Who resides within the safe compounds of St. Devi’s Academy and the LOT Home in India?

Within our walls we have little girls who would have been sold into prostitution. They are children from families so very poor, with circumstances so dire, that parents or relatives either sold their girls with the promise of a paltry monthly income, or they were tricked into thinking they were giving their girls an opportunity for a good job. Some girls are abducted, drugged and taken across the border. Most of these unfortunate girls end up in India, the Gulf States or China.

According to the Child Workers in Nepal (CWIN) 5,000 – 7,000 Nepalese girls and women are trafficked each year.According to a New York Times article printed August 31, 2013 – “Women and girls are being bought, sold & smuggled across the Nepal-India border. Although reliable data on the scope of the issue is difficult to gather, Unicef reports that as many as 7,000 women and girls are trafficked out of Nepal to India every year, and around 200,000 are now working in Indian brothels.”

Pimps or Madams pay close to $2,000 for one trafficked Nepalese girl, according to Caritas, Nepal’s Gender Department. The girl is then obligated to repay this fee over time, which is never-ending.

AsiaNews.it published an article in February 9, 2013, which states, “Trafficking in Nepali women and girls towards India, China and Arab countries is a growing problem. Unemployment in the Himalayan Nation is high and many families, to survive, end up selling their daughters to traffickers who force the latter into prostitution.”

“ ‘In remote villages, more and more families are forced to sell their youngest daughters in exchange of a monthly payment,’ said Parbati Budhthoki, a former prostitute in Surkhet District, told AsiaNews.”

“ ‘Most of the victims are used by their parents or blood relatives as a source of income’, the 19 year old explained. She herself was sold to a brothel in Delhi when she was only 16 for 15,000 rupees (US $280).”

“ ‘In Delhi, I received up to 25 customers a day,’ she remembers. ‘If I did not work, my masters would beat me or burn me with cigarettes.’ “

Bhuwan Thapaliya from Astitwa reports, “The story of these Nepalese girls in the Indian brothels is pathetic. The brothel owners, amid the four walls of depravity, subject them to mental and physical persecution. If they refuse to serve the clients, then they are locked up for days, starved, beaten and burned with cigarettes until they learn how to service up to 25 clients a day.”

“Activists blame the lack of strong-laws against traffickers and the absence of victim-friendly courts in Nepal for punishing the traffickers.” Irin News, May 9, 2007

The blame can be placed on many shoulders but the real issue is to stop this deplorable, inexcusable situation! These girls are not nameless, faceless people! They are God’s innocent girls who are forced into shameful, atrocious activity. Trips with a Mission is doing what it can to save girls in danger of being sold, to preserve their innocence, to educate them so they can have a viable future and to save them into God’s kingdom. Please help us in this endeavor.

This was originally posted June 20, 2014