Half the Sky Read online

  The police seemed unlikely saviors to girls in the brothels because police officers regularly visited the brothels and were serviced free. But Meena was so desperate that she once slipped out and went to the police station to demand help.

  “I was forced into prostitution by a brothel in town,” Meena told the astonished desk officer at the police station. “The pimps beat me up, and they’re holding my children hostage.” Other policemen came out to see this unusual sight, and they mocked her and told her to go back.

  “You have great audacity to come here!” one policeman scolded her. In the end, the police sent her back after extracting a promise from the brothel not to beat her. The brothel owners did not immediately punish her. But a friendly neighbor warned Meena that the brothel owners had decided to murder her. That doesn’t happen often in red-light districts, any more than farmers kill producing assets such as good milk cows, but from time to time a prostitute becomes so nettlesome that the owners kill her as a warning to the other girls.

  Fearing for her life, Meena abandoned her children and fled the brothel. She traveled several hours by train to Forbesgunge. Someone there told one of Ainul’s sons, Manooj, of her whereabouts, and he soon arrived to beat up Meena. Manooj didn’t want her causing trouble in his brothel again, so he told her she could live on her own in Forbesgunge and prostitute herself, but she would have to give him money. Not knowing how she could survive otherwise, Meena agreed.

  Whenever Manooj returned to Forbesgunge to collect money, he was dissatisfied with the amount Meena gave him and beat her. Once Manooj threw Meena to the ground and was beating her furiously with a belt when a respectable local man intervened.

  “You’re already pimping her, you’re already taking her lifeblood,” remonstrated her savior, a pharmacist named Kuduz. “Why beat her to death as well?”

  It wasn’t the same as leaping on Manooj to pull him off her, but for a woman like Meena, who was scorned by society, it was startling to have anyone speak up for her. Manooj backed off, and Kuduz helped her up. Meena and Kuduz lived near each other in Forbesgunge, and the incident created a bond between them. Soon Kuduz and Meena were chatting regularly, and then he offered to marry her. Thrilled, she accepted.

  Manooj was furious when he heard about the marriage, and he offered Kuduz 100,000 rupees ($2,500) to give Meena up—a sum that perhaps reflected his concern that she might use her new respectability as a married woman to cause trouble for the brothel. Kuduz wasn’t interested in a deal.

  “Even if you offer me two hundred fifty thousand rupees, I will not give her up,” Kuduz said. “Love has no price.”

  After they were married, Meena bore two daughters with Kuduz, and she went back to her native village to look for her parents. Her mother had died—neighbors said she had cried constantly after Meena disappeared, then had gone mad—but her father was stunned and thrilled to see his daughter resurrected.

  Life was clearly better, but Meena couldn’t forget her first two children left behind in the brothel. So she began making journeys back—five hours by bus—to Ainul Bibi’s brothel. There she would stand outside and plead for Naina and Vivek.

  “As many times as I could, I would go back to fight for my children,” she remembered. “I knew they would not let me take my children. I knew they would beat me up. But I thought I had to keep trying.”

  It didn’t work. Ainul and Manooj didn’t let Meena in the brothel; they whipped her and drove her away. The police wouldn’t listen to her. The brothel owners not only threatened to kill her, they also threatened to kidnap her two young daughters with Kuduz and sell them to a brothel. Once a couple of gangsters showed up at Meena’s house in Forbesgunge to steal the two little girls, but Kuduz grabbed a knife and warned: “If you even try to steal them, I’ll cut you into pieces.”

  Meena was terrified for her two younger girls, but she couldn’t forget Naina. She knew that Naina was approaching puberty and would soon be put on the market. But what could she do?

  Interviewing women like Meena over the years has led us to change our own views on sex trafficking. Growing up in the United States and then living in China and Japan, we thought of prostitution as something that women may turn to opportunistically or out of economic desperation. In Hong Kong, we knew an Australian prostitute who slipped Sheryl into the locker room of her “men’s club” to meet the local girls, who were there because they saw a chance to enrich themselves. We certainly didn’t think of prostitutes as slaves, forced to do what they do, for most prostitutes in America, China, and Japan aren’t truly enslaved.

  Yet it’s not hyperbole to say that millions of women and girls are actually enslaved today. (The biggest difference from nineteenth-century slavery is that many die of AIDS by their late twenties.) The term that is usually used for this phenomenon, “sex trafficking,” is a misnomer. The problem isn’t sex, nor is it prostitution as such. In many countries—China, Brazil, and most of sub-Saharan Africa—prostitution is widespread but mostly voluntary (in the sense that it is driven by economic pressure rather than physical compulsion). In those places, brothels do not lock up women, and many women work on their own without pimps or brothels. Nor is the problem exactly “trafficking,” since forced prostitution doesn’t always depend on a girl’s being transported over a great distance by a middleman. The horror of sex trafficking can more properly be labeled slavery.

  The total number of modern slaves is difficult to estimate. The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just sexual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And The Lancet, a prominent medical journal in Britain, calculated that “1 million children are forced into prostitution every year and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million.”

  Antitrafficking campaigners tend to use higher numbers, such as 27 million modern slaves. That figure originated in research by Kevin Bales, who runs a fine organization called Free the Slaves. Numbers are difficult to calculate in part because sex workers can’t be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily. Some commentators look at prostitutes and see only sex slaves; others see only entrepreneurs. But in reality there are some in each category and many other women who inhabit a gray zone between freedom and slavery.

  An essential part of the brothel business model is to break the spirit of girls, through humiliation, rape, threats, and violence. We met a fifteen-year-old Thai girl whose initiation consisted of being forced to eat dog droppings so as to shatter her self-esteem. Once a girl is broken and terrified, all hope of escape squeezed out of her, force may no longer be necessary to control her. She may smile and laugh at passersby, and try to grab them and tug them into the brothel. Many a foreigner would assume that she is there voluntarily. But in that situation, complying with the will of the brothel owner does not signify consent.

  Our own estimate is that there are 3 million women and girls (and a very small number of boys) worldwide who can be fairly termed enslaved in the sex trade. That is a conservative estimate that does not include many others who are manipulated and intimidated into prostitution. Nor does it include millions more who are under eighteen and cannot meaningfully consent to work in brothels. We are talking about 3 million people who in effect are the property of another person and in many cases could be killed by their owner with impunity.

  Technically, trafficking is often defined as taking someone (by force or deception) across an international border. The U.S. State Department has estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, 80 percent of them women and girls, mostly for sexual exploitation. Since Meena didn’t cross a border, she wasn’t trafficked in the traditional sense. That’s also true of most people who are enslaved in brothels. As the U.S. State Department notes, its estimate doesn’t
include “millions of victims around the world who are trafficked within their own national borders.”

  In contrast, in the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1780s, an average of just under eighty thousand slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. The average then dropped to a bit more than fifty thousand between 1811 and 1850. In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—although the overall population was of course far smaller then. As the journal Foreign Affairs observed: “Whatever the exact number is, it seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was.”

  Long Pross was thirteen when she was kidnapped and sold to a brothel in Cambodia. When she rebelled, the female brothel owner punished her by gouging out her eye with a metal rod. (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  As on slave plantations two centuries ago, there are few practical restraints on slave owners. In 1791, North Carolina decreed that killing a slave amounted to “murder,” and Georgia later established that killing or maiming a slave was legally the same as killing or maiming a white person. But these doctrines existed more on paper than on plantations, just as Pakistani laws exist in the statute books but don’t impede brothel owners who choose to eliminate troublesome girls.

  While there has been progress in addressing many humanitarian issues in the last few decades, sex slavery has actually worsened. One reason for that is the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Indochina. In Romania and other countries, the immediate result was economic distress, and everywhere criminal gangs arose and filled the power vacuum. Capitalism created new markets for rice and potatoes, but also for female flesh.

  A second reason for the growth of trafficking is globalization. A generation ago, people stayed at home; now it is easier and cheaper to set out for the city or a distant country. A Nigerian girl whose mother never left her tribal area may now find herself in a brothel in Italy. In rural Moldova, it is possible to drive from village to village and not find a female between the ages of sixteen and thirty.

  A third reason for the worsening situation is AIDS. Being sold to a brothel was always a hideous fate, but not usually a death sentence. Now it often is. And because of the fear of AIDS, customers prefer younger girls whom they believe are less likely to be infected. In both Asia and Africa, there is also a legend that AIDS can be cured by sex with a virgin, and that has nurtured demand for young girls kidnapped from their villages.

  These factors explain our emphasis on sex slaves as opposed to other kinds of forced labor. Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there’s always hope of escape down the road.

  Inside the brothel, Naina and Vivek were beaten, starved, and abused. They were also confused about their parentage. Naina grew up calling Ainul Grandma, and Ainul’s son Vinod, Father. Naina sometimes was told that Vinod’s wife, Pinky, was her mother; at other times she was told her mother had died and that Pinky was her stepmother. But when Naina asked to go to school, Vinod refused and described the relationship in blunter terms.

  “You must obey me,” he told Naina, “because I am your owner.”

  The neighbors tried to advise the children. “People used to say that they could not be my real parents, because they tortured me so much,” Naina recalled. Occasionally, the children heard or even saw Meena coming to the door and calling out to them. Once Meena saw Naina and told her, “I am your mother.”

  “No,” Naina replied. “Pinky is my mother.”

  Vivek remembers Meena’s visits as well. “I used to see her being beaten up and driven away,” he says. “They told me that my mother was dead, but the neighbors told me that she was my mother after all, and I saw her coming back to try to fight for me.”

  Naina and Vivek never went to a day of school, never saw a doctor, and were rarely allowed out. They were assigned chores such as sweeping floors and washing clothes, and they had only rags to wear—and no shoes, for that might encourage them to run away. Then, when Naina was twelve, she was paraded before an older man in a way that left her feeling uncomfortable. “When I asked ‘Mother’ about the man,” Naina recalled, “she beat me up and sent me to bed without dinner.”

  A couple of days later, “Mother” told Naina to bathe and took her to the market, where she bought her nice clothes and a nose ring. “When I asked her why she was buying me all these things, she started scolding me. She told me that I had to listen to everything the man says. She also told me, ‘Your father has taken money from the man for you.’ I started crying out loudly.”

  Pinky told Naina to wear the clothes, but the girl threw them away, crying inconsolably. Vivek was only eleven, a short boy with a meek manner. But he had inherited his mother’s incomprehension of surrender. So he pleaded with his “parents” and his “grandma” to let his sister go, or to find a husband for her. Each appeal brought him only another beating—administered with scorn. “You don’t earn any income,” “Father” told him mockingly, “so how do you think you can look after your sister?”

  Yet Vivek found the courage to confront his tormentors again and again, begging for his sister’s freedom. In a town where police officers, government officials, Hindu priests, and respectable middle-class citizens all averted their eyes from forced prostitution, the only audible voice of conscience belonged to an eleven-year-old boy who was battered each time he spoke up. His outspokenness gained him nothing, though. Vinod and Pinky locked him up, forced Naina into the new clothes, and the girl’s career as a prostitute began.

  “My ‘mother’ was telling me not to get scared, as he is a nice man,” Naina remembered. “Then they locked me inside the room with the man. The man told me to lock the room from the inside. I slapped him…. Then that man forced me. He raped me.”

  Once a customer gave Naina a tip, and she secretly passed on the money to Vivek. They thought that perhaps Vivek could use a phone, a technology that they had no experience with, to track down the mysterious woman who claimed to be their real mother and seek help from her. But when Vivek tried to use the telephone, the brothel owners found out and both children were flogged.

  Ainul thought that Vivek could be distracted with girls, and so he was told to try to have sex with the prostitutes. He was overwhelmed and intimidated at the thought, and when he balked, Pinky beat him up. Seething and fearful of what would become of his sister, Vivek decided that their only hope would be for him to run away and try to find the person who claimed to be their mother. Somewhere Vivek had heard that the woman’s name was Meena and that she lived in Forbesgunge, so he fled to the train station one morning and used Naina’s tip to buy a ticket.

  “I was trembling because I thought that they would come after me and cut me into pieces,” he recalled. After arriving in Forbesgunge, he asked directions to the brothel district. He trudged down the road to the red-light area and then asked one passerby after another: Where is Meena? Where does she live?

  Finally, after a long walk and many missed turns, he knew he was close to her home, and he called out: Meena! Meena! A woman came out of one little home—Vivek’s lip quivered as he recounted this part of the story—and looked him over wonderingly. The boy and the woman gazed at each other for a long moment, and then the woman finally said in astonishment: “Are you Vivek?”

  The reunion was sublime. It was a blessed few weeks of giddy, unadulterated joy, the first happiness that Vivek had known in his life. Meena is a warm and emotional woman, and Vivek was thrilled to feel a mother’s love for the first time. Yet now that Meena had news about Naina, her doggedness came to the surface again: She was determined to rec
over her daughter.

  “I gave birth to her, and so I can never forget her,” Meena said. “I must fight for her as long as I breathe. Every day without Naina feels like a year.”

  Meena had noticed that Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an organization that fights sex slavery in India, had opened an office in Forbesgunge. Apne Aap is based in Kolkata, the city formerly known as Calcutta, but its founder—a determined former journalist named Ruchira Gupta—grew up partly in Forbesgunge. Other aid groups are reluctant to work in rural Bihar because of the widespread criminality, but Ruchira knew the area and thought it was worth the risk to open a branch office. One of the first people to drop in was Meena. “Please, please,” Meena begged Ruchira, “help me get my daughter back!”

  There had never been a police raid on a brothel in Bihar State, as far as anyone knew, but Ruchira decided that this could be the first. While Ainul Bibi’s brothel had warm ties with the local police, Ruchira had strong connections with national police officials. And Ruchira can be every bit as intimidating as any brothel owner.

  Naina shortly after her rescue from the brothel (Sraboni Sircar)

  So Apne Aap harangued the local police into raiding the brothel to rescue Naina. The police burst in, found Naina, and took her to the police station. But the girl had been so drugged and broken that at the station she looked at Meena and declared numbly: “I’m not your daughter.” Meena was shattered.

  Naina explained later that she had felt alone and terrified, partly because Ainul Bibi had told her that Vivek had died. But after an hour in the police station, Naina began to realize that maybe she could escape the brothel, and she finally whispered: “Yes, you’re my mother.”