Taking liberties
Lured by the promise of a decent wage and a better life, girls from India's Assam state are being sold into a life of slavery and abuse in the nation's capital. Words and pictures by Gethin Chamberlain
Rabina Khatun could have had no idea that her great adventure would end in rape.
She was a trusting girl, so when a trafficker came to her and promised her riches beyond her wildest dreams, she was inclined to believe her. All she had to do, the older woman told her, was go to work in the Indian capital, Delhi, for a year as a maid. So Rabina, all of 14, left her village in the Lakhimpur district of northeast Assam and got on a train.
What she did not, and could not, know, was that the trafficker had sold her to an agent in Delhi who would sell her on again. Rabina had become a modern-day slave.
It is a vast and growing trade. Thousands of girls from India's remote northeast have been lured to Delhi with promises of riches, only to be sold into slavery. Many are the daughters of low-paid tea pickers who cannot afford to keep them. They are trafficked by agents who can earn anything from 4,000 rupees (HK$520) to 10,000 rupees for each girl they bring in. Often, the traffickers live in the same villages as the girls.
At least 100,000 girls like Rabina are believed to be kept locked up behind closed doors in Delhi alone. Nationwide, Indian government figures show 126,321 trafficked children were rescued from domestic service in 2011-12, up nearly 27 per cent year on year.
The US State Department's latest report on trafficking estimates that up to 65 million people in India are engaged in forced labour. It says there is an increasing number of job placement agencies luring children into "forced labour, including domestic servitude, under false promises of employment". And it notes that 20 per cent of domestic workers report that they have suffered sexual abuse by employers or agencies.
The demand for these workers is being driven by the rapid expansion of India's middle class, a small but growing proportion of the country's population who have money to burn. These are the people who can afford to pay as much as 60,000 rupees to a placement agency to acquire a live-in maid - and who often regard the possession of a number of domestic servants as a status symbol.