driving me through the red-light district early on a Saturday evening. Already the streets were packed and every doorway had at least 2 or 3 women standing in it. The hopelessness and despair on their faces was bad enough and made me weep inside…but it was about to get worse.
“Do you see those cages in the second-floor windows?” my contact asked me. “Cages? What are they for?” I replied, certain I did not want to know.
Girls as young as 4 are smuggled and held in cages
“They hold little girls who are smuggled in from Nepal.” My stomach turned as he told me about the fate of these girls, who are as young as 4 years old. They’re smuggled across the border and brought to Mumbai where they’re held in cages for a month.
Their captors urinate on them, abuse them, torture them, and rape them—until they no longer have a will to rebel. Only then are they fit to enter Mumbai’s enormous child sex slave industry—because their traffickers can sell them knowing they will not run away.
That was the day that changed my life.
Mumbai does not have a monopoly on child trafficking, of course. It happens all over the world, in developing and developed countries, including throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada. No city is immune from this horror.
Each year 1 million children enter the dark world of child slavery; that’s in addition to the children already enslaved.
They are raped for profit 20, 30 or even 40 times a night.
Night after night after night. The vast majority are girls, although there are of course many boys who are trafficked as well.
Most kids get sold into slavery because they believe the lies that traffickers tell. They really think they’ll be models or waitresses, and their parents trust the “aunties” who show up in the villages offering to give their daughters an education in the big city.
The sad truth is that these girls end up in the multi-billion sex trade—the 2nd-highest grossing illegal industry on the planet.
What if we could reach these girls before the traffickers do?
What if we could warn parents ahead of time about the lies that traffickers tell?
What if we could educate teenage girls and give them enough confidence and self-esteem to stand up to traffickers? We would make a massive dent in the trafficking pipeline and prevent hundreds of thousands of children from ever being sold for sex or labor.
"I believe we can do it.
In fact, we must do it."
* * *
Diana Scimone is director of The Born2Fly Project to stop child trafficking
She also blogs about the fight to stop the traffic
Follow Diana on Twitter: @DianaScimone
Born2Fly video: 'Get Angry. Please'
Trafficking
Diana Scimone
Jennifer Burn
Sunita Krishnan
Comments
to bring in changes we need many more people to work with us. I shall not discuss the severe case which others have done but I would bring everyone's attention to a campaign that we can launch at one point of time. You are an international organization and you can organize the same and many of us would follow. We can takke a common timing like the violence fort night. In India we network and work together with several other organizations on anti-traffickin g issues and hence we can take the responsibility in India. Is there any such plans that you have which we can plan and work around the world. We need to express our anger at the lack of change for our children who are vulnerable to trafficking and abuse constantly. Reading some of these facts it really angers us and also makes us frustrated.