All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [171]
Ruchira is well versed in the reciprocal cycles of poverty and exploitation and how gender inequality sets the stage. The NGO is based on two Gandhian principles: ahimsa, or nonviolence, in its methods of confronting the violence of sex trafficking; and antodaya, which translates into “rise of the last,” which means uplifting the poorest and most desolate girls and women into a world of dignity in which human beings are not bought and sold. Apne Aap also addresses the need to uplift and reeducate the men who exploit prostituted women and sex slaves, acknowledging that the destruction that happens in the soul of an abuser is equal to the victimization of the abused. It’s something I talk about often, that misogyny is as harmful to men and boys as it is to women and girls. The prescribed definitions of manhood are as limiting and damaging to them spiritually as the consequences are to women.
Apne Aap groups support more than ten thousand girls and women who have either survived trafficking or are vulnerable to being trafficked. There have been many wonderful success stories, but also heartbreaking setbacks. Ruchira told us a particularly enraging story, involving a woman named Meena who had been trafficked to a brothel as a child. She was able to make a rare escape but tragically had to leave her small children behind. Meena rehabilitated her life, a heroic act in this culture, and tried unsuccessfully to rescue her children, to whom she had given birth in the brothel. When her young son escaped and told her that her daughter, Naina, had reached puberty and had been sold to another brothel, Meena contacted Ruchira Gupta for help. Ruchira pressured the local police to raid the brothel and rescue Naina, whom they found drugged and broken. They returned her to her mother, but Naina’s agony wasn’t yet over. The pimp from the original brothel sued Meena for custody, claiming Naina was his daughter. The judge deemed the mother of “bad character in her past life” and then declared that the pimp who sold her was the father. The child was sent to a remand home, meaning a juvenile delinquent house. Appalling, impossible? Only if you don’t know India.
I instantly offered to stay in India as a public protest until that girl was freed. I was ready for civil disobedience on the curb in front of the remand house, or the judge’s house. I was ready to fast, to call friends to travel to India to raise high holy hell with me. But Ruchira told me such a gesture wouldn’t help. The Indian bureaucracy could be moved only from within; it took time.
Ruchira Gupta is dedicated to these individual cases, determined to save one life at a time. But her goal is much broader: She wants to fight sex trafficking on an institutional, international, and cultural level by abolishing prostitution everywhere. This position is not widely accepted, but it is gaining momentum as more and more studies show that legalizing and regulating prostitution does not put an end to trafficking, it enables it. A far more effective way forward is to criminalize demand. I could write a whole book about this issue, but suffice it to say that my eyes have been opened to the fact that we cannot bargain with the slave traders. We have to put them out of business. It’s a practical and a moral imperative. I agree with Apne Aap’s policy that prostitution is a systemic form of violence against girls and women, that it is driven by demand for purchased sex, which is driven by a culture of domination, and that exploiting women for sex is not inevitable, it is a choice that men make, and they can be deterred from making it.
Before we left the center, I sat with a group of young women and listened to their stories. One girl shared that her parents had chosen her husband, and she was resolutely denying the marriage. She insisted she would marry in her own time, for love. She was learning there were alternatives; there should be alternatives. Her folks were furious. “Apne Aap is spoiling your attitude and mind,” they told her. She