Undercover Reports:
India’s Human Trafficking: ‘Slave Brides Sold like Goats, Treated like Garbage’
…Thousands of girls and women in India are sold into marriage and often face a lifetime of abuse and hardship
*70 year old men buy Underage girls as young as 12, Traffickers re-sell victims in the Black Market
*’Traffickers under the cover of darkness kidnap women from other states, selling them to men in Haryana’-INVESTIGATION
*”I am a victim of Human Trafficking. I was sold at 12 years. My buyer was an old man of 70 years. I gave birth to a baby. After he died, I was put up for sale again by the Trafficking syndicate. He didn’t feed me. He’d take me to the fields and stuff my mouth with mud and then beat me”-ADITI AADHYA SAANVI confess in tears
*BY GEORGE ELIJAH OTUMU/Executive Editor &Group Managing Director, Naija Standard Newspaper Inc USA
THE ATTROCITIES committed by a set of syndicate involved in Human Trafficking in India has been busted by a series of undercover investigation conducted by our reporter to track, expose the ‘modus operandi’ of these criminals hiding away from plain sights so that the long hands of the law will not reach them. This sham is now being busted by the revelation of one of the victims, Aditi Aadhya Saanvi.
This victim, Aditi was sold, she was just 12 years old. Her buyer was a man in his 70s.
Marriage and a baby quickly followed in quick succession. But, three years later, the man died and Aditi was again put up for sale. This time, her buyer was a horrific abuser.
“He didn’t feed me. He’d take me to the fields and stuff my mouth with mud and then beat me,” she says.
Aditi is one of thousands of India’s slave brides – girls and women sold into marriage, often destined for a lifetime of abuse and hardship, as this 101 East documentary reveals.
*A dangerous demand for brides
In India, sex-selective abortions and female infanticide, due to a preference for male babies, has created one of the most severe gender imbalances in the world.
Now, the shortage of women is generating a dangerous demand for brides among men desperate to marry, especially in states like Haryana, which has one of the country’s worst gender ratios.
Traffickers are stepping in to meet this demand, kidnapping women from other states and selling them to men in Haryana.
A survey of 10,000 households in this northern state found more than 9,000 married women had come from other states.
It was discovered that some women living in villages in Haryana have been sold as many as three times.
The villagers call them “Paros”, a derogatory term implying they’ve been purchased.
Another victim, Arushi Advika was trafficked to Haryana when she was just 10 years old. She says an older girl from a village near her family’s home in the north-eastern state of Assam drugged and kidnapped her.
“I was made to do field work, cut grass, feed cows, do all the work. I cried for a year. I was in captivity for four years,” she says.
She says she was then sold into marriage.
“I couldn’t run away or bring my life to an end. There was nobody whom I could ask for help,” she says.
“All people in Haryana are disrespectful towards women like us. Everybody says we have no self-respect … and that we are sold like cows and goats. We feel very bad when we hear all this because we are human beings and we belong to India, just like them,” she says.
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