This article was first published in the Irish Examiner on 20/04/2003
By Michael O’Farrell
In India
THE house stands proudly amid the palm trees, three storeys-tall in a city where concrete walls are a luxury and up to 100,000 people live in squalid street slums.
Known to local charity workers as the “house that Tim bought”, this building will be used to save children as young as eight from a life of prostitution and pornography.
Earlier this year when a district court judge ordered disgraced TV chef Tim Allen to pay a €40,000 fine for possession of child pornography, the Irish public was outraged, seeing it as another example of the rich escaping justice.
But justice comes in many forms, and 4,511 miles away in India, the children smiling in “the house that Tim bought,”, see a sanctuary of hope in a place of despair.
Every day local children from the surrounding slums come to the house for a couple of hour’s education organised by the Indian charity Cosmos. Many are sick and undernourished, their stomachs distended from worms, their legs bent out of shape from rickets.
Often – far too often – a child will go missing never to return; perhaps a victim of TB which ravages children here killing thousands annually, or perhaps the child will simply have been sold.
Roughly $20 for a 12-year-old girl is the current market price. Situated in the joined conglomerate towns of Siligiuri and New Jailpaiguri (NJP), just beneath the foothills of the Himalayas in the corner of north-eastern India, the house is right in the middle of one of the world’s busiest child trafficking hubs.
Presently the home, a mammoth structure compared to most of the surrounding dwellings, is rented by Cosmos. But in association with the Indian NGO, Ireland’s newest charity, the Edith Wilkins Calcutta Street Children’s Foundation, is about to buy the building and turn it into a rescue centre for trafficked children.
Here up to 30 of the worst cases of trafficked children will be housed permanently and given full-time education and counselling until they are 18.
There are several such houses already in Calcutta and Bombay but none here to catch trafficked children before they reach the large cities.
That Tim Allen’s money will pay for the first one is a curious quirk of fate which matters little to the children who will be rescued.
High above Siligiuri and NJP within sight of Mount Everest and the border with Nepal, a Cosmos drop-in centre at Choom gives child labourers and local shanty children the most basic education and health care.
But apart from offering the children a two-hour break from endless days of child labour the centre gives aid workers the chance to identify those most at risk from preying traffickers.
Many of these children, through basic poverty, are at risk of being sold into sex slavery.
Others have already been sold by their parents as domestic servants – a practice notorious for ending up with the child being abused and sold on to traffickers and pimps.
Inside the dirty classroom, sitting barefoot in the cold, four such girls – Rinky, 11, Amari, 14, Shanti, 13, and Lamu, 15, – are practising the alphabet on dirty copybooks. Each of these girls was sold by her impoverished parents to buyers who said they would use the girls as domestic servants.
Each of the girls cost as little as 1,000 rupees ($20). None of the girls has seen her parents since being sold. As girls they were not valued in an outmoded traditional practice that continues to this day.
Eleven-year-old Rinky wears a cheeky grin, her eyes sparkling with mischief. But Lamu’s expression and the misery in her eyes most truly reflect the plight of these four.
While the other three were sold over a year ago, Lamu, who says she is from Nepal, arrived in the area within the last week. She refuses to say how she was brought from her own country but says she is being beaten by the family she works for.
When I meet her, she appears dazed, confused and deeply unhappy. None of the girls is paid anything and aid workers suspect that all are being abused.
It is children like these who end up in the massive brothels of Calcutta and Bombay, hundreds of miles away. Children like these who feature on the under-the-counter DVDs said to be widely available in those cities. It is children like these who wind up being traded and further violated on the internet as their images are distributed among paedophiles worldwide.
And it is, no doubt, children like these who were abused in the kind of photos Tim Allen downloaded from the internet.
Listening to the girls, Edith Wilkins is compassionate, angry and determined.
“The sooner we get that house set up and running the better,” she muttered to herself and then even though they don’t understand English she turns to the girls: “We’ll get you out of here soon.”
The girls looking puzzled seem somehow reassured and nod their heads.
Before girls like Rinky, Amari, Shanti, and Lamu reach the big cities or become digital images on the internet, they typically come through Siligiuri and NJP.
Indian development consultant, Uday Bhanu Sen, has studied the trade in children for the World Bank and identifies this location as a focal point for traffickers. It is a huge business run by organised crime gangs, up to five of which are thought to be operating in the Siligiuri area.
The most lucrative route in trafficking originates from Nepal down through the hills to Siligiuri and on to the cities like Calcutta.
Typically the traffickers are women who don’t raise suspicions travelling with children. The women never know who their bosses are and are paid by intermediaries. Any women caught never talk; and even if they did, they could never identify the person behind the trafficking operation.
Thousands of trafficked children as young as 10 pass through the slums and red light districts of Siligiuri and NJP before being sent on to shadowy houses known as breaking houses in the suburbs of India’s large cities.
Here they will quite literally have their spirits broken as they are institutionalised into a life of abuse before being paraded in underground flesh markets and sold to the highest bidder.
Once bought, girls and boys are put to work in the massive sprawling brothels of Bombay and Calcutta where young children on street corners can openly be seen soliciting older male clients.
Others are sent abroad or delivered to order to wealthy clients. Still more wind up as images of abused children bought and sold worldwide on the internet.
The numbers are shocking. According to a 2001 report compiled by the US State Department, anywhere between 12,000 and 50,000 women and children are trafficked into India for the sex trade each year. Most come from Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh all within 100km of here.
Many more children are taken from India’s seven eastern states, the transport routes of which also all converge in Siligiuri.
The mountainous regions between Nepal and Siligiuri see young girls regularly go missing according to Mr Sen. By the time the police allow a missing person’s report to be officially filed – after five to seven days – a trafficked child will already be hundreds of miles away.
THE Khalpara red light district extends for almost half a kilometre along the open rail track in Siligiuri. Just off the main dusty track, over a large open sewer, dozens of small maze-like alleyways contain a community of 5,000 people built on the wages of sex and child trafficking.
Everywhere – on street corners and along the alleyways – they sit on wicker stools chatting, sharing bowls of fruit and nuts, waiting for the next customer.
Many of the girls, dressed in pretty coloured saris their lips plastered with heavy red lipstick, look no more than 14. One is still in her school uniform.
These young girls are among the estimated 345,000 children working as prostitutes in India. NGOs believe over a million girls and women are forced into India’s massive sex trade at any given time.
The International Labour Organisation estimates 15% of the country’s 2.3 million prostitutes are children.
All along the railway in the sweltering heat the truck drivers sit watching before selecting a girl.
Pimps and traffickers lurk in the shadows of shacks selling tea and hot snacks cooked on open fires. Opening onto the alleys each stable-like brothel contains dozens of girls working from rooms on either side of a long corridor.
Each working place is an earth-floored room smaller than the average double bed. Every room contains a basic wooden bed and a bucket. Every three paces there is another brothel, another row of stable rooms, more miserable lives playing themselves out amid the rats and stench of human excrement.
This squalid place is effectively a sorting market and transport hub for the child trafficking business.
From here girls from neighbouring states as well as those trafficked from Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan are gathered and sent to India’s large cities and elsewhere in Asia.
Under cover of darkness some of the girls on the edge of the district agree to talk and offer us their seats. They won’t disclose their ages but the oldest could, at a stretch be 17. None is from the area and all refuse to disclose how they ended up here. They say they earn between 100 and 200 rupees ($2 to $4) an hour.
As we speak several customers are lining up impatiently kicking their heels in the dust and leaning on their bicycles. The girls agree to meet in the morning but when we return they have paid the price for talking. They have been beaten and threatened. They run when they see us coming. Local pimps escort us to our car making sure we leave.
In his air-conditioned office across town the district’s police chief admits there is little he can do.
This is fertile land for trafficking, officer R Mishra says. These girls come from outside. Few are born here. Last week his men caught traffickers with five children crossing from Nepal. But that’s a rare occurrence given how open the borders are and how overstretched the police force is.
Officer Mishra doesn’t say it but border police are themselves notorious for accepting bribes and are counted among the customers in the red light areas.
“We don’t have time for this. I have been propositioned by a lot of organisations who want to help but nobody has the willingness required,” the police chief says with a shrug.
“Everything is poverty driven. It all comes down to money – people have to eat. The shame is much of what is wrong here could be helped for free. The love these people need costs nothing.”
Much to their delight, he agrees to co-operate with the foundation’s new rescue home to be bought with Tim Allen’s €40,000 fine, but he wears the pessimistic air of someone resigned to India’s ways.
And in many ways once intervention is made the problems encountered by aid workers will have only begun. “Once we open this can of worms we cannot afford to walk away,” Edith Wilkins often repeats as she tours the area. “Look at them everywhere,” she says as she surveys the young girls in the brothels. “We’re going to need 100 rescue homes.”
One study of 25,000 street children here found 30% were HIV positive while up to 80% had some form of sexually transmitted disease.
“They are not catching this disease on trees. We are sitting on a time bomb. India is going to have the highest HIV rate in the world very soon,” says Dr Chatterjee the author of the report.
According to Dr Chatterjee every business lining the roads in this area will have child labour levels of between 30% and 40%. And that figure is no coincidence.
The businesses he speaks of – garages, hotels, eating establishments all run from tiny dirty shacks cater to the steady stream of truckers who often facilitate child trafficking and abuse the children themselves.
“This issue of child exploitation and trafficking is the major issue in India. The process of childhood is very necessary and these children – thousands and thousands of them – are being deprived of their childhood and grow up with no education, no skills and no future. An entire generation is being devastated,” says Dr Chatterjee.
AS the main transport arteries into Calcutta reach the suburbs the rich smell of opium occasionally wafts up from squalid dens along the road.
This route doubles as the main drugs artery from northern Asia. Here, in a series of halfway houses around the city, more than 500 miles from the house Tim Allen’s money will buy, young trafficked girls are broken into prostitution by traffickers who force drugs on them until they become addicted.
Local NGOs estimate 80% of the child sex workers of Calcutta originate in Nepal before coming through the half-way homes.
Few have seen these breaking houses but during his research, development consultant Mr Sen has been told of their existence by rescued girls.
“They are refused food or water for days until they agree to have sex. When they submit the first customer is carefully chosen and through the act becomes the girl’s husband, pimp and owner,” he says.
Girls sold by their families as domestics in the foothills of the Himalayas for as little as 2,000 rupees ($40) will fetch many times that in Calcutta.
Virgin girls are especially prized – fetching up to 20,000 rupees ($400) – because many Indian men believe sex with them will rid them of impotency. Other common myths such as the one that sex with a virgin child will clear up sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) does nothing to help the spread of HIV and other diseases.
Virgin children acquired to order for a wealthy client can fetch as much as 100,000 rupees ($2,000) for a trafficker.
For many trafficked children the infamous brothels situated in the polluted black hole of Calcutta is the end of the line.
“Eighty percent of the kids in the brothels of Calcutta docks are from Nepal,” says Mr Sen. This city of 14 million is a world away from the clean air of the Himalayas where they were first sold.
IN a temporary rescue centre close to Kaligat, the infamous red light district where Mother Teresa catered to the dying, Mia (not her real name) is a living example of India’s terrible flesh trade.
From Bangladesh, 17-year-old Mia was recently intercepted by India’s Border Security Force (BSF) as traffickers attempted to smuggle her to Saudi Arabia.
Ironically it was BSF officers at the Bangladeshi border who originally took a bribe allowing Mia to be trafficked into India in the first place.
Aid workers say Mia had been forced to work in Calcutta’s red light district for years. Like thousands each year Mia was trafficked from the mountains, into Siligiuri and NJP and on to Calcutta.
Wearing a dark grey dress she appears withdrawn and shy. She does not mix with the other girls in the centre.
“I did nothing wrong but I am suffering,” is all she will say over and over again. “I did nothing wrong but I am suffering.”
Mia’s is the silent voice of thousands of children lost to this hell annually. It is a voice ignored by the authorities, and suppressed by the traffickers.
It is also the unheard voice of anguish behind every picture of abused children bought and sold on the internet.
It is a voice we cannot afford to ignore.
Donations to the Edith Wilkins Foundation can be made through the foundation’s website – http://edithwilkinsfoundation.org
