Ruchira Addresses Students at IIT Delhi

Ruchira Addresses Students at IIT Delhi

I can see there are a lot of cool men in the audience, which is very cool. I’m Ruchira Gupta the
founder of Apne Aap.

First of all I would like to start by thanking all of you for supporting our cause, for standing
up for a cause which is very, very, invisible in India, and for having the courage to organize,
in your campus, to speak up on an issue which is so invisible. So first of all thank you.
IIT Delhi is one among several colleges and several student associations which has joined in our
campaign in the last one year. It was once a topic shrouded in silence but now it has been picked
up by many American colleges as well. So, what you are doing is part of a global movement
which we are hoping to go and go and go until we see a change in our society.

Why should this issue be taken up? There are three million women and girls who are prostituted
in India right now, even as I speak. The average age of entry into prostitution is nine to thirteen
years old. Every girl who is locked up in a brothel is locked up for five years at a very minimum.
On an average, that girl is raped by ten customers every night. When the girl is bought by a
procurer from the village, he pays something like three thousand rupees to five thousand rupees
to her parents. When he takes her to the brothels of GB road in Delhi, or in Bombay or Kolkata
he sells her to the pimp from seven thousand rupees to ten thousand rupees and the customer
pays 200 to 300 rupees every time he has to rape her. The girl gets nothing for the first five years
when she is kept in the brothel; she is just simply used and abused, used and abused. She is
normally kept locked up in a small five by five room with iron bars on the window, trotted out
when other customers are available; otherwise the brothel manager and pimp make sure that she
has no freedom to do anything else. She is made to have a couple of children in the first two
years when she is pushed into the brothel so that the brothel manager can use her affection for
her child to control her. The brothel manager normally tells her that now that you have a child,
now that you have been raped you will be of no value to your family or to your home, you
cannot be married and you will face the stigma of someone who has lost her virginity. On top of
that once you have a child, the brothel manager says that if you go away, we will keep your child
hostage; and we will keep your child away from the girls of the brothel. If she doesn’t run away
they only let her be with her child once a day for two or three hours so that affection for the child
remains. But they will control the girl by saying ‘we will beat up your child or starve your child.’
Along with that the brothel manager also makes sure that the girl is made dependent on drugs
and alcohol in the first two or three years. The girl is very, very, dependent on the drugs and
alcohol because she obviously doesn’t want to be raped every night. To face the trauma she
wants to create an out of body experience and to do that she very easily takes to the drugs and
alcohol. So between the dependency on the drugs and alcohol, between the repeated rapes and
beatings and the fact that she has to have a couple of children in the first two or three years, the
girl is completely imprisoned psychologically and physically. Even after five years in the brothel
she doesn’t know how to go back. When the brothel manger says ok you have a little more

freedom, you get half of what you earned, you can go out and stand on the streets to attract
customers, you can go to the shops in the neighborhood with what you earn; but at that point, the
girl doesn’t really know where to go to, she is so traumatized, she is so subjected to the abuse
and imprisoned in the mind that she doesn’t go very far. She sticks to the streets where the
brothels are, waiting for customers. That’s when an organization like Apne Aap or a tourist or an
activist approaches her and says “don’t you want to be doing something else?” She says no;
because she doesn’t even know that another life is possible after five years of abuse. She doesn’t
even trust that another life is possible after this abuse. She doesn’t even see a road back home.

In those five years she tries to eke out an existence, keep half of what she earns, give something
to the brothel manager. Out of the half that she, she get deeper and deeper into debt because from
this half the brothel manager says: “You have to give us money for your daughters upkeep, your
son’s upkeep, you have to pay for your own make up, you have to pay for the bed that you lie
on where you service the customers, and you have to pay for your clothes, your food, any other
expenses, medical expenses included.”

By this time the girl, who’s become a woman in the brothel also picks up many, many diseases,
ranging from sexually transmitted diseases; to jaundice, to tuberculosis, to insomnia, to HIV
AIDS. And of course she suffers from malnourishment; of course she suffers from drug and
alcohol dependency - so she needs medical treatment all the time. And on top of that she has to
face violence when she is alone with a client. Because many of these clients and customers who
come to the brothels are coming not just to buy sex, they are coming to buy domination. So when
they buy the girl they are very often violent with her; they stub cigarette butts out on her, push
bottles up her vagina, beat her, stab her. There are incidents after incidents that have been related
to me by girls inside brothels, apart from this list of things; so they also need treatment for the
physical violence as well as for the psychosocial trauma. And the same money that the brothel
manager allows them to keep is used up for all this. The pimp and the brothel manager keep
accounts of all of this; the girls have completely lost count in the last five years that they have
been in the brothel, even if they have ever learned how to count. So they go by whatever figures
the brothel manager tells them, this is what you owe to the brothel, this is what you earn and
they have no sense. It goes on for four or five years until they turn 20 to 25. Then they are 20-25,
as they grow older (and this is old age in the brothel system), their looks begin to change. They
begin to look like cardboard creatures, caricatures of their very selves who were standing on the
roads. Like mannequins because they have been so used and abused that they lose their beauty
and their innocence very fast; they have skin diseases, they have hollow eyes and their hands
are shaking. So their attraction for the customer comes down. And there are very few customers
who want to buy the older women who are prostituted– these are women who are in their late
20s. If they can’t earn, the brothel manager doesn’t let them eat, she even tells them the bed is
too expensive for them to sleep on, she threatens to kick them out of the brothel; and then she
starts telling them that the only way they can stay on in the brothel is if they put their daughter
into prostitution, if they replace themselves with their daughters. That’s when these women

begin to approach organizations like Apne Aap. That’s when they tell us that we want to protect
our daughters, whatever has happened to us has happened, but can you do something to protect
our daughters? And that is when an organization like Apne Aap actually walks into the brothel
and says yes we can; we start a community classroom to prepare their daughters for school and
that’s our entry point into the brothel system and into the red light districts. By enrolling their
daughters into community classrooms we begin to talk to the women. When they begin to see
a change in their daughters they begin to think that a change is possible for themselves and then
they say ok can something be done for ourselves? - Because they are facing the prospect of being
thrown out of the brothels, onto the sidewalk. So that’s when we start organizing them, first as
a mothers group, then as a women’s group and then finally as a self empowerment group which
has access to some saving, some loans, some banks accounts, some education, job training and
hopefully the ability to start a small business.

Apne Aap is starting 146 such groups; we’ve reached out to more than 10,000 women over
the years. But there are there million women and girls still out there and this is an official
government figure that says three million women and girls prostituted in our country right now.
And when I’m talking about three million and the average age is nine to thirteen you can imagine
what happens to these children. Also the average number of times a girl in a brothel or women
in a brothel has to provide sex to a customer is ten. So if you multiply three million into ten that
means thirty million rapes are being committed in our country, every night, with impurity.

The reason that this impurity happens is for two reasons: One is that these girls are from poor
families, they come from remote areas or villages in Bihar where there is a flood or famine,
or from some parts just outside Delhi. The second is many of them are low caste. They are
segregated even inside the villages and towns that they are picked up from. They don’t have
access to education, the school is far away. If they go to school they are teased mostly because
of their caste. They don’t have the legal protection that you and I would have if we went to a
police station. The police officer simply turns them away and says this is your destiny. They
don’t even have the self confidence to go the police station very often if a trafficker or procurer
tries to pick them up. They don’t have access to job training; they are told this is your destiny to
be a cleaner or to be a porter or whatever their caste make up is. They don’t have any land; they
are constantly being evicted from where they live. So when a trafficker comes into the villages
preying and looking around for girls, he goes into such areas. He takes advantage of the fact that
they are the girls and the family already considers them low value, we have already seen that
in the movie undesirables which I was talking about; the fact that they are poor, so the pressure
on their family is a lot. The father thinks that the girl is a liability that he would have to pay a
dowry, so why not let her go for a job in the big city or even prostitution- because the father
thinks that at least she will get two meals a day. The third is, as I mentioned to you, they are low
caste and there is an inevitability to their fate.

What happens to them is invisible and what happens to them has been normalized. Because we

think there are always going to be some poor women who will be sexually available because
they are so poor and they receive food in return. They can’t get jobs, don’t have any training so
maybe prostitution is the best option for them. But what we have to remember is that nobody
chooses to be born poor, nobody chooses to be born a girl and nobody chooses to be born low
caste. Prostitution for most of these girls and women is an absence of choice, not a choice.

On the other hand why is there this impurity? - The fact that these 30 million rapes are being
committed every night. It’s almost like many of you must have heard the term genocide. What
is happening to these girls in and women is gendercide.
Thirty million, if these numbers were in any state and so many people were killed, massacred,
there would be a war or global uproar about it. But because, as I mentioned earlier, that these
girls and women are low caste and poor, they’re invisible. But also those who are buying them –
they have choice. The girls are prostituted because of absence of choice but the perpetrators, the
Johns, the clients, they have choice. Because they have at least some income, from somewhere,
which they are using to pay for the girl, they can choose to buy her or not to buy her; but it is
their choice that is considered inevitable, that men will be men. And this has been normalized
also through a tradition from hundreds of years in our society. It is an insult to most men, and to
all you today who have organized this event, shows that it is an insult to every single person in
this auditorium. That thinking men will be men and that men have this unbridled sexual desire
which they cannot control to go on buy girls- It’s not true. But because we are not standing up
and saying this that it’s not true and this should not be perpetrated in our name, those that are
either making a profit from the sex industry or those that actually buyers themselves who are
saying men will be men are speaking on behalf of all men. And these people are definitely the
minority but they have the louder voice. And because of them prostitution has become a demand
driven industry. Prostitution is a system which is formed of supply and demand. On supply side
are vulnerable at risk girls and women who have no choice but on the demand side are buyers
that have some choice and the business, which definitely has a range of choices. The business
is composed, of course, of a whole chain of people; from the of the local village procurer who
gives 2000 rupees to the parents and says I‘ll marry your daughter, I’ll get her a job in a big city
or she is starving and would be happier as a prostitute, the transporter who then takes her from
the procurer to the big brothel cities, the middle man that takes the girls from the transporter and
takes her to the pimps. The pimps who negotiate the price of the girl depending on her beauty
and age; if she is fair skinned a higher price, if she is younger a higher price, if she is voluptuous
a higher price. These are things defined which we found out through surveys that we have
conducted among guys that buy sex and brothel managers and brothel owners.

Brothel manager then keeps her locked up for five years and then the cycle starts and after five
years she is allowed half of what she earns and she is pushed out onto the street. And this cycle
starts and the trajectory for a prostituted girl is bondage slave, earning half of what she earns,
getting into debt. Mortality rates are high in red light area from violence, from murders, from
starvation and diseases and women usually die by the time they are 45 or 50 years old, they don’t

survive to old age. Which is why Apne Aap has launched its campaign called ‘Cool Men Don’t
Buy Sex.’ Because we believe that the new India does not stand for buying girls. We do believe
in sex, we enjoy sex but we want to eroticize equality. We believe in sex with collaboration,
with participation, not sex with domination. This is the message that we want the young people
of India to take forward. Just like many years ago we had to take on the issue of sati. You know
sati used to happen long ago but there were some young men who had to stand up against it at
some point and say, ‘We are against the fact that widows are not allowed to remarry. We are for
widows to remarry. We are against sati.’ And the culture changed. Today we again have a huge
challenge in front of us as the inequality of girls and women manifests itself in many different
ways in our society and our country. But every time we take a stand on this, every time we do
something to change the level of inequality, we create a little bit of a more equal world

Even by organizing this event today you have taken a step in creating a little bit more equality.
Because by doing this event, by discussing such a topic, you are raising the consciousness, you
are making the issue visible. Which is why I started the conversation by saying, you know it’s
interesting [there are so many men in the audience]. I want to thank you for that for making this
issue visible, it takes courage. When I have a conversation like this about sex, about domination,
all of us feel uncomfortable. But we also know that is this exactly something we don’t want to.

So many young men in the room obviously you want to change the world with professional
degrees, professional status as we grow- there were many things you didn’t like when you were
growing up. Think about what you would like to do differently from what your father was doing.
Because our grandfathers also did the same thing; when the British Empire existed in India, our
grandfathers thought this is not normal to be ruled, why should we be ruled by the British? As
so we joined a movement to overrule the British. It is just takes a little of courage and courage is
contagious.

You are part of the movement, sometimes you may not realize it when are studying and working
into the night, but you are part of the movement. And movement itself is mushrooming so what
you’re doing is supporting other students your age in other countries and your country. The
same events, the same issues have been discussed in Kolkata, national institutional law schools,
social science schools, cutting across all nations and sections. You are already different from the
generation before you from your fathers and uncles when the issue was invisible. I’m going to
stop now and open up the floor for questions.