Sex Trafficking in Mumbai

Once I came to Mumbai, the dalal sold me to a malik in Kamathipura. The malik told me I owed him 35,000 rupees, and I must have sex with any man who chooses me until this debt is repaid. I refused and his men raped me and did not feed me. I was in a bungalow two years and made sex to twenty men each day,” states Maya, who interviewed for Siddharth Kara’s disturbing yet truthful book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Until the recent blockbuster hit, “Taken, featuring Liam Neeson, industrialized civilizations were was virtually unaware to the volume in which sex trafficking exists today and  yet it is the third largest criminalized enterprise in the world. Unfortunately, this topic is still not widely discussed, consequently, resulting in many people moreover being uncultivated to the severity of the problem. Shockingly, the estimated statistics, given by International Labour Organization, for 2012 alone, reports that 4.5 million people, more than half being women, were forced into sex trafficking. Whether being from a first second, or third world country is irrelevant; the problem exists worldwide.

Slavery has been banned worldwide for more than a century and yet it still persists. The United States Trafficking Protocol in 2000 defined trafficking as following:

The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abducted, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power, or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at minimum, the exploitation of prostitution, forced labour services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

Although this definition is thorough and seems like it covers all aspects of trafficking, it lacks focus that trafficking, in general, is about slavery not just the unlawful movement of individuals, which is why lawmakers are still at odds with this definition.

Economic exertion is a prodigious agent, around the world, for women to end up in the arms of a trafficker, but is more so common in foreign countries. Family desperation and poverty induce the probability that a family will sell their child or children into slavery. Poverty is a main attraction to scouting traffickers. They propose irresistible offers to families that are in such despair. The family cannot refuse, the offer allows them to survive. Surprisingly, traffickers follow through with payment, but this is not without an underlining agenda; their ultimate plan is to entice and lure other families into considering the same.

However, not all trafficking is by family arrangements. People are regularly abducted, deceived by false job offers, and seduced or romanced. Once the victims are obtained by the traffickers. They begin mental and physical abuse in order to create a submissive mindset to commands. Among the types of manipulation are forced drug usage, gang rapes, violence, and false promise of freedom after repayment of debt, and love. Mallaika, a woman from Mumbai and is also a slave herself. Tells Kara about how when minors arrive to the brothels they are beaten into submission and given opium so they will perform sex. If they do not obey, they are beaten to unconsciousness, “A minor came from my village and was sold by her parents for twenty thousand rupees. She refused to have sex, so the malik broke her arm.”

Although sex trafficking exists rampant in foreign countries, it is a mounting issue domestically. While many slaves are foreign and slipped into the country. United States citizens are also intertwined. They are mainly underage children that are homeless or runaways. Front runners of these operations known as pimps, also construct the business the same way as other ring leaders do in foreign countries. Children are owned” by pimps and use hostile intimidation, cohesion, and drugs to obtain individuals.

Unfortunately in the United States, sex trafficking is harder to see than internationally. In the state of Nevada, prostitution is illegal. So unlike walking down the streets of Mumbai, slaves are not lined up outside a storefront. Instead, pimps use legal means by placing a front business, for example, massage parlors, to cover trafficking. In big metropolitan cities in states that border oceans and other counties such as Texas, California, Florida, and New York, are prime is areas to base trafficking operations. Shockingly over 90 cities in the United States are involved with human trafficking.

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