“It is about realising what you can do”
Dr. Sunitha Krishnan
“It is about realising what you can do” – Dr. Sunitha Krishnan
A very good afternoon to all of you. I’m not in an exemplary state of mind right now to give a fantastic speech as the last two months have been quite traumatic for me. Two months back I was dealing with a case in a small town in Orissa, a place called Gunpur. A man along with his wife and three-year-old daughter had recently moved from IIT Kanpur to Gunpur where he was to be an assistant professor. When the child returned from her first day at school at 3:30 pm, she was blood-soaked and her vagina was completely torn. She went to school in the morning, came back home raped in the evening. This shook me in many ways. It’s not that I haven’t dealt with cases like this before, but what shook me was a call from the mother.
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The mother was in a similar forum eight months ago, attending one of my presentations. During the presentation she kept saying, “What should we do? What should we do? What are we supposed to do?” I kept telling her, “For a minute can you just think if this happened to your own child, what would you do?” But she wasn’t convinced with that statement of mine. She said, “No. As an NGO you should give us a menu card, in terms of what everybody should be doing!” and I was stubbornly saying, “No, I’m not going to tell you what you have to be doing! You have to decide for yourself.” This is a conversation that I had with her eight months back and eight months later she calls me up and says, “Ma’am when you were talking to me, I never thought it’ll be my own child.”
When we talk about sexual violence or sex trafficking, we always think it’s about somebody else. We always think it can happen to X, Y, Z, but never to our own child. We don’t understand that every 22 minutes in this country there is a reported case of rape. When we talk about a reported case of rape, we mean there are 20 other cases that are not being reported. As I talk to you, every 10 minutes, a human being is sold for prostitution, not only in this country but worldwide. It’s very difficult to understand what violence of a sexual nature means to a victim. I’m a survivor of gang rape myself. At the age of 15, I was gang-raped by 8 men. The rape, per se, is not something even I remember, but what I remember very distinctly is what happened afterwards.
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The two years of isolation, ostracisation, marginalisation, the years of stigma, of making you feel like an accused for a crime that you’ve never committed in your life, the sense of isolation — both within you and outside you, and a whole world of people around you including your family who don’t understand the sense of loneliness you’re going through. What we do to human beings who are subjected to sexual violence is 95% man-made. We create that sense of isolation, ostracisation and marginalisation purely through our attitude and perceptions.
At one end, if you look at victims of sexual violence, the kind of trauma that they go through is a one-time affair. I work in a world where people are victims of sex trafficking which is a daily affair of sexual violence. It’s centuries of isolation, marginalisation, stigma and exploitation.
I can’t claim that I know it all, because I have not gone through that pain, but I have been party to rescuing close to 8,400 women and 7,000 children, which is a significantly big number. However, when you look at the larger picture where 2.3 million people get sold into prostitution every year in our country alone, these thousands are very few in comparison.
One of the biggest problems that any victim of sex trafficking faces is that nobody in society actually understands them. Prostitution and commercial sexual exploitation is a form of exploitation that can destroy the body, mind and soul of a person. If you have a case of rape, molestation or gang-rape, the person admits to being a victim and says “Yes, something has happened to me.” When it comes to exploitation, you face a very strange situation. The victim says “I am not a victim. I am in this world of exploitation by choice. I love doing this. I don’t want to come out of this.” She normalises the experience of being exploited, so much so that she lives and thrives on the world of exploitation.
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Why does a person who’s sixteen years old start saying, “I like being raped by 40–50 men a day, it’s okay with me. I love living in exploitative conditions, getting beaten up by the police, by the pimps, by the brokers and by the customers.” What is it that makes this person behave this way? Any person who’s sold in sex trafficking is lured, deceived, coerced or blackmailed into the trade. In the last 21 years of my working in this field, I haven’t met a single person who has said, “This was the best choice of profession that I saw, the best option that was available before me and that is why I got into it.” The youngest child that I’ve rescued from prostitution was only three years old.
More often than not, a victim has no clue what is waiting for her once she enters the trade. She thinks once I cross that line, things will become hunky-dory. Only later does she realise that she has to sleep with 20–40 men a day. I haven’t met a single child, woman or a young adult who has said, “This is not a government job, a modelling job, a film role, or an honest job, but I am okay with sleeping with 20 men a day.” Each one of them resists. The more you resist the more torture is inflicted upon you.
A child once told me that she was kept in a room with a snake for eight days, beaten black and blue everywhere till she said, “Okay, I’ll do what you want.” Most often, the girls think when they succumb to the pressure, the torture will end. They don’t realise that when they say ‘yes’, they are agreeing to a lifetime of exploitation. Because what is prostitution or commercial sexual exploitation? It is 4–6 people living on the earnings of one human being. It means sleeping with 30–50 men every day. It also means sleeping with men who have different needs. They are not men who are interested in love or an accountable relationship. They are men who are buying a body for a stipulated period of time and they think they can do anything with that body for that one hour or one night.
Each one of the children and women that we have rescued has told us one common story — the story of one customer a day, who would put chilli powder in their vagina or a customer who would take a cigarette or a cigar and burn them all over their body. We asked the girls, “Why didn’t you resist? Why didn’t you say no?” They say, “Paisa diya na, amma.” Once the money is given, you have no choice.
In this world of exploitation, resistance fades away very fast because this victim knows that outside this world of exploitation, there is no world of acceptance waiting for her. Her family is not going to accept her and neither is the police. They are going to treat her like a criminal and put her into jail. The world is not waiting for her with open arms. This is what the traffickers and exploiters tell them.
They are not lying, unfortunately. How pathetic is it that collectively, we fail in providing rehabilitation options for these victims, as a government and as a society, despite the abundance of resources.
There is a certain ‘poverty’ in the way we think and this, the victim knows very well. That’s how she gives up and starts surviving in the world of exploitation, where she is vulnerable to a million diseases. She is susceptible to a range of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV-AIDS.
A time comes when she believes there is no world outside for her and that this is all she can do and be. That’s when she gives up on the world. I founded the organisation Prajwala to respond to such an issue. We are involved practically in every part of sex trafficking. We undertake rescue operations, go into brothels, go into places of exploitation including hotels, houses, and rescue children, women and young adults. We’ve been able to demonstrate to the world that it is possible to bring dignity to the lives of these victims.
One of the key things that I realised very early in life was that in this whole world of pain that you are subjected to, one of the best companions you can have is yourself. You can make or break yourself. And that is a realisation that has helped me cope with my own pain and convert my pain into power. We help the victims understand that below the surface of pain, there’s a volcano of power that they can harness which can help them become welders, carpenters, house-keepers and cab drivers. Today, we as an organisation have been able to show the world that it is possible to bring in change. What matters is that it takes place on an individual level.
What do we want from you?
You have to break the culture of silence around this issue. What we don’t realise is that when a father abuses a daughter and we remain silent, we are actually encouraging a world of perpetrators to come into society. Our silence has to be broken from our families. We have to start talking from there.
We need to break our culture of tolerance. Somewhere we have started tolerating violence. We need to create a world which is intolerant to such violence, which says, “No human being can be subjected to any form of sexual violence.”
The third thing we need to break is our culture of despondency. We have to stop giving up so soon and find a way to respond. Responding is about changing your mindset and doing things within your own power. It is about realising what you can do as a teacher, as an engineer, as a doctor, as a CEO or even as a student. Please find that space to respond.
Excerpts from a Q&A session:
Rtn. Mudit: Dr. Krishnan, we are humbled by what you have gone through and we salute you for what you are doing despite your personal tragedy. Please let us know how we can contribute or help your cause financially; at least that’s what we can do. My question is — what are your views on prostitution; about legalisation — will it help the situation or not, because it’s not going to disappear.
Sunitha: Financial contri-butions are required but they are not the need of the hour. It will come as and when all of you feel compelled to do some things. Legalising prostitution is about legitimising slavery. For a 100 years there have been rapes in different forms. Just because we are not able to change the rape, would we think about legitimising rape? Prostitution is about sexual slavery, about exploitation of a human being and about degeneration of the body, mind and soul. What we need to think about is collective responses — one, how to prevent it and two, how to create spaces and support systems for exit. Somewhere we have not tried enough and are drawing conclusions before we do. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m not saying it’s impossible.
Rtn. Suresh: A number of the responses or suggestions that you have given us are cognitive, reactionary, collective participation. I might like to do this, but from you and your rich experience in this field, I need a structural direction. How do I get across with everybody over here for an activity which I know is what you have described to us?
Sunitha: Since I get such questions again and again everywhere I go, we have prepared this tool-kit which I will leave here, which is a very structured response, in terms of the time you have in hand, the skills you can commit to or resources you can commit to and how you can use it to change the situation. I can just evoke you into action but what you do is left to you. Each one of us has to decide on what we can do and how much we can do, and the limit to which we can push ourselves. I can’t be the one to suggest what each one of you can do, but I can give you some broad guidelines, comprehensively available in the kit.
Rtn. Poonam: While the work you are doing is marvellous, I think, we as a club could structure our involvement in a better fashion so that it is a movement. I suppose what you are talking about is creating a movement and structuring that into something which is much larger and much better advocated, so that the helpless know that there is a place where they can go and seek assistance and support. This is because a lot of awareness is lacking in certain pockets of society. But thank you so much for the afternoon you spent and I’m sure we’ll structure something together.