Profile of Ruchira Gupta

Ruchira Gupta, Founder and President of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, has worked for 25 years for the rights of women and girls’, advocating against sex trafficking. With the help of 22 women in prostitution, Ruchira founded Apne Aap in 2002. Today the organization touches the lives of thousands of women across India.

 

Ruchira’s most significant contribution to civil society, government and multi-lateral institutions has been to highlight the link between trafficking and prostitution and to lobby with policy makers to shift the blame from the victim to the perpetrator.

 

Ruchira testified in the United States Senate before the passage of Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 2000. Governor (then, Senator) Sam Brownback noted, “her testimony in the US Senate instilled in the mind of my fellow Senators the pressing battle to protect the 700,000 women and children worldwide, if not more, who are forced into the sex trade every year. As a result, I introduced legislation that would become the first law in the United States seeking to combat the forcible trafficking of persons.”

 

Ruchira has lobbied with other activists with the United Nations during the development of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children resulting in the first UN instrument to address demand in the context of trafficking in Article 9, of the Protocol. She has addressed the UN General Assembly twice on the subject.

 

Ruchira is presently working to petition the Indian Government for a change in the Indian anti-trafficking law, Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) that would institute more severe punishment for buyers of prostituted sex and traffickers who profit from it along with removal of clauses that punish women and girls. She has already testified to the Standing Committee of Parliament on the subject and launched the 5c (a clause to punish buyers and traffickers) campaign to bring changes in the current ITPA.

 

Ruchira has been written about in the following books:

  • All that is Bitter and Sweet by Ashely Judd (Random House, 2011)
  • Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn, (Knopf, 2009)
  • Revisiting India by Ramin Jehanbegloo (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • Sold by Patricia McCormick (Hyperion, 2006)
  • Adventure Divas by Holly Morris (Villard, 2005)
  • Ten Thousand Miles without a Cloud by Sun Shunyun (Harper Collins, 2003)
  • That Takes Ovaries by Rivka Solomon (Three Rivers Press, 2002)
  • Breaking the Earthenware Jar by Ruth Hayward (UNICEF, 2000)
  • In the Name of Ram by Abid Surti (1993)