Ashley Judd’s Journal from India, Day 16

Apr 16th, 2007 3:00 PM UTC
By Jenny Eaton Dyer, DATA

Actor and humanitarian Ashley Judd, board member of Population Services International (PSI) and Global Ambassador for YouthAIDS, addressed women’s empowerment and wrote daily posts for the ONE Blog, during her March 2007 travels through India. Today, she posts her final entry from the trip.

Monday, April 16

Of course, since 2002 I have met many sex slaves, their stories full of cascading horrors. But for some reason, Natasha’s really, really bothered me, and I’ve had a hard time coming to the page to put it all down. All I can do is try. (Like Saint Theresa of Kolkotta said, when chided for trying to feed all the poor in India, “My God only asks that I try.”)

Natasha sat in a large chair, looking very small, frail, gorgeous, groomed. Her hair was long and lovely in a Veronica Lake type wave. She was soft spoken yet clear. Her English was pretty good, which further complicated my ability to accept her entrapment. The camera was set up to protect her identity, and in post production her voice will be replaced to guarantee her anonymity. Her life is at risk if her owner discovers what she has done: speak with us about the details of her life as a sex slave.

At about 18 (she is now about 21 or 22, many Indians can only approximate their age), Natasha traveled to Mumbai. She had relatives there. Her luggage was lost and there was a lot of confusion about her arrival. She managed to end up at girlfriend’s apartment to spend the night as she sorted things out. Her friend was going out for the evening and invited her; she was happy to tag along. The friend took Natasha to a hotel. They went up to a guest room. A man was there. The friend smiled and left the room. To her bewilderment, Natasha realized she had been left there to have sex with the man. Fearing physical violence and feeling trapped with no way out, she did. When the man let her go, she went downstairs. Her friend was waiting. She slapped her face. The friend said, “Welcome to the garbage bin.”

Natasha told me she is in hell and she cannot get out. Several times, she talked about the dumpster she was thrown in, how she cannot climb out of it. In a disastrous piece of timing, her relatives, whom she had been looking for, found her via her friend just as she was leaving the hotel. They put together why she was such a nice hotel, and immediately rejected and disowned her for a whore. She had no where to go but back to her friend’s apartment where her fate in the sex industry was sealed. Simultaneously, her relatives were ensuring this information got back home. She was swiftly, irrevocably blackballed and ostracized by her family there.

Natasha’s story is a complex puzzle that is a combination of truly being trapped and the perception of being trapped. That makes it hard to describe; it also makes my dismay deeper. Here are some questions I asked, and her answers:

Ashley: Why didn’t you then, why don’t you now, just go to the police and explain what happened? Why don’t you tell them about your life now?

Natasha: They would be the first to rape me, she said with a sad smile. Then they would simply hand me back over, and there would be more trouble when I was returned.

A: Why don’t you secretly, however long it takes, stash away a little bit of money and just sneak away, go somewhere else in India, start over? American women move on their own by the tens of thousands each year (yes, I asked a lot of dumb questions from a western perspective…but I think we all would have).

N: Wherever I go, I will always be THIS. I will see a former client who will reveal my past, and I will never be accepted anywhere as anything but this. And, I have to continue to earn the same amount of money I earn now, my family depends on me.

This is so troubling. In a country of 1.2 billion, she has sufficiently internalized her victimization and the mob’s fear tactics to believe where ever she may go, a former client would call her out, and she’d be put back into the trade, but without knowing what that situation would be like…it might be worse, for example, than her current situation.

The money part…shockingly, the family that was so quick and remorseless in disowning her as a whore is glad to take the money she earns as one. Natasha supports 11 members of her extended family in her home village. So, even if she were somehow to believe she could break free, she would only do so if she could immediately begin earning what she does now, a rare feat for any woman in India.

A: Do your clients use condoms?
N: Yes, the boss makes sure they understand they must. I am tested for HIV every alternate month.

Ah, yes, it’s not called organized crime for nothing. A healthy sex worker is a better earner.

A: Has anyone amongst you tested positive?
N: Yes.

A: What happened? Did she get treatment?
N: I don’t know. She disappeared.

A: Where do you think you will end up? Is it your fear when you begin earning less you’ll be dumped at a brothel in Kamathipura?
N: I can’t think about that.

This answer was very chilling. We talked about enough for me to grasp what she meant: “I can’t go there,” in the way we refer to things so scary, like our dog being hit by a car or a child dying, that we simply cannot allow our minds to go there. Natasha has no idea how long her owner will keep her, and what comes next, she is too terrified to even contemplate.

I asked questions about her daily life. I wish I had asked more; does she have an identity card? Does she get herself to the hotels, or does the pimp drive her? These things, I do know:

Natasha lives with 10 other women in a 3 bedroom apartment, all of whom are in her predicament. She is on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She never knows when the call will come; she lives knowing at any second she will be sent to have sex with a strange man, and she must do whatever, however grotesque, repugnant, painful, and degrading, he wants. Her owner is someone she has never seen. In a perverse twist on “Charlie’s Angels,” she hears his voice on the phone as he bosses and threatens her. The pimp is the day to day manager of her life, checking on her, spying, supervising, and collecting money. Her clients include Indians and foreigners. I asked her if she has been to the Taj, my hotel, and she smiled. “Oh yes, many, many times.” I felt sick.

The men who buy her want sex, all types of it, but a few just want company, perhaps someone to take shopping or to dinner. Those men are a relief for her, the only answered prayer in her life. Her owner pressures her to keep herself up. It was another bitter irony; this beautiful woman is forced to maintain her beauty and keep up appearances for a job in which she is enslaved.

The money she earns is taken away; a small bit is doled back out to her. She sends all of it home.

Sensing the destroyed condition of her soul, I asked her about her dreams, hoping to help her reconnect with even a shred of one. As a child, she wanted to be a homeopathic doctor. She is literate; I asked if she would ever pick up a book on the subject. The answer was no, and there was a sense she was indulging me for asking such a far fetched question. First of all, she explained she does not have the freedom to do so, but more importantly, it would be a pointless, wasted effort. Natasha doesn’t have enough of herself left at this stage to even merit searching for and attempting to engage with the part of her that long ago was interested in medicine. In a word, Natasha is hopeless.

I asked her why she was talking to me if she was hopeless that any change or improvement could be brought to her life. She was real clear on this point: She begged me to do something for the others. She was risking her life by talking to me, and she pleaded with me to do something, anything for the others. They have nothing, not even the education she has. For some reason I asked her if she would help the others learn to read, and in fact, she said she has been doing this. That is the one tiny hope she has left, teaching a few of the women who live with her to read, that it might benefit them somehow. I could picture her, soft spoken and gentle, teaching. In my mind’s eye, I saw the apartment, her sitting on the floor with a few women, moments stolen between the phone calls.

I then began to ask more about the others, and got the worst blow of all. I asked her how old is the oldest woman, how young is the youngest, with whom you share the apartment?

N: I am the oldest. The youngest is about 14.

A: What? 14? How long has she been there? When was she brought in? N: She was there when I got there 3 years ago. She was 11 when I arrived.

A: How old are the others? N: 14, 15, 16, around there.

A: You mean the 9 other sex slaves are minors? Children? N: Yes.

What does one say to that? How does one react?

My time with Natasha was coming to a close. The production company, posing as a sex client, had put feelers out to find someone like her. When she was sent, and discovered what we were really after, she said it had to go down as if she was being paid for sex so that nothing looked odd (we paid her flat rate of $350 US), and that she agreed to talk if we didn’t reveal her as our source and we did everything we could to help the others.

The next part for me was incredibly emotional. To know she was walking out of that room and back into her life was a pain the likes of which I have only felt a few times in my life, pain like walking away from 40 orphans in a well meaning but underfunded crèche in a destroyed South African slum. I am already crying as I write this, no wonder I have procrastinated for days. It is just so wrong, so wrong, so very, very wrong. I pulled her close to me and held her and seared myself into her eyes.

I said to her, “Will you believe there is hope for you?” N: No.

A: Natasha, can you believe there is any hope at all, any possibility of hope for you? N: No.

A: Natasha, can you believe, then, that I believe? When you are completely hopeless and despairing, will you remember me, can you believe that I believe?

She broke down. N: Yes. I will try, I will try. I will try to believe that you believe.

She left, emotional, crying, and in a hurry. The time for which we had paid was up, and she couldn’t be late without arousing suspicion.

***

PSI has special access to brothels it has worked hard to earn over the years. If we jeopardize it, we risk losing our unique ability to reach prostituted women, men, and children (and, just as importantly, those who pay for sex) with medical and reproductive information, services, products, empowerment and behavior change messages. Of course, as you can see in Mumbai, our access has allowed us to instigate and inspire sex workers by helping them found Sanghamitra, their own advocacy grassroots organization. By going in as an agency to protect health by preventing STD, HIV, and pregnancy, which we do well, we also are able to provide the psych/social support create change from within. The paradigm shift within the exploited is no trivial thing.

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