Child prostitution
Forcing daughters into prostitution

Bharatpur is famous not only for its bird sanctuary: it is equally infamous for its hundreds child prostitutes, many of them sold into the profession by their own kin, who also pimp for them. Here, an aberration has become the norm.

By Seema Anand

Every evening in Bharatpur (famous for its bird sanctuary), flashlights held by little girls start blinking along the roadside. What they throw, in fact, is light on the darker side of our society.

The girls are mostly aged between 12 and 15 years old (though some are as young as 10). Their fathers and brothers accompany them on their vigil by the roadside, fixing the "price" for them.

Says the brother of a teenaged girl, "The customers are mainly truck drivers here. The average rate for one girl for half an hour is Rs 50. They take the girls to their trucks or thatched huts a few hundred metres away from the road."

Fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters, grandmothers and aunts are well aware of how the brutal behaviour of the customers often ravages the little girls. Many of the child sex workers contract sexually transmitted diseases. But that hardly deters their families.

"The better looking girls are sent to red light areas in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and other cities," admitted the father of a teenaged girl who was sold some time ago in the national capital for Rs 1.5 lakh. "They earn good money there and send it back to us."

"These girls belong mainly to the Bedia community, which is spread over dozens of villages in Bharatpur," says K K Mukherjee, who is associated with the Gram Niyojan Kendra (GNK), a non-governmental organisation working in the area.

GNK has opened a school where 70 children of Bedia sex workers from the surrounding villages come to study; 22 of them, mostly girls, stay in a hostel within the school premises in Roopvas village, about 25 km from Ghatoli.

The Scheduled Caste category Bedia community has traditionally been known for its singing and dancing skills, but it graduallytook up prostitution as its primary, nonchalant occupation."What can we do, we have to send our daughters into this profession as there are no alternative means of livelihood," says 58-year-old Bhagwan Das, a resident of Ghatoli. "Despite reservation for the Scheduled Castes, no one from our community in this village has a government job." The most striking feature of Ghatoli and other surrounding villages such as Bansipaharpur, Khakarnagla and Ludhabai is that, in most Bedia homes, one hardly finds young women other than daughters-in-law.

"The reason is that, traditionally, daughters-in-law are not sent for prostitution, although daughters are trained right from the age of seven to become prostitutes," explains 45-year-old Shyama, a resident of Ghatoli. "As soon as girls cross 10 years of age, they are sent to women relatives in the red light areas of big cities." Hundreds of Bedia girls from Bharatpur, many of them minors, continue to work as sex workers in several Indian cities.

"Girl children in the Bedia community in Ghatoli and surrounding villages are sent to the cities to their sisters, aunts or mothers who are already in the flesh trade," said Shyama. "They are continuously tutored right from the childhood so that they are mentally prepared to enter sex work.

"I also went to Delhi for prostitution but was lucky enough to meet someone who proposed marriage to me. Today, I have a son and two daughters and I am happily married." Once the girls have started earning in the cities, their fathers and brothers visit them at regular intervals to collect the earnings. Some families have even built multi-storeyed houses with such "blood money".

Normative social traditions obviously go for a toss. If a child is born out of wedlock to a Bedia sex worker, her family brings the baby back to the village. If the baby happens to be a girl, there are celebrations: it means an additional earning member, whose upbringing will bear fruit in another 10 to 12 years.