From a dimly-lit alley a teenage pimp emerges to tout a schoolgirl held prisoner inside the six-floor brothel behind him. “I can get you young girls,” he boasts. “Minor, only been used four or five times. Everything is for sale here in Mumbai, sir.”
Somewhere in there is a girl whose stolen innocence is a sordid selling point in the rat-infested red-light district of Kamathipura district.
In this labyrinth of rubbish-strewn lanes, where homeless tots sleep rough beside wild-eyed junkies, there are thousands of such girls, some as young as six. They are slaves, sold to child traffickers by their own penniless families in other parts of India.
Kamathipura was first set up by the British for the use of colonial troops. It was called a “comfort zone”.
When our forces left in 1947 local pimps moved in, scenting easy money to be made by exploiting children.
So while Britain prepares to enact a Modern Slavery Bill which will hand out life sentences to human traffickers, India remains the country with more people trapped in forced labour than any other.
A Global Slavery Index released recently said the world’s second most populated nation contains nearly half of the world’s slaves. A total of 15 million people, many of them children, are forced to work for no pay as domestic servants, miners, cotton pickers and, worst of all, prostitutes.
Slavery is the world’s third most profitable business for organised crime syndicates, behind only guns and drugs.
And amid the teeming chaos of Mumbai, the youngest victims of the sex trade are held in pitch-black wooden box cages inside secret rooms deep in the brothels.
These tiny locked cells are concealed behind trapdoors and false walls and the girls, daubed in make-up by their captors, the girls have no means of escape from the paedophiles client who prowl by night, undisturbed by allegedly corrupt police.
Seena Simon, who runs a halfway house for rescued girls, explains: “The girls are kept plump and beautiful in their cages like chickens being factory farmed. The pimps prefer them as young as possible to make more money. Men here will pay more for younger girls. That is why they are hidden away.”
One Indian child rights organisation says 40% of prostitutes inside the country are of school age.
I meet one recently rescued girl, 16-year-old Padma, from the state of Utter Pradesh, who was sold by her indebted parents when she was six.
She tells me her father first resorted to begging, then took out a loan that he couldn’t pay it back. The loan sharks beat up her parents and threatened to kill them unless they sold Padma, their youngest child, to a female trafficker in their gang.
“The lady beat me all the time – I never knew why,” says Padma. “After that she brought me here, to Mumbai.
“First of all I was made to be a slave in this lady’s house. By then I was seven. About a year after that I was handed to this gang. One of the men told me I had to be ready to be a woman.
“They made me start to put on make-up. One day he told me to take off my clothes. I didn’t know what I would have to do.
“He attacked me, he molested me; I had no idea what was happening. I was completely petrified while it continued. When he had finished, the woman who had sold me locked the door from the outside and left me there. I was naked and crying.
“When she came to speak to me the next day, she said, ‘It’s not a sin, it’s just what we do’. I was threatened so many times that I just decided to accept what they wanted. I was nine then. I had become a prostitute.”
Padma speaks with astonishing composure while recounting her ordeal. But while she is dressed maturely in a pink sari, her facial expressions are still child-like.
Our interview is conducted in her dormitory room, decorated like a child’s bedroom with stencilled pictured of angels on brightly-coloured walls.
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