She came to the brothels of Bombay to make a documentary
about sex trafficking and never left. Realizing she couldn't
walk away from the atrocities she had witnessed, she started
Apne Aap (On Our Own) to help women and children who have
been sexually exploited regain their independence. Meanwhile, her Emmy award-winning film The Selling of Innocents continues to spread the word.
Click below to read what Ruchira told Holly about:
Ruchira: So this is our office, and the girls come
in here and we register them. One of the biggest things that
we've done, is we've launched a membership drive by trying
to restore their sense of identity, and the way we've done
that is by giving them these I.D. cards. Each girl gets a
photograph on the card, and then they have their name, you
give them an account number, we open a bank account for them
because so far, nobody was going to open an account for them.
They had no ID, they were not considered citizens of India,
they were not given access to healthcare, but with this I.D.
card, now they belong to an organization. They have a sense
of who they are, and they can go anywhere, so this has been
a very big help. One of our biggest success stories, with
these I.D. cards, has been a fight that the girls had with
the police. What happened was that the police went inside
the brothels and tried to extort money from one of our girls.
These girls flashed their I.D. cards, and said that, 'Do you
know that we belong to this organization and if you try to
extort money from us, we'll report to our organization?' And
the cop went back. But he went to another girl who is not
a member of our organization, beat her badly, her face turned
blue, her jaw was broken, and he extorted about 1200 rupees
from her. She brought the girl here, and made her a member.
She took up her case with the police, and now the policeman
has been transferred, so it was big victory for us.
Holly: Success, empowering.
Ruchira: Totally empowering, because these girls
didn't even know who they were. They didn't have a sense of
being citizens of this country — this is the first time
that they belong to Bombay. And, you know, you can keep talking
about rights in a vacuum, but until you have a sense of what
rights mean, how you can exercise them, it doesn't mean anything.
And so this was our first day, to explain what rights mean,
and how to have the right to fight the cops, because the cop
or nobody has any right to extort money. So this was the first
step; the second step is that we are cataloging all our members
here.
Holly: How many members?
Ruchira: Two hundred and six. We started with a core
group of 22 members, and now we have 206. By the end of June,
we'll have a thousand members, because we have a waiting list.
Holly: Really?
Ruchira: We just don't have the resources right now
to absorb them all, so we are going slowly. Because we have
to spend a lot of time on legal referrals, health referrals
— our staff actually takes the girls to the centers and
to hospitals. Like this girl, she had tuberculosis, so our
staff actually took her to a hospital and explained to the
hospital people that she needed a check-up. Most times, the
hospital just turns these girls away, and they say, you are…
Holly: They just all say, you're sex workers.
Ruchira: You're from the Red Light area, you have
AIDS, we don't want to touch you, don't come here to us. But
when a staff goes with them, they make sure that they are
looked after. So we spend like days and days in the hospital,
just looking after our girls.
Holly: Now do these cards say, you're a member
of this organization?
Ruchira: Yes.
Holly: Is this saying 'I am a sex worker?'
Ruchira: It doesn't say that.
Holly: I mean, not literally, but.
Ruchira: It says yes, I work as a woman in prostitution.
And our slogan for this, for Apne Aap, is that we work with
under-privileged women, so the stigma and discrimination around
sex work doesn't exist anymore.
Holly: Now, this is probably a stupid question,
but prostitution is technically illegal here, it's illegal
right?
Ruchira: No, prostitution is legal in India; if I'm
over 18, I can sell my body for sex and nobody can arrest
me for it. But what is illegal is sex with a minor, also living
off the earnings off somebody who is selling her body for
sex. If I was a madam, it would be illegal, also if I was
a pimp, it would be illegal. And the hard part, where the
police actually harass the girls, is that soliciting in a
public place is illegal, which means that, if you're standing
on the street and trying to get a client, you can be rounded
up by the police, and that's when the police keeps coming
and picking up the girls, putting them into jail, extorting
money, beating them up. And also, what they do is raid the
brothels, they go inside the brothels and actually look for
little girls, if they find the little girls, they go after
the older women and try to extort money, saying that we'll
smash your brothels.
And these girls, they don't have a sense of what is right,
and what is constitutionally their entitlement, so they can't
challenge the police. They don't know that it's not allowed
to extort money from them; they don't know that they cannot
come inside the brothel anytime and smash the furniture or
their walls. They have no idea, so Apne Aap is also trying
to tell all the women about what their rights are, how to
fight the police, how to tackle the disease of HIV, AIDS,
tuberculosis, and all these kinds of things. Sometimes it's
just a matter of information, and the second is of course
organization, because you have to mobilize. You have to work
together, because if they are isolated, the police can be
more brutal. So that's our membership drive.
This is our second room, and inside this room we have vocational
training classes, and on Sundays, a teacher comes, who teaches
them just minimum math — just counting and numbering,
etc.
Holly: Most of these girls haven't attended school.
Ruchira: No literacy, no, they were sold into prostitution
when they were 9 or 10 or 11, pre-menstruating girls, raped
repeatedly, and for five years they were locked up inside
the brothels. They had no time to go to school, they were
just used by 25 men a day, for sexual favors, and by the time
they realized they want an education, it's too late for them.
So what they are trying to do, so at least that they can take
care of their accounts, we want to teach them minimum math.
Then we want to teach them minimum reading and writing, so
that's what we do, on Sundays, 9 to 5, a teacher comes and
teaches them how to read and write and count. So this is the
place for that. On most days. There's two computers so that
some of them can at least come and learn on the computers.
I'll take you to the downstairs place, and then today, we
are holding a memorial service for two our people who have
died of AIDS. This is our third room, and this is a safe space
for them, where they can just come and sleep.
Most of our women don't have a home, what they do is rent
a bed for eight hours everyday, and then they have to service
clients, they have to look after their children, and they
have to sleep. Everything they have to do in that eight hours,
and then they are thrown out. So then they try to sleep on
the sidewalk, if they don't get space on the sidewalk, if
it's too hot, too crowded, whatever, they just wander around
the streets in a mad frenzy. So, we've created a space where
they can just come and crash out. And normally in the day,
if you come, you'll find a lot of women just sleeping quietly.
We've also created living facilities for them.
One of the biggest problems inside the brothels is water.
Most of the women don't have access to water, or only half
an hour a day, so they might not reach it in time, they can't
wash their clothes, they can't wash themselves, so for days
on end sometimes, they are not able to clean themselves. We've
created living facilities where they can just come and take
a bath, and everyone uses it. It's not that they want to be
dirty, there is this whole propaganda campaign being done
by a lot of people that prostitutes are dirty, they want to
stay in unhygienic conditions — it's attached to the
whole question of sex and stigma around that, and how prostitutes
don't want to work for a living, and that's why they are prostitutes,
and they all have HIV, so they like to live in these conditions
of the dive. But it's not about that. They all have a sense
of hygiene, but they don't have access to anything, so they
just give up. And that's why this room is really important
for us.
Today we have a memorial service, in memory of two of our
girls who died, and we've mobilized the entire community to
come and sit outside. We've called a film star who's offering
us her solidarity, and we are going to talk about the two
girls.
Holly: HIV?
Ruchira: Yeah, AIDS, they died of AIDS. Half our
members have HIV, and we are trying to launch a prevention
campaign through our outreach work in the community about
how they can get HIV, how can you empower a girl so that she
can talk to a customer or a client.
Holly: How's that going?
Ruchira: It's very hard, because most customers refuse
to use condoms, so now we are trying to work with the men.
On Monday, we have a meeting with a male group, and we are
trying to talk to them about what being a man means. How do
you redefine masculinity, and that's going to take much hard
work.
Holly: These are men, the customers, or men the
partners?
Ruchira: Some are boyfriends, some are pimps, some
are sons, and some are customers, whoever we can pull in.
And then once we work with the men in this community, what
we are going to do is, we are holding workshops with other
target groups, like sailors, the police, taxi man's union,
so through each group discussion with men, we are able to
try and redefine masculinity. Our girls are going to talk
about their life experiences and what happens to them, why
sex and violence need not be connected, because for many of
these men, they think sex and violence are the same thing,
they haven't really understood what it means to have an equal
relationship with women. Then they also don't understand AIDS,
they don't understand safe sex.
Holly: Is this your first workshop?
Ruchira: No, I've had two, we've done two workshops.
Holly: And how have they gone?
Ruchira: The first time, we had 20 people, next time
we had 80 people, so it's increasing, and people are listening.
It was really hard in the beginning, because they said, 'Why
should we come here, why do we want to listen to what you
have to say, this is a women's thing." So we said, no, you
can die from AIDS, and they are willing to also talk about
AIDS. The other thing is that they are going to talk about
police atrocities, and so they came, because all of them had
been beaten by the police on the streets.
So this is where we are holding our meeting, this whole
place was a garbage dump when we got the building and we got
the men in their lives to come and said that you must clean
up this place. And the men and the women worked together to
clean up this place, now it's a place where you can play cricket,
where we can hold meetings, where we can hold workshops, it's
a fun little place. And these are all women from the community
who have come for this meeting, and all our members, they
are paying membership fees to us, and it's not that they just
come in when they feel like, but they are totally involved
and committed.
Holly: The center is an after product of your
film?
Ruchira: It is, it is in response to my film, because
the women that I worked with while making the film, are the
women who pushed me into starting this, because they said,
'You will come, make the film and go away. How will our lives
change?' So, I said, 'Your lives will only change if you want
it to, I can't do anything.' So they said, 'But we can't do
it right, we don't know anybody.' So I said, 'Well, I can
be a facilitator, but you have to organize.' And through that
process, then we set up this organization. We were 22 members
originally, two of the original people that I worked with
in the film are dead. They died of HIV, and we placed their
children with other families, and some of the others are still
here, so it's nice to see them around still. People come here,
make promises and go away, so there's a lot of faith that
I have to live up to.
Holly: Yeah, you have to walk your talk.
Ruchira: Yes, absolutely, and it changed my life,
through making film. I made so many different films, and you
know, as a journalist, you move on, from one story to another,
but this was one story that I could not walk away from, because
I have never seen this kind of exploitation, it just outrages,
and I, you know, I wanted to do something more about it, which
is why I began to do the work I'm doing now.
Holly: Is that what you do all the time now?
Ruchira: Yes, for the last seven years, I've been
working more and more exclusively on the whole issue of sex
trafficking and prostitution. I've been working in Southeast
Asia, Bangkok, Philippines, other parts of Thailand, Cambodia,
Laos, Vietnam, South Asia, Katmandu, Bangladesh, India, South
Africa, Eastern Europe, Kosovo, some bits of America, so…
Holly: Do you ever just feel…?
Ruchira: Sometimes you feel so tired, and then suddenly
you meet somebody who is so inspiring that it just keeps you
going for the next ten years.
Holly: What happened last night?
Ruchira: They were sleeping on the sidewalk, and
the police just came and beat them with sticks and wires and
told them to move out from there, and they don't have any
other place. And they just throw them away.
Holly: Is there any reason that it happened last
night, as opposed to any other night?
Ruchira: It's on a continuous basis, periodically.
It could be all day the brothels are being raided by the police,
which is why we've got half the people that would have come
for the meeting today.
Holly: Did they try to scare people off because
of this thing?
Ruchira: They've taken them into the police station.
Holly: They arrest them.
Ruchira: Yeah, for no reason.
Holly: Will people go to work tonight, or because
of the police harassment, they won't go to work?
Ruchira: They will but less will go, you'll see them,
some will be out, some will be there, they will go to work,
because they can't survive, they earn every day to live off
the food everyday.
Holly: When I was watching those girls, I was
thinking, they're 13, they're at this critical age in any
culture, in any situation, and what's their station right
now in life and what do you think is going to happen?
Ruchira: You saw some of our girls dancing yesterday,
and we've started this cultural action program in Apne Aap,
where we try to build self-esteem through music and dance,
and that goes a long way, but then to a dead end at one point
when the girls turn 13 or 14, just at puberty, because we
know that the Broadway madams are going to put them into prostitution.
That's a critical time for them, and we are trying to protect
them from that, by giving them more access to education, by
giving them more access to other work opportunities, vocational
classes, etc. etc.
Some of the girls who were dancing yesterday, like the girl
in the green dress, she's just passed sixth grade, and I've
gone to the brothel with her two days ago, and she belongs
to a brothel madam, and I was telling the madam that she wants
to be a doctor, let her stay and study on for another year
or two years.
I was literally trying to buy time, and the madam said,
well you know, but she's promised that she'll get into prostitution
within a few months, so I don't think I can send her to classes
anymore. So I had to sit and negotiate and negotiate and negotiate,
and finally the madam has agreed to give us one more year.
So, we try to also work with the madams to protect the girls,
but at some stage we want to create a safe space where we
can actually take the girls away to, away from the brothels,
and they can learn and study and just explore their potential
as much as possible in a safer environment.
Holly: So she owned her and it was up to her what
happened?
Ruchira: Yes, and this girl even asked her when she
passed, I said, 'This is great, you know, you're results are
out, let's get chocolates and everything.' And she became
sad, and I said, 'Why?' So she said, 'Well because this is
the end, I'm not going to study anymore.' And I said, 'Why
not?' And she said, 'Because I belong to this madam, and the
madam has said that I will soon be getting into prostitution,
and you know, my family long ago had sold me to her, so I
have to be with her now.' And I said, 'But what would you
ideally like to be if you had stayed on?' And she said, 'I
would like to be a doctor.'
She's on the brink, and we want to save her, but we can
keep buying time…
Holly: Until you find an alternative for her?
Ruchira: Yes, exactly, but there was another girl
like her, she was living in the house next door, next to our
center, she too was about 12 or 13 and she used to come to
us and she was very fond of embroidery, so we got her into
a vocational training course and today she has set up her
own business, we found her a small house for her family, away
from the Red Light area, and she's decided that she doesn't
want to come back.
Holly: What age do the girls usually get sent
to the brothel? She's 13 and she'd been there for a long time.
Ruchira: She's been there for five years now, and
she was sold when she was seven or eight, sometimes, you could
have a child as small as five who is sold into the brothel.
Holly: From the villages, primarily?
Ruchira: Yeah, they are from villages, from urban
areas, from anywhere now, because the whole thing is spreading
so much, people are losing jobs, there is the underlying factor
of poverty when people are starving, parents are letting their
daughters go, they feel that if they send one daughter off
to the brothel, her income could probably support the other
three siblings for 4 months or 5 months.
Holly: So they're sending money back, it's not
one sale, it's…
Ruchira: Well, no, no, to back, just to back up a
little, what happens is that normally in a village, a couple
has a small child, and she's a daughter, and they are in desperate
need of money, what they would do is that they might mortgage
the child to the local agent — everybody knows who the
trafficker is in the village — and they might say, 'Give
3000 rupees now, and when she's seven or eight or nine, we'll
give the girl to you.'
So they would already borrow against their daughter, then
when she was seven or eight or nine, the trafficker would
say, that 'Okay, now it's time for me to take the daughter
off.' They might negotiate for additional fees then, they
may get some more money, they may not get any more money.
The girl comes here, to the brothel district, and she's
sold off to the madam by the trafficker. The madam may pay
between 5 or 6000 rupees, which is like 50 to 60 dollars for
the girl, and she would try to keep the girl to herself for
five years, during which period, the girl would get nothing,
like she would just be locked up in small room, made to service
about 20 to 25 clients a day.
Holly: The little girls?
Ruchira: The little girls, sometimes they are even
pre-menstruating girls, and the madams force them to have
sex with men, they use ice and they say if you're bleeding,
then the ice will stop the bleeding, and they just force them,
and the girls have no way of trying to get out of the situation,
the parents have let them go, they are locked up in these
small rooms, they are raped repeatedly, they are beaten, they
are abused, until their spirits are completely broken, and
then they have to service the clients.
Holly: If you had, or if this organization had
the resources, could it go buy the girls from the madams?
Ruchira: It could, but that wouldn't
end the whole trade. What we want to do is actually, eradicate
sex trafficking and the exploitation inside prostitution,
so you know, just buying the girls off is no solution, because
that means that we still create a demand. And as long as there
is a demand, there will be a supply. So we have to tackle
both the demand side and the supply side.
On the supply side what Apne Aap is trying to do is that
they're going in to the villages and launching prevention
campaigns. The girls go in and talk about their own life experiences,
what happened to them inside the brothel, what can happen
to young girls who come in. They try to talk to the parents,
so that's one of our programs. We are also trying to create
manuals, which talk about rights, what is the right of a girl,
how she has equal right to property as her brother, so she
should not become the first resource in poverty, that's the
other thing that our girls are doing.
The third thing they're trying to do is work on the demand
side, which is the clients, the customers. So what we're doing
is we're holding workshops with the men, which is the police,
the customers, the sons, the boyfriends, the pimps and they're
doing this through different target groups, like in Bombay,
they're doing it through the taxi man's union, in the suburbs,
we are doing it with some sailors, then we are trying to do
it with the real police, so what they're able to do through
these different target group workshops is explain to them
what sex with a minor, it means to that little child. Her
childhood is lost, her body gets destroyed, she has no chance
of building a life for herself ever again.
We explain this to the men, then we also try to explain
to them about rights, we explain to them about what being
a man is, we are trying to redefine masculinity, because sometimes
men come to the brothels thinking that, you know, they have
this sexual urge, and the macho thing is to go and look for
a really young girl and find an outlet for this sexual urge,
buy they don't realize that this is so exploitive, so just
redefine it in their heads and introduce new ideas into their
heads. They think that masturbation is wrong, it will make
them blind. They think that sex with a virgin will cure them
of AIDS. So we have to tackle the demand side as well.
***
Holly: So now you're
a print journalist?
Ruchira: Yes, I was a journalist for about 14 years,
and I shifted to TV journalism actually, just accidentally,
because BBC was in India and they were making a documentary
on the a sort of right wing group, like based on the Nazis
in Germany and I had written a lot on the group, so the BBC
approached me to work with them on this documentary. And that's
how I began making TV documentaries, and then the CBC asked
my to do this documentary with them on sex trafficking, called
the "Selling of Innocents". So I did that, after that I worked
with the BBC for two years and made another 11 documentaries,
both in radio and in television.
Holly: Now, let me ask you, what happens at that
point where, you know, you've covered something that's horrific,
or whatever it may be and you don't cover it, you actually
take action beyond that. I mean what is it that?
Ruchira: See that's the funny thing about this issue
is that, you know, as a journalist, I was writing about all
sorts of things. I've covered war, famine, murder, starvation,
all kinds of things, and I've always moved on to the next
story. But when I began to work on this documentary of sex
trafficking, I just couldn't move on, this sort of got hold
of me and I was so outraged about what was happening inside
the brothels, I'd never seen this level of exploitation. And
I felt that, you know, nobody deserved to go through this,
and I just wanted to do something about it.
And it changed my life, because I got more and more involved
with work on this, and for the last seven years, I've been
researching the issue of sex trafficking, not just in Bombay,
but in Nepal and Bangladesh and Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Laos, Philippines, Eastern Europe, Kosovo, South Africa, and
try to give it a global perspective. Because it's now become
part of the organized criminal networks.
And why is the flesh trade, so huge? Because between the
16th and the 19th century, 1.5 million people were trafficked
into slavery, and we still live with that guilt that slavery
existed. And today, about a million children are being trafficked
into prostitution every year, and yet we can't stop it
with all the modern technology at our commands, all the conventions
of human rights, all the conventions on the rights of the
child, and it just outrages. I was so angry that I said I
have to do something back, and you know, Apne Aap is one of
the things.
My own work inside the UN is another of the things. My research
and a book that I'm working on will be another way of contributing
to this.
Holly: So how is your, except for the practical
realities of your life changing, has your spirit changed since
you sort of moved from journalist to activist?
Ruchira: Yes, because as a journalist, you go so
far and then you back off because you just want to tend the
story, and you know, you don't want the responsibility of
changing the world. But as an activist, you go, you push and
you push and you push till you feel that you actually got
a paradigm shift, the way people think about some subjects,
and I don't feel like just a muckraker anymore, I feel I'm
doing something beyond muckraking, and you know because journalists
actually make a very valuable contribution. They expose the
problem, and activists add on by trying to change the way
people look at the problem and changing the situation altogether.
So it's, it's very satisfying sometimes, and it's almost
inspiring, sometimes, you feel so tired when you confront
a situation and you feel drained emotionally and physically.
And you meet a 13 year old girl, and you don't know how to
pull her out of prostitution, and then, within two minutes,
you know, you meet somebody else that says that because of
some work that I've done with them on, you know, just training,
they say we've decided to take our lives in our own hands,
and we are willing to follow you to change things around,
and we will not take the oppression, either of the brothel
madam, or of the police. And you feel great about that stand.
Holly: Do you think there's a sense of activism,
a lot of the women I've met seem to have this strain of activism,
and they may be artists, they may be singers, they may be
whatever, but they're also committed to a grassroots activism.
Is that something?
Ruchira: It's very prevalent in India in a certain
group of women, and I think that comes from the freedom struggle,
because when Gandhi got the whole freedom struggle going,
he pulled in people from all walks of life, and it's so resonant
in us to, that you know, life is not just about living for
yourself, we have to contribute something back to society,
especially if you have a good life. That it's almost as if
the thread of the freedom struggle is going through us. The
first time that women ever participated publicly in anything
was the freedom struggle, where Gandhi actually pulled in
women to go on the streets as well.
So the women's movement actually was born during the freedom
struggle in a way. And it continued in all kinds of ways,
social work, or commitment to changing things, or politics
is very much a part of women's aspirations, on one level,
on the other hand, you'll also find, like a seven-year-old
girl sold into sexual slavery, and she can do nothing about
it. So the contrast is great in India, and some people have
the luxury to be activists, and other people don't. So the
people who have the luxury to be activists, it's almost like
an additional responsibility that you do it.
Holly: Is caste a factor
in that [activism]?
Ruchira: It was very hard for some low caste women
to become an activist, but in the last ten years, things have
changed in India. And low caste women have grabbed power,
they have just taken over high offices politically…
So this has changed in the last ten years, especially in
1989, we had a law implemented in Parliament to increase representation
for people from backward classes and low castes in all government
jobs. And that really, uh, polarized society, because at that
time, the upper castes felt really threatened and they said,
'How can you do this? How is it possible? This is completely
wrong. What's going to happen to upper caste people if this
happens?'
And so, finally, people from the other castes and classes,
who had been pushed out of mainstream society for so long
realized how it did work, because this became a really public
debate at that time, and they came out and organized and today
we have people who are pushing and pushing and dealing very
high political power. And automatically from high political
power, it's also leading to other kinds of movements.
Holly: Does humor help you in this struggle?
Ruchira: A lot, yeah, all the time, because you know
you see so much darkness all around you that you just don't
know what to do, and suddenly there is some woman who is just
so humane and humorous that it just brings you back to the
world, because otherwise there's this sense of being disconnected
from the world. And just a joke, or someone's laughter does
bring things back into perspective.
Holly: Is there something that you fear?
Ruchira: I always tried to explain to other people
that you should never, never have two things as part of your
internal thinking process. One is fear, the other is guilt.
Because both can stop you from doing whatever you want to,
and it's better if you feel guilty about something, not to
do it. If you feel fear, also then try and either face it
completely if you feel it's ethically right, or just drop
it altogether. But don't let it get a hold of you, and so
I've never, I've always tried to take things head on if I
think it's ethical, otherwise, just get out.
Holly: So there's nothing.
Ruchira: There are moments of fear, but it's not long
term fear, like for instance, when I was making a film, and
I was inside the brothel and I had refused to take any help
from anybody to make the film, no power structures, so no
cop, no NGO'S, nobody, and I had just gone inside and a man
pulled out a knife at me, and he said, 'How dare you come
and make a film here, and I'm not going to let you,' there
was that momentary sense of fear that 'Oh my God, I'm going
to lose my life here. On the other hand, at the same time,
there were these women who I'd been making the film with for
18 months, and they came and surrounded me and they said,
'We have let her in and she is making the film to get our
voices out to society, so you can't stop her.'
So their strength gave me strength at that time, and also
it was inspiring and you know, it's almost like a commitment
that this is the bond that we've created, that they trust
me, but my strength also comes from their trust, and so there
is no fear because of that.
Holly: Yeah, it's really clear that there's a
lot of trust there.
Ruchira: Yes.
Holly:
Well, a couple nights ago, the cops dragged the women out
of the brothels, beat them up, threw them in jail, that's
some real stuff to be afraid of.
Ruchira: In fact, yesterday's meeting, the one that
you came for, one of the women asked me, they said that, 'We
do want to take on police oppression, and now you are giving
strategies to tackle it. But on a daily basis, we are the
ones who have to face the police, and they come and beat us,
they use the stick, they use wire, our bodies are bleeding
and we are limping for days, and we can't do business, so
we stop, so how can we tackle this on a daily basis?'
And I said that I've had experience with police myself,
I have been pushed around, I was nearly strangled to death
at one point, as a journalist, but the only way is to move
forward, because you can't retreat if you are in a battle
about something that you really care for deeply.
And I asked the women, how far did they want to go, because
the first woman could be beaten, the second could be beaten,
but you know, the same principles of the civil resistance,
that if many women unite, then the police can not go on beating
everybody, there will be public outcry, the media will support
us, and that's the way we can build up backing. With one of
the programs we want to launch, is the transfer of the corrupt
policemen from here, so we are planning a procession, but
before that, we will hold several workshops about what civil
resistance means, how do you take this on with the police,
how far are you prepared to go. Are you willing to actually
fill up the jails? And we had this conversation yesterday,
and I asked the women, I said how many of you are willing
to do this, even though you might be hurt, you might end up
in jail, and would you be willing to do it, and yet, you saw
the show of hands yesterday.
Holly: Ah yes.
Ruchira: All of them put their hands up, and they
said we're willing to go forward. And that's what they were
talking to me about after the speeches, or when they were
hugging me and kissing me and all that.
Holly: What do you think; do you think that this
will be the battle you're fighting in 15 years?
Ruchira: Yeah, I think I will. But hopefully in a
different way, because you know, we should have achieved some
things by then, but I don't think sex trafficking will be
eradicated in 15 years, there might be different forms, it
might go more underground, we may have different kinds of
enemies. Like today we have to explain what sex and sexuality
is to people in India. In Amsterdam, it's a different battle.
In Sweden, it's a different battle. So, the exploitation of
women would continue in some way, I'm sure I'll still be working
on these issues. I'm never going to give up.
Holly: When you were 13, do you think, did you
have any notion of what you'd be doing?
Ruchira: Yeah, I always wanted to be a journalist,
and I'd sort of announced to everybody that, you know, that
I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to write and
change the world, and I thought that writing could go along
way just by exposing problems.
Holly: And how does religion figure into this,
because…
Ruchira: It does in a way. Caste is very much a part
of Hinduism, so in that sense, you know, religion does figure
because it's mostly low caste women who are being trafficked
inside India, in other parts of the world, it's anybody who
comes from a low class, and but other times when you see somebody
being exploited really badly, I think, you know does God exist?
And why is this happening if God does exist? And yet, my own
work is so spiritual, that I derive a lot from the sense of
spirituality — the ethics comes from that feeling of
spirituality, and the feeling that there may not be a
God, but there is some sense of justice. And this justice
comes from the existence of something, and that something
has to feed into our work as we connect with other people.
So it's a more abstract sense of religion, and it's more a
philosophy, which is more existentialist than anything else
actually.
Holly: What's the recipe for getting, moving people
from complacency to activism? Because I think people can hear
this story, what's going on here, be horrified and do nothing.
Ruchira: Basically you have to look for the point
of transformation, and that point of transformation always
is at the human level. You have to find, that how can you
connect, and how can you explain to people that this is something
within you as well. So whenever I try to explain to somebody
about sexual trafficking, sometimes, I even say 'Have you
ever been raped in your life?' And most people say 'No,' and
I say, 'Have you ever had sex with your husband when you don't
want to?' and they all say, 'Yes,' and I said, 'You know,
and did you have an orgasm at the end of it?' And they say
'No.' And so I say, how much of it was rape and how much of
it was consent? And you know, then they begin to think, and
then you can move forward.
See, you always have to look for these moments of connectivity,
and that, from that comes the point of transformation. From
outrage or exploitation, or as you said, victimization to
moving on.
Holly: What's your
personal ethos?
Ruchira: I can tell you my personal point of transformation
actually. Two things actually happened here. One was that
I went through a very bad divorce at one time, and it made
me do a lot of introspection about who I was and to keep my
marriage going, whether I was willing to actually give up
a lot of my principles and see how I could hold on to the
marriage. Because I said, 'I can't not have a family and children
and why should I have a divorce, I haven't done anything to
anybody, and it's a completely dignified relationship and
suddenly why is my life breaking up.' And I lost my spirit
in the process for about six or seven months, because I tried
to really conform and that was, I became almost nobody,
because I was, I didn't even know who I was, my friends didn't
know who I was, you know it was just a complete transformation
of who I am now. And uh, that introspection helped.
The other thing which happened was that I was covering an
event for a magazine that I was working for at that time,
and while covering that event, I was nearly strangled to death
and thrown into a ditch, and I came out of that ditch and
I went public about it. That here is this political party
which has launched this program of hatred and violence and
they are trying to kill me and strangle me to death. And the
moment I went public about it, a lot of my friends sort of
just moved away, because they all supported this political
party, and even the people from the political party said that,
you know, 'If you'd come to us quietly and said that you were
hurt, it would be one thing, but why did you go public?' So
there was this whole, almost this invisible line which I'd
crossed, where I could have negotiated more security for myself
by saying that I was attacked, and I was nearly strangled
to death, and everything. Then I would have been a good woman,
but the moment I crossed that line and went public about the
violence done to my body, then I was a bad woman, because
I should not have gone public.
And that's when I began to think, that what is this good
woman, bad woman concept, and you know, who defines bad women,
when they could actually try and kill me publicly, that was
fine, but when I speak about it publicly, that's wrong. And
so that was also a moment of transformation.
Holly: India, as you've said,
is this place of extremes, but the people don't have a, well,
in my short experience, extremes in their personalities÷it
doesn't seem like people are really miserable or really super
happy, there's neither extreme in my Western interpretation
of how people are. Is that completely off-base?
Ruchira: No, that's very true. India is full of contradictions,
and yet there's an inner peace. You'll see a woman walking
on the street, she has nothing, and yet, she'll be walking
in the most dignified way. So poverty in India is very different
from poverty in the West. In the west, poverty is considered
a crime; in India, it's just a fact of life. It's happened
in this life because of something which is done in the last
life, or you might be going through the suffering in this
life so that your next life is better. So nobody holds poverty
against you, and also there are some people who actually embrace
being poor, they sacrifice everything and they'll just have
a cart and one piece of cloth, and they'll wander through
the streets singing and collecting alms and living off that.
And people appreciate that level of sacrifice, and they will
actually give them money as they go across, so the whole ethos
of being poor here, means nothing.
It's a different lifestyle, it's a different understanding
of life, and I think it comes from some of the reform movements
within Hinduism. One is of course, Buddhism, you know, where
you accept certain things as basic truths, but that old age
and disease, there is no control over that, and then what
you have control over is how do you live that life, and do
you live it in a way that you don't harm other people, and
what does harming other people mean? Does it mean slapping
somebody, shooting somebody? No, it goes actually much more
deeper than that, so it actually goes into the fact that you
use minimum resources, so it actually has a resonance in the
Green Peace movement right now, or what the Green Party is
talking about also.
So, I think that inner peace comes from that, that they
are not leading an evil life, they are trying to lead a minimalist
life, which doesn't harm the balance of the universe in any
way. Their dignity comes from that.
Holly: Poverty is more demonized in the West.
Ruchira: Yes.
Holly: Now does belief in reincarnation, does
that change one's feeling toward death?
Ruchira: Totally, because you don't feel that time
is limited; you feel this work is limited. See, if it doesn't
happen in this birth, it's going to happen in the next birth,
because also underlying the whole theme of Hinduism is that
whatever you want will happen to you at some stage, it may
not happen in this life, but there are many more lives.
Holly: Is that a comfort to you?
Ruchira: No, for me, whatever I want to do, I want
to do in this life.
Holly: Uh, the little girls are getting ready
for their dance down there.
Ruchira: Yeah, and, today you can see that all these
little girls are getting ready for their dance. We have a
youth group in our center and we work with them through cultural
activities, dance, music, computer training, games, etc. They're
really excited about this and it gives them such a sense of
empowerment to perform to other people, to this group and
their mothers look on fondly, and it creates a sense of community
as well. Our communication with them becomes much easier through
music and dance.
Holly: Half of their moms
have HIV. When those women die, what's going to happen to
the girls?
Ruchira: Actually, most of the women in Apne Aap
are HIV positive, but we know at least half have the disease
for sure, because they've tested and admitted it to us. Some
have not yet tested and admitted, so one of my problems is
that what are we going to do to help them? Of course, one
thing is instant relief in terms of medicines applied, taking
them to hospitals whenever they get any opportunistic disease
like tuberculosis, or jaundice, or even an appendix operation,
because they need better care. We are also trying to provide
some more food, so they're starting a soup kitchen.
But the big issue is that what's going to happen to their
children, because most of them don't have any support from
their families, they don't have a husband. They don't, they're
extended family has thrown them out. These children could
literally be growing up on the streets when the mothers die.
The boys will become part of gangs, and the girls will end
up becoming prostitutes. And we want to really save these
children, because the future is theirs, and we are trying
to get the girls placed in boarding schools, the boys given
some vocational classes.
We are also starting something called "memory books," where
the children will know all their lives that their mothers
really loved them, so they will keep a diary for their children
about who they are, why did they get into prostitution, how
much they love their children, and this is what we keep for
the kids forever.
Holly: And do you, all the time are you worrying
that they'll emulate their mom's lives, profession?
Ruchira: None of the girls want to become prostitutes,
they've seen too much misery, they've seen the exploitation,
the violence, the repeated rapes, the diseases, the kind of
lifestyles that their mothers have. They live in four back
rooms, locked up forever, looking for clients. They have to
sexualize their persona. They can't be thinking people, they
don't know that there is any other use for their body, their
hands, or their feet or whatever, they just have two parts
to their body and that's what they keep losing all the time.
The girls are scared of getting into that, and we really
want to protect them. And it's a challenge, because literally
now, we are buying time, and we are protecting them for three
years, four years, five years.
Also, on the other side, none of the mothers want their
daughters to be into prostitution, they want to protect them
for as long as they can, but when they become older and disease
ridden, and their earning capacity comes down, they push their
daughters into prostitution, because otherwise they starve.
Holly: What's the good news?
Ruchira: The good news is that the women are willing
to fight. Six years ago, when I came into this brothel, they
were so timid and they were so scared, they were not willing
to even talk to each other. They did not let outsiders in,
and today, six years later, you can see the laughter and the
joy that they have. They were running around, skipping from
room to room in Apne Aap, they were willing to talk to you,
they were asking you straight out questions. They are no longer
the timid, disempowered women, so that's the good news. That
if you work with people, if you tell them about their rights,
they are willing to stand up and fight, and I think that challenge
to the human spirit, and its response is the biggest and the
best news.
Holly: Are you a diva?
Ruchira: I'm definitely a performer in the drama
of life, but I don't know if I'm the main performer. Maybe,
again, you know, it changes from time to time. Like at one
moment, I may be the main performer, but two days later, it
might be someone else who is the main performer.
