IN RURAL INDIA, TRADITIONS OF CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION ENDURE
Scripps Howard News Service
By JOHN STACKHOUSE
Toronto Globe and Mail
SANGLI, India - The prettiest girl in this leafy, tropical town in western
India’s sugar belt doesn’t have much time to talk. Dressed in a stunning
mauve silk sari, with gold jewelry dripping from her ear lobes and nose,
18-year-old Chandra must get to work.
“My entire family depends on me,” she said with a laugh as her alcoholic
mother stood at the doorway ordering her back to the family’s brothel.
A prostitute since she was 12, Chandra expects to net the equivalent of $50
for her day’s work, because in her state of Maharashtra it’s the annual
snake festival and a time for local men to celebrate another good monsoon.
In an average month, Chandra figures she can bring home $500 - an amount
many of her customers don’t earn in one year.
“My family, my brothers, they sit around all day and do nothing,” continued
Chandra, who has a five-year-old son from her initiation as a commercial
sex worker. “Everything they have is from me.”
Far from the chaotic brothels of Bombay and Calcutta, where many children
are kept in forced custody, Chandra represents what many experts say are
the majority of India’s 100,000 or more child prostitutes: girls put to
work by their families for no other reason than the enormous, if brief,
profits they can earn.
They can be found at truck stops, dingy small-town hotels and roadside tea
stalls. They often do double duty as kitchen help and sex workers.
And they have little choice - not when their parents, siblings and other
relatives depend so much on their earning power.
With her movie star looks, Chandra was virtually destined to become a sex
worker at the age of 12. It was her mother’s occupation, too.
But as with many Indian children, she wasn’t sold directly into
prostitution. Instead, Chandra’s mother confirmed her as a “devadasi,” a
Hindu temple servant who before reaching puberty is dedicated for life to
the goddess Yallamma.
Traditionally, the divine and elaborate marriage would transport a
low-caste girl such as Chandra into a devotional career of temple singing
and dancing. In modern times, the outlawed ritual, which is believed to
absorb as many as 10,000 girls a year, often means sexual enslavement to a
temple priest or prostitution.
The devadasi system is only one of countless traditions of child sexual
exploitation in rural India that seem sure to endure, driven by the
economics of poverty, tyranny of caste and compulsions of culture and
religion.
“Some of these forms of child prostitution in India emerge from deeply
rooted, traditional practices and beliefs which still prevail,” said
Richard Young, chief of community development for the United Nations
Children’s Fund in India. “They may be legally outlawed, but they do
continue.”
And they present a serious challenge to the world. As the international
community tries to crack down on the sexual exploitation of children with
stronger laws, better police enforcement and community-development
projects, it remains to be seen whether the culture of child prostitution -
from the parents who sell their children to the people who buy them - will
change anytime soon.
“Attitudes and mind sets, corruption and apathy are major obstacles which
will not be overcome by any scheme,” Young said.
In the Indian desert state of Rajasthan, where Rajnat tribals once served
maharajahs, the communities now set up camp along highways to serve truck
drivers. At puberty, each girl’s virginity is auctioned to a man, and she
is then put to work in a mass market.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, the “basavi,” or “female bull,”
ceremony consigns low-caste girls to a life of ritual devotion that is so
unremunerative that they usually resort to prostitution as well.
In the Bedia tribe, one girl is selected from each family to serve as a
community prostitute; if she becomes pregnant, she is ritually married to a
one-rupee coin.
But it is the illegal devadasi system that accounts for up to one-fifth of
India’s child prostitutes, UNICEF says. The devadasi dedications, often
held in private homes to avoid police raids, prey on parents’ fear and
greed.
Many of the girls, and in some cases boys, are chosen because of ailments -
such as skin diseases, mental retardation, leprosy, the matted hair of
malnutrition - that render them undesirable for human marriage.
It also saves the family an onerous dowry, as the girl is married to the
god for life. In return for their divine devotion, the devadasis are
accorded special status in their villages, not least because of their
earning power. They receive comfort and caring when they are ill. Some are
even eligible for a government pension of $4 a month.
As with thousands of other women in her district, Durga, a mother in her
mid-20s, was put through the ritualistic devadasi ceremony and married to
an icon before her first menstrual cycle.
“There was no question of being happy or sad,” she said. “I didn’t know
what they were doing.”
It was just another part of an unforgiving childhood. Durga had been raised
in a Bombay brothel, where her mother was sold into prostitution by her
father. She remembers being so poor that she carried pails of water for the
equivalent of less than one penny a trip. She also remembers being raped at
13 for refusing a customer, and being bruised so badly that she had to go
to hospital.
But now Durga earns the equivalent of about $120 a month - enough to care
for her two children, two brothers and mother - and knows there is no other
way for her now.
“Once you’re in the business,” she said, “it’s very difficult to get out.”
In Sangli’s red-light district, in a downtrodden corner of the city near
the railway tracks, most of the 260 prostitutes are devadasis who serve a
prosperous farm belt from a squatter camp of cinder-block houses built on
land allotted by the local government.
Each room is fitted with a cassette player, ceiling fan, cot - some with
two or three - and a sheet hangs from the ceiling to serve as a curtain.
Outside on the footpaths, well-dressed young men loaf about in indecision
or relaxation. The tradition seems unchanged in many ways, except one.
“Men come and ask for younger and younger women,” said Kamla, a local madam
and devadasi, whose rotund frame and grimacing face is enough to keep
troublemakers away.
Even in far-flung Sangli, 10 hours by bus from Bombay, the fear of
contracting AIDS has hit the brothels like a monsoon cloud. One young
prostitute, who calls herself Seventy Jasmine, asked if AIDS really is a
deadly disease with no cure.
Durga told her that it is, and that two of her co-workers died last month.
One had four children. Durga then told the others about Ichalkaranji, a
textile-mill center not far from Sangli, where eight prostitutes died last
month. There, the red-light district’s population, which once numbered
around 70, is down to 35.
Durga once assumed she would dedicate her daughter, who is now 6, to be a
devadasi, like herself and her mother. But not anymore.
“We are afraid of death,” Durga explained. “We do not want our children to
die.”