But he is struggling: Chauhan, 52, is the only father in the village who refuses to force his children into sex work.Coming Out as Gay to Parents: 3 Parents Share Their Experience The Coming Out Process: Coming Out Stories From Gay Teens One villager, Balram Chauhan, should be a rich man. They wait on their porches with the rest of the family while their daughters are inside with customers. Only the lowest paid or most degrading jobs are available to them anyway. And so their families are keen that they continue the work.” The main issue is we don’t have alternative jobs for them. “Even girls we try to rehabilitate come back to it. “It’s a traditional business,” says deputy superintendent Nagendra Singh Sikarwar, at the nearby Jeeran police station. The law is clear, but does little to sway social custom and economic distress. Police say seven people were arrested for child sexual exploitation offences in Sagar Gram in the past year, five of them women who sold their underage daughters. Madhya Pradesh, the state in which Sagar Gram is situated, recently passed the death penalty for anyone who rapes a child under 12, also increasing jail terms for adults who have sex with someone under 18. Every few hundred metres along the road, girls are reclined on rope beds, waving at any vehicle that slows. “They’ve all gone to hotels or to stop cars,” an older man says, gesturing at the nearby highway. Yet, visiting the village at dusk, few women or girls can be seen. Among the Baccharas of Sagar Gram village, however, the problem cuts the other way: there are 3,595 women in the district compared with 2,770 men, according to the most recent census. India’s preference for male children has created a deep gender imbalance. Another Bacchara woman, aged 29, says the most she can make for an encounter is 200 rupees. She made 5,000 rupees (£55) on the first night. “I didn’t understand what they were doing to me. “When I was young, the most important thing was seeing the money the customer was offering,” she says. The younger ones sometimes stow under beds, observing the others at work.
Older girls teach them how to attract customers from passing trucks and cars. Parents decide which of their daughters will fetch the best price.
Girls in Sagar Gram, which lies next to a highway, are groomed for this life virtually from birth. “The rest of the girls in my village were doing it, so I felt like I had to do it as well,” she says. “How can you go to school? You need to be working.” “Your parents are going through such a hard time,” they told her. She remembers what the adults in her village told her when she was 15, and her family was having money problems. She remembers the awe she felt when the older girls from her caste, the Bacchara, suddenly had enough money for makeup and nice clothing. Leena, 22, remembers learning about the woman. Workers outside the office of advocacy group Jan Sahas in Dewas.
“From now on, we will take your men from you with our bodies.” “Up until now, we lured your men through dancing,” the woman told the queen. His enraged queen issued the woman with a challenge: if she could walk a tightrope across a river, she could join the royal family, and permanently raise the status of her caste.Īs the woman neared the opposite bank of the river, a step from success, the queen suddenly cut the rope. Sometime in the misty past of Hindu myth, a king fell in love with a dancer. Girls in Sagar Gram grow up hearing a story. But there are likely more we haven’t identified. “We estimate there are 100,000 women and girls in this situation.
“It is caste and gender slavery,” says Ashif Shaikh of Jan Sahas, an advocacy group that works with members of India’s lowest castes, communities that used to be called “untouchables”. The exploited and trafficked children of Sagar Gram, and dozens of other villages across India’s hinterland, are one of its most disturbing manifestations. For most Indians, caste still has a defining influence on who they marry and what they eat. But millennia of tradition is not easily erased. India officially abolished caste discrimination almost 70 years ago.