Journalist and anti-sex trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta talks about her work to combat sex trafficking of young girls in India and also discusses her documentary on the subject, titled The Selling of Innocents.
Gupta said she was appalled to discover that a lucrative “flesh trade” had emerged during her generation in India. She detailed how young girls were smuggled into India from Nepal or elsewhere to be transported to brothels in Bombay and Calcutta - with some locked up for years to be sold into prostitution.
“The pimps would hand over these girls to brothel managers who would lock up these little girls for five years in small rooms with iron bars on the window, and charge them out for eight customers a night, to be raped repeatedly again and again and again.”
At the end of that period - when the victims were no longer commercially viable - the girls were then simply thrown into the street to fend for themselves, Gupta said.
She also talks about how her efforts to lure girls and women away from the sex trade led to spearhead her documentary project The Selling of Innocents. The success of her film also caused Gupta to launch the non-profit organization Apne Aap Women Worldwide, which provides alternative work choices besides the sex trade for at-risk girls and women.
Watch the full episode to also hear Gupta recount going into slums in Delhi with iconic feminist leader Gloria Steinem and the current state of the feminist movement in India.
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