[Reader-list] Fwd: My Diwali speech at the White House and Press release

[inder salim]

SUCCESS AGAINST SLAVERY: STRATEGIES FOR THE FUTURE & PROMISING
PRACTICES IN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING
Remarks by Ruchira Gupta, Founder President of Apne Aap Women
Worldwide (www.apneaap.org), at the White House, 28 October, 2008
Good afternoon. My name is Ruchira Gupta and I bring greetings from
the ten thousand trafficked women and girls who are members of Apne
Aap Women Worldwide in India. It is a pleasure to be here today, and I
appreciate the attention that the White House has devoted to the issue
of human trafficking in the last eight years.
My organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide has a membership of over ten
thousand trafficked human beings. They are women and children trapped
in prostitution. They are from various oppressed castes and indigenous
groups such as Nats, Devadasis, Koelis, Sheikhs, Ansaris, Tamangs,
Limbus and Kshettrys and live in the red-light areas and slums of
India. They were kidnapped, sold, coerced, tricked or forced into
situations of sexual exploitation. Some were as young as seven. They
were kept in small locked rooms and raped repeatedly. Many died by the
time they were thirty or thirty five.
They never had a past but now they have a future. They are rid of
their terror. Apne Aap has found a woman-centred solution that
transforms women in the community from victim to leader. Once slavery
was perpetuated by the idea that there was and always would be slavery
and now sex-slavery and prostitution are also perpetuated by the same
idea of inevitability. Our intervention challenges this notion through
the leadership of enslaved women who are some of the 18 million slaves
still left in the world-a larger number than in the nineteenth
century.
Today, I will speak on behalf of these victims and survivors of human
trafficking who have found a solution and are fighting back-about the
successful strategies that have impacted their lives and that they
want to share with the 18 million women and children all over the
world who are trapped in sex and labour slavery. We have organizing
prostituted women to a)tell the truth about the harm of body invasion,
b)develop economic autonomy so they cannot be forced to sell their
bodies and c)address societal illness that creates prostitution by
replacing domination with cooperation
The model developed by the victims and survivors of Apne Aap can be
adopted by other cultures as it is localized and decentralized. It is
cost effective and sustainable as it is led by women not segregated
from their communities but living inside the communities. Our women
leaders can be the trainers who can share experiences with other women
and replicate the groups. This approach is also sustainable because it
transforms the entire community rather than putting children, women
and men into institutions. It has lead to red-light areas becoming
non-red-light areas, brothels going out of business and women and
children leading lives of dignity.
We understand that change does not happen from the top down in the
lives of nations or women. We help women organize and imagine the
change that they thought could not be achieved. Apne Aap Women
Worldwide has been organizing these women and girls into small
cooperatives known as Self Help Groups all over India. These self-help
groups are linked simultaneously with livelihood, learning and legal
protection by Apne Aap team members. These groups of victims and
survivors are assisted in finding localized and viable economic
options, provided a safe and accessible space to meet that is separate
from the place of exploitation, enabled to have the courage to tell
the truth through open mikes, conversations and a newspaper published
by the prostituted women called Red Light Despatch and empowered by
protecting themselves and their children from sexual exploitation
through legal protection and learning in schools.
The options that we create for trafficked women and girls are more
sustainable because the livelihood options are based in the local
economies and are braced with legal protection and the small group
structure that allows women to support and rescue each other .To
rescue one prostituted woman is to improve her circumstances and
survival, but it is also to leave her shame and feeling of
helplessness within her. As with every example of profound
transformation from Gandhi's experiments in living to the civil rights
movement in the United States and Alcoholics Anonymous
internationally, we help prostituted women to create their own small
and continuing groups, and do the same for their children. These
groups are the difference between being rescued from the outside,
which leaves a conviction of helplessness, and transformed from within
oneself through sharing, speaking and supporting strength within each
other. Our groups seek not to mitigate the circumstances of
sex-trafficking but to end sex-trafficking. We seek complete
transformation, not simply reform.
Our intervention has a delivery model and a receiving model that makes
it an equal exchange. We listen to the women and this empowers the
women to speak. This discourse has enabled victims and survivors to
lead their own change and forced a rethinking on who they are.
This re-thinking has had an impact on policy as well. We have been
able to influence Members of Parliament to introduce an amendment to
the Indian anti-trafficking law which will penalize buyers and
profiteers that will be voted on this year. This has been because of
the courage and relentless efforts of our members who are victims and
survivors of sex-trafficking who say in Parliament and outside that
they want a world in which it is unacceptable to buy or sell another
human being and to imagine an economy in which one does not force one
to sell oneself. Our work has resulted in two training manuals which
are being widely used by the Government of India to train Indian
police and prosecutors to get higher convictions of traffickers.
We have been able to bring out the link between caste and prostitution
and are currently working on recommendations to reduce caste-based
prostitution for the National Commission for Women. We are members of
the Steering Committee of the Planning Commission, Working Group of
the Ministry of Women, National Human Rights Commission to help in
policies affecting women and children.
We are trying to keep sex-trafficking profiteers from legalizing sex
slavery in India even though more Foundation funds, especially
US-based Foundations, are spent on the supposed protection of sex
buyers from AIDS than the protection of women and children from sex
buyers. This has created a vested interest in the preservation of
brothels in some parts of India for the distribution of condoms rather
than protecting the women and children even though there is no
evidence that increased condom distribution in brothel districts is
leading to condom usage or a decrease in AIDS.
Increased numbers of women from red-light areas and slums have been
approaching us to help them set up self-help groups and mentor their
leadership. This is the best measure as women at the grassroots feel
that our work is practical and making a change. We serve and plan to
continue to serve survivors, victims and potential victims of
sex-trafficking in the red-light areas and slums of India and Nepal.
We also plan to reach out to those who enforce the law so that they
arrest traffickers and not victims. We will be a platform for a
coalition of survivors, victims and potential victims of trafficking
that will give voice to women's' and girls' groups against
sex-trafficking and mentor new groups to be able to change their own
lives and end their own exploitation. This platform will support all
the groups, enable them to share experiences, raise their voices, and
lead their own change. This platform will also help the groups find
other economic options through finding localized and sustainable
options in a network of self-help groups.
There are hundreds and thousands of women and girls who are still
trapped and at risk to sexual exploitation and prostitution. There are
trafficking prone areas in India which have missing girls from age
seven onwards. They need to be protected. Our work needs to continue.
Today is Diwali-the festival that celebrates the Goddess of wealth and
prosperity-Laxmi. While one goddess is being celebrated there are
hundreds and thousands of young girls in our country who are in
situations of captivity as bonded workers and as prostituted children.
It is time for us to celebrate and protect our daughters who are each
goddesses in their own right. I bring to you Diwali greetings and ask
you to take a pledge in your hearts to think of cach girl at risk as a
goddess to be celebrated not violated.
Thank you,
Ruchira Gupta
Apne Aap Women Worldwide, www.apneaap.org
Ruchiragupta at gmail.com,
28 Oct. 08