In a village in southern India a child has just been born. A group of women gather round the cradle, wishing the baby a life full of riches, rubies and pearls.
“You’re lucky the child is a boy,” the women tell the mother. In this society girls are valued far less.
The women are all devadasis, literally slaves of the goddess.
As children their parents gave them to serve Yellama - the goddess of fertility. Her cult is thousands of years old, her followers spread across southern India.
At the temple to Yellama in Saundatti women dance and praise the goddess.
The practice of dedicating young girls as devadasis has been outlawed for over 50 years, but still it happens.
Anti-slavery campaigners estimate that there are at least 25,000 devadasis in the state of Karnataka alone.
Sexual slavery
“Being devadasis means we are slaves of the goddess. We have to visit this temple. We wear necklaces of pearls to show we are bound to Yellama. We give blessings and perform her rituals,” says Imla, a devadasi in her 40s who is swathed in a pink and yellow sari.
When girls dedicated to Yellama reach puberty they are forced to sacrifice their virginity to an older man. What follows is a life of sexual slavery, they become sanctified prostitutes. The money devadasis earn goes straight to their parents who often act as pimps for their daughters.
Sex slavery widespread in England
Young women tricked into coming to England, often by boyfriends, are being sold off in auctions at airport coffee shops as soon as they arrive.
They are among the thousands of women brought into the UK to be sex slaves, usually with no idea of their fate.
The trade was one of the findings of a BBC News website investigation into slavery in 21st Century England.
As the UK marks 200 years since the Parliamentary Act to abolish the slave trade, slavery goes on in another form. The slave trade, outlawed by legislation introduced in March 1807, saw people from Africa transported en masse to the Americas with the involvement of people from the UK and other European countries.