When a victim of trafficking is rescued, the reports often describe in detail the physical torture, the sex and the violence that was forced on her. But not where she came from, nor where she is going. Now that she has been rescued, what does life have on offer? “Trafficking is an invisible crime,” said Malini Bhattacharya, chairperson of the West Bengal women’s commission. No camera captures the moment a person...

A gang that kidnapped minor girls to force them into prostitution has been detected at the intervention of the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights. Seven people have been arrested for abduction and child prostitution and four minor girls, who had been kidnapped from Sultanpuri in Delhi, have been rescued. On taking up investigations into the case, the DCPCR found that young girls were kidnapped from Delhi's Sultanpuri area in...

Decades of violent insurgency in Assam have forced many women, including homemakers, to take to prostitution after their husbands or close family members were killed or maimed in terror attacks. The busting of a sex racket here bears testimony to this. During her questioning by city police, Pinky, 25, a divorcee, told police she was forced into prostitution to make both ends meet. "She did it under compulsion and her...

We urgently need legislation that specifically addresses child abuse.  The Indian Penal Code does not spell out the definition of child abuse as a specific offence Even the Juvenile Justice Act does not specifically address the issue of child sexual abuse The government's decision to introduce a set of guidelines for service providers in the tourism sector in a move to prevent a repeat of incidents like the rape of a Russian...

When a problem is big and tends to profit a powerful group, there’s a time-honoured temptation to sweep it under the rug by assuming it’s natural and inevitable. This was true of slavery until the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, and of colonialism until the contagion of independence movements in the 20th century. Now these same forces are at work in attitudes toward the global and national realities of...