This is the second part of the story of Molli Desi, a young Indian woman abducted into a “rescue center” under the excuse that her sex worker friends might “traffick” her. If you missed the first part yesterday, I urge you to go back and read it first before continuing.
At the “rescue” centre (which we only thought of as a “detention” centre) we were told that the NGO had custody papers for us from a court, and that we could not leave. I think it is important to understand why we are held in custody rather than given our freedom after we are “rescued”. Most anti-trafficking programmes must have what are called the “Three Ps”: Prevention, Protection, and Prosecution; without cases the NGOs cannot meet their prosecution quotas, and without women and girls in their centres they cannot meet their “protection” quotas. Many of these NGOs are not rights-based at all, but rather prioritise prosecution of traffickers; they must therefore detain sex workers under “safe custody orders” so as to force them to testify in court. This detention can last many years because the court process is so slow, so the trafficker can get bail and live free while the “victim” is held in centre or even prison. If women or girls run away, the NGO claims they were kidnapped by traffickers. In reality, though, it is the NGOs who are the real traffickers; sex workers and other women they capture are a commodity that they buy and sell. To get money from USAID they must promise to be anti-prostitution, and to get money from other donors they use women they have captured to put on shows. The women are even given false ages to make it look like they are very young; they told the court and donors that I was 12 years old though I was actually 17, and one woman of 23 was said to be 16.
The detention house was not like the orphanage; the women and girls were scared and cried a lot. Several of them were not even sex workers, but rather migrants without papers; the NGO said they were “at risk” for trafficking. Most of the girls there with me were not sex workers; some had been raped while in domestic service. Everyone wanted to leave but many had nowhere to go, because the NGO had told their family and home village that they had been trafficked and raped. They do this to stop you from being able to go home, because they know your family will reject you for being a sex worker; it’s a way to discourage running away from the centre. This is why it is so important to give a false name and say you are from a faraway place when they catch you (which we did); it also helps to prevent anyone from filing a First Instance Report (FIR).
After a couple of days, the NGO demanded we undergo gynecological examinations and take HIV tests, but I refused to undress or to let them take blood. They would not respect my wishes, so I had to physically fight them; the NGO director hit me in the face with her hand, and I now have a scar on my forehead from her heavy ring. Each day we had to do activities in the centre, and we were not allowed to go outside. One day two white donor women came to visit the centre, and we were forced to sing and dance for them and let them take photos of us; when the staff realised I could speak English they took me upstairs and locked me in a room until the women had left. After we had been in the centre for a week, we started planning our escape, but our hidden phone needed credit and charge; though we had the money I had hidden, we did not have any contact with outside. We learned from other women who had been there a while that night security would exchange food and candy for sex, so we propositioned one night guard and in exchange for oral sex and money he eventually brought us a phone charger and phone credit. We were then able to contact our sisters in the orphanage, who had been very worried about us; the orphanage had filed an FIR on us because they thought we had been kidnapped and trafficked.
After another few more days of oral sex with the night guard and some of his friends (whom he was charging money for access to us), we arranged for two of our sisters to come to the centre in an auto-rickshaw, late at night (this was during a festival time). We then used a metal bar we got from the guard to prise open the metal cage on our window, lowered ourselves onto the annex roof, and got down to the garden. Unfortunately, the main gate was still locked and we could not get to the street, so we rang our sisters outside and they convinced the auto-rickshaw driver to break the lock and let us out, whereupon we all ran to the auto-rickshaw and fled away into the night. We did not go straight home, but stopped for iftar food; it tasted so good, and we were all so happy to be free we laughed and cried all the way home. When we got home everyone was so pleased to see us, and we immediately washed our clothes and had showers; I then slept for almost a whole day. We told our director that we had been lured away by miscreants and eventually escaped from their hideout, so she wrote a report and the FIR was cancelled. We eventually heard from a woman who escaped the detention centre later that the staff had claimed traffickers had kidnapped us from the centre, and that we had probably been sent to Mumbai.
My main accusation against the “rescuers” is that everyone presumes that they take proper care of those they “rescue”; in truth, however, the NGOs have complete power over their victims. There is no proper protection for women and girls they detain, so it is very common for centre staff to rape them. Though the Government is supposed to supervise orphanages and centres, the reality is that it lacks the capacity to do so; all NGOs know there is inadequate supervision, and many of them resist external accountability and will pay the few inspectors who do come to give them clean reports. This power and impunity from consequences invites abuses of all kinds, such as the way the night guard charged his friends for sex with us; personally, though, I did not find the sex trading for telephone credit and food nearly as bad as the way the women senior staff acted toward us. They want sex workers to be forced into domestic work or garment factory work, or to be married to low caste men; they know they are trapped inside patriarchy and resent our determination to live free. You can find many “rescue” stories on the internet, but most of them are usually mediated by the “rescuers”; if you read my account here and the various links I have included, you will hear another truth.
Bloody hell. This is concentration-camp-like behaviour. Shaking my effing head.
> Many of these NGOs are not rights-based at all, but rather prioritise prosecution of traffickers; they must therefore detain sex workers under “safe custody orders” so as to force them to testify in court.
Note this. Most governments are punishment orientated, and this is the way the NGO’s get power from these governments, by acting as an arm to aid the punishment.
Most governments, punishment oriented or not, are far better at broad simple tasks than they are at anything that requires judgment and/or nuance. I’m not saying your comment is wrong, but I think the two factors make things worse than either would on its own.
True. Governments are good at big things like leveling mountain ranges, winning wars and exterminating entire populations; with things that require judgment and finesse they’re incompetent, and in managing human behavior they’re monstrous on a natural-disaster level.
That happens to be true for all bureaucracies, except that they cannot do the large tasks either. (That is where “leaders” come into play.) Also, bureaucracies are fundamentally amoral (i.e. they cannot even grasp the concept of morality or ethics) and hence typically become immoral in practice by the personal tendencies of their members and often leaders. These people often join bureaucracies specifically because they can do away with moral and ethical questions. Just establish some form of rule (e.g. a “law”) that authorizes the problematic behavior and they can be as sadistic and destructive as the respective rule allows, without any fear of repercussions.
Want to build a national highway system? Go to the government. Want to wipe out an outbreak of murderous fascism in Germany? Call the Feds.but by the same token, I’ve never understood why anyone expects a National Health Service, a Depatrment of Education, or a National Endowment for the Arts to be nything but a neon-lit, gas-powered, mongolian cluster-fuck.
Let’s see if this can be taken a step further, shall we?
Why should the government be building highways? If two cities or two states want to build a road to connect them, isn’t that their concern and responsibility? Not to mention the abusive coercion of eminent domain and the fact that the system is now crumbling anyway because no one want to pay enough to maintain it.
And apparently WWII doesn’t work as an example either because that simply replaced Germany’s desired global hegemony with our (and for a while, the Soviet Union’s) very real global hegemony.
I haven’t done the research necessary to establish my feeling as proof, but the sense I get from history is that governments do reasonably well at building or helping to build large networks of communications of transport. In many cases (rural electrification, the national rail system) we know, or think we know, that people were not willing to pay fees that would allow the building of the infrastructure, but the networks in question demonstrably benefitted society as a whole in a measurable economic fashion.
IO feel that there’s a PhD. dissertation or six in this, somewhere. Not sure whether it would be History or Economics. Possibly both.
I would suggest that individual States are likely to be fixated on what does them good in the short term. The Federal government is, or should be, interested in what benefits the Union.
Part of what makes this messy to demonstrate is that governments tend to keep supporting networks long after they have ceased to be of much material benefit (think the various canals that are maintained as parks, at vast expense). Also, a lot of chicanery went on in the building of the rail network, and also in the accusations about it after. Yes, a lot of shady characters got a lot of “fee” land and made a killing. But the land was worth little to nothing before the railroad got built, and the people shouting “fraud and corruption” after the fact had their own axes to grind. The net result seems to have been that the railroads got built, a bunch of people (some of them not very nice) got rich on wealth that hadn’t existed before, the Government didn’t give up anything it valued, and the only people getting screwed who didn’t volunteer to be part of the whole mess were the Native Americans …. who were getting screwed no matter what.
I was being just a bit facetious before, but I’m going to keep digging because I have to vent at some point. From reading this blog (and the various sites I’ve found through it) it appears that the US government has been, almost from the moment of its creation, been nothing but a cruel joke played on the American people and the world. I suppose the same can be said for all governments that have ever been created by man, yet we still keep forming them.
We’ll never know, of course, but perhaps the government SHOULDN’T sponsor those infrastructures. After all, what has it yielded? Runaway population growth, extermination of populations (as Maggie alluded to), enslavement to the technological (guilty!) and the exhaustion of resources. Without it, there would be far fewer people on earth, and those that remained would be forced to solve their problems locally, without having to call across miles and continents for “Uncle Sam” to help. Conversely, “Uncle Sam” would be significantly hobbled in his attempt to exercise control Apparently we humans are still too ignorant to have the technology we have without using it to destroy each other and ourselves. Perhaps that fellow someone quoted a few weeks back about how the human race should stop reproducing and go quietly into extinction for it’s own sanity was on to something.
Ahhh, I feel a little better now…
The problem with despising representative governments for its flaws (and they are legion) is that if people are not governed by their own will, they will be governed by another’s will imposed upon them.
No State sounds swell, but there are always those ready to step into the vacuum.
That’s the thing, though. I don’t ‘despise representative government’.
These posts have been my attempt at verbalizing how I sometimes see libertarian theories playing out. I meant them in a halfway sarcastic way, borne of frustration that builds up.
To go back to the discussion about irrational beliefs, I would prefer to believe that we can make representative government work, but it isn’t easy sometimes.
“No State sounds swell, but there are always those ready to step into the vacuum.”
Precisely, which is why I’m extremely wary of those who talk of revolution, upheaval and ‘guillotine fodder.’
Gerard Casey in his book “Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State” actually devotes an entire section toward why exactly representative government, by its very definition, cannot possibly work.
He did an interview on the Tom Woods podcast where he explains this as well if you are not interested in the book.
http://www.schiffradio.com/pg/jsp/verticals/archive.jsp?dispid=310&pid=64445
Several sources of further information:
On Infrastructure: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation
Walter Block also wrote a very lovely book called “The Privatization of Roads and Highways” which actually goes further explaining how this might work in a stateless context.
“The Enterprise of Law” by Bruce Benson does much to show that what most people consider to be legitimate law (law against property crimes) primarily formed before the establishment of monopolistic state law. He also wrote another book which expanded on one of this one’s main themes: The privatization of police services. That title is called “To Serve and Protect”.
The Benson books utterly shattered my worldview with respect to the state, and I am all the better for it!
Yeah, because there’s no meaningful distinction to be made between the US and its allies and Nazi Germany and WWII-era Russia. (rollleyes)
I was trying to hearken back to a comment made a few weeks (Months? I can’t quite remember) back with regards to WWII. I do not wish to call anyone out, therefore I’m not saying who made that comment.
There may have been a distinction then, but I think many here would argue there is no distinction now…
Lacking a Kristallnacht, or even the slightest hint of one, I’m calling BS.
Again I do not wish to call out another person here unless they remember what I’m referring to and choose to elaborate. Basically, it was in response to a comment I made a few weeks back asking if there was anything the US had done right in their eyes in the past century. A second person suggested vanquishing Nazi Germany, and it was the first individual’s consideration that WWII resulted in replacing a fully developed fascist state (Germany), with one that had not gotten there yet.
I’ll also repeat I didn’t like the implications then or now, but on the other hand I can see how the person arrived at that conclusion.
At this point, if you still wish to call BS, I think you would have to ask (publicly, I’m afraid) the person whose feelings I’m referencing and if they wish to elaborate.
And believe me, I don’t like the implications any more than you do.
I have to say your story shocked me to the core on NGOs, I mean I know some NGOs are not as pretty as appeared to be, but this is a new level of horror I must say.
The ones in Cambodia are at least this bad, and possibly worse. I would love to hear from a sex worker who could share a firsthand account of Cambodian “rescue”.
The opposition to sex workers goes to great lengths to harm both active workers, and indeed, anyone who associates with them (as in this case).
Historically, those who participate in Morals Crusades (and these days that includes anti-smokers, gun control advocates, and global warming activists) tend to be either small minded, power hungry twits, or fully mad. And if Robert Louis Taylor’s biography of Carry Nation is any indication, the nuts are better company.
Okay, I’m going to use plain English here. These “rescue” NGO operators are nothing but sadistic pigs, who, in their next incarnation, deserve to come back as a flea on a monkey’s ass. Because if they are gonna act like parasites, they should take the true form of a parasite.
I’ll pray to Devi for Molli’s success in her endevours.
What did that poor monkey ever do to you?
Fair enough. May they come back as a flea with no monkey’s ass in sight 😀
This is a really harrowing personal testimony and deserves to be given much wider exposure. Utterly appalling.
Shared.
The problem is, the mainstream media are still eating up the sex trafficking mythos (and its related mythos that “NGOs are good”) like a bunch of starving hounds on a pork chop. I’ve challenged the sex trafficking mythos on bulletin boards and various news sites on the Web, but I don’t know how much good it does when mainstream TV networks, newspapers, magazines and large aggregator sites are spewing a constant stream of lies about both topics at viewers, mostly out of ignorance and lack of real interest in the topic. This particular story very effectively points out the reality of anti-trafficking NGOs and deserves to be heard very widely. I wonder if there is some way to optimize its usefulness is dispelling ignorance?
The majority dislikes prostitution, they hear only what they want to hear.
More brilliance from Molli Desi, thank you for writing it. The indianexpress article (First Instance Report) about women rescued from brothels on GB road was also awful in terms of what it reveals of NGO activities.
Thank you Molli for telling us your story, and Maggie for hosting it.
It would be good to think that it gets a wide airing, and that so many people would change their views.
Molli, you are an extraordinary woman, and a credit not only to your profession, but also humanity. I hope the truth about what these “rescuers” are doing to people like you will eventually crack through people’s idea of what human sexuality should be, and there are worse things in life than allowing their husbands and boyfriends to “cheat.”
What’s the name of this NGO? Kindly e-mail me the name, if possible and if Molli worried about a defamation suit. Thanks.
I will email her this morning to ask, but it’s totally up to her whether she wants to reveal it (assuming she knows it).
They made you sing and dance for white women? Without paying you, while keeping you prisoner?
This entire story is awful, but this detail really offends me. Not sure why, but that is so disrespectful.
I also note the irony: they kidnapped you to keep you from being kidnapped, and they forced you into prostitution (the night security and his friends) in order to “save” you from it.
I mean, what’s more degrading: kidnapping and interring a woman who has friends and a support system (the orphanage) that cares about her, and forcing her to suck off the night guards in order to escape, or an honest exchange of sex without coercion between consenting adults, where the man gets his needs met and the woman is in control?
It really says something that the best person in the NGO detention house (the staff, not the prisoners) was the fucking night guard. I mean, Jesus Christ.
The first thing that staggers me Molli,is how very similar this sounds to the reality of well known Duncroft, and even more to a forgotten hellhole called Enderleigh in the 1970s
It triggers memories.
…and the similarity between your account and accounts I have received from inmates and former staff members of “centres for supported independent living” (a new term for detention I think) for adults deemed to be vulnerable that are operating and expanding right now.
But that is not all…recently I heard it publicly announced that we will finally get to grips with the sexual exploitation of children now a person I know to have been heavily involved in covering up and facilitating serious institutional and other abuse of children is about to become involved.
I cannot prove what I know, or I would have explained it to the police long ago but I can’t forget what I know either, and I certainly cannot factor it out of my own attitude.
It is clear to me that the only “rescue” to be offered to vulnerable and exploited children will involve taking them out of the frying pan and throwing them into the fire while everybody holds junkets to congratulate themselves on what a wonderful job they are doing, while the souls of “rescued” children bleed out.
If this is all we have to offer innocent children who are owed the very best we can give them, god help “rescued” adults.
These same monsters actually laugh, pose and have great craic out of lying and fighting to destroy other women’s lives.
I cry myself to sleep trying to figure out a way to at least slow them down.
This is horrifying. Thanks for sharing Molli- it’s unbelievable you and other women have to go through all this, and here in the west we are still lapping up the NGOs’ lies. So basically their income depends on trafficking, if no-one’s been trafficked they abduct the most marginalised (migrants and sex workers) and claim they’re trafficked. And if they can’t claim they’re trafficked, they use the slogan “at risk” of trafficking. It’s so awful 🙁 The NGOs are the real abductors and traffickers. And sadly the donors believe them because they can never talk to the women- like how you were locked away in case you told the donors what was really going on. I can’t really express how II feel over the internet, this is just so bad.
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