BROTHEL SPY NETWORK SERIES

But there's no question that the sex trade here is large and lucrative and that women and children are exploited in overwhelming numbers to meet an insatiable demand. As elsewhere in the world, sex trafficking in India - and in particular the child sex trade - involves hidden crimes that defy precise measurement. How accurate are those estimates? No one knows for certain.

In 2009, federal police reported that 1.2 million children a year are exploited in India's commercial sex trade - a number that matches the United Nations' estimate for the entire globe. But the Ministry of Women and Child Development estimated in 2014 that more than 3 million women and children are trafficked each year inside the country. IJM staff and others credit India's government with strengthening and more consistently enforcing anti-trafficking laws in recent years. IJM found that more than 10 percent of sex workers in Mumbai's private networks are minors. IJM researchers in 2017 found that about 5 percent of sex workers in public brothels, like the one we entered, are younger than 18.Īlthough brothel districts such as Falkland Road and Grant Road have shrunk in recent years as wealth and gentrification rise in the city, they've been replaced by private networks, which often make online matches between sex buyers and those they exploit. It's a story repeated hundreds of thousands of times a year here and in other cities in India, where the level of exploitation is staggering even for a nation of 1.32 billion people. When she arrived, she was told she had been sold to a brothel, where she was held captive and forced to have sex with three to four men a day. The green chili, she put it on my body and beat me”Īn adult survivor, in an interview at IJM's offices here, told me she traveled to the city from another part of India on the promise of a good job. She said, ‘You can now go wherever you want.’ Then she put on the (music) and beat me a lot. I started crying,' one trafficking survivor told International Justice Mission researchers in the 2017 report, 'Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Mumbai.' 'So the (manager) took off all my clothes, she didn’t leave one piece of clothing on and took me to the door. “I said that I didn’t want to stay there.

Rape, beatings, starvation and isolation are used to break the spirit and capture the mind. Many survivors of India's brothels describe a horrific conditioning period during their first days and weeks in the sex trade. A child has few defenses here, and although we're told that the boy's gender gives him some protection from sexual abuse, he's still at severe risk. Strangers wander up the stairs to buy sex late into the night. Life is brutal in these dark halls and squalid rooms. His mother supports the move his father wants to keep the boy with him in the brothel.Īs we are served glasses of scalding coffee, the boy tells us, through a translator, that he wants to grow up to be a police officer. The social workers have come here because they want to help the child enroll in a boarding school.

He wears Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shoes. Then we meet their son. He is 5 years old, with big brown eyes and a shy smile. Our guides, social workers who requested for their protection that we not publish their names, lead us into a small apartment shared by a young mother and her husband. The blend of odors - from food, sweat, urine and rot - is overpowering. Garbage buckets and empty beer bottles sit outside the rooms. Adult and children's clothing hangs from the ceiling, drying in the heat of the day. A woman is sprawled, either asleep or unconscious, on the floor in one room. It is late afternoon, a few hours before the evening rush, and women and pimps are still resting in a row of small rooms along a narrow hallway.

BROTHEL SPY NETWORK SERIES

►Read earlier installments in the EXPLOITED series here The wood, in the heat and humidity of the monsoon season, feels sticky beneath my shoes. The next stairstep in front of me is barely visible as IndyStar visuals editor Mykal McEldowney and I climb to the second floor. As we step inside a brothel in the nearby Grant Road district, darkness envelopes us.

Brothel spy network