LEWISTON — Eighteen years ago, journalist Ruchira Gupta uncovered the horrors of sex-trafficking in India.
Girls as young as 9 were kidnapped, drugged and forced into prostitution. Some stayed because they were beaten and brutalized. Others stayed because they had nowhere else to go and no help if they got away.
Gupta’s documentary, “The Selling of Innocents,” earned her an Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism. But she couldn’t walk away from what she’d seen and she couldn’t ignore the victims. So Gupta started Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an organization to help women and girls at risk of being sold for sex, and she started talking. To the U.N. General Assembly. To the U.S. Senate. To anyone who would take sex-trafficking seriously.
On Tuesday, she spoke at Bates College in Lewiston.
“These were little girls,” Gupta told a crowd of more than 75 students and community members. “It was inhuman. It was dehumanizing just to know about it.”
Gupta is in Maine as part of the Justice for Women Lecture Series established by the University of Maine School of Law. She spoke earlier this week at Deering High School in Portland and Colby College in Waterville. She is scheduled to speak Thursday at the law school, the capstone of her Maine tour. With 670 people registered to attend, reservations have been closed.
At Bates, Gupta showed a clip from her documentary and spoke about sex-trafficking, not only in India, but also in the United States and Maine.
“Same as if a pimp stands outside a high school in Maine and recruits somebody because she’s looking for love or she’s looking for drugs or she’s running away from her family. Could be any reason,” she said. “He recruits her, then he pimps her for the purpose of sexual exploitation in a hotel room to a john.”
Gupta said she heard of it happening at Deering High School, where she spoke with students on Monday.
“It’s right here. It’s in this place,” she said.
Gupta talked about her experience of helping victims, many of whom used the term “survivor,” and said they had no choice in selling their bodies. Often, victims have been kidnapped and sold, prostituted by family members or lured into prostitution with drugs, alcohol or attention, she said.
Gupta spoke of the need not only for prosecution of sex-trafficking, but also for victim assistance, including immigration help for those brought from one country to another, education and safe housing — particularly in Maine, where there are virtually no options but jail or juvenile detention for prostitutes.
She also spoke of the need for victims to talk to each other, to talk with others and to build solidarity.
“A (Maine) survivor had told me, she said she had felt more empowered and supported and encouraged because I had been brought in to speak,” Gupta said. “Like, that’s the best gift, you know? The (Portland) mayor gave me the keys to the city, but I think the survivor gave me the keys to her heart.”
Gupta said she hoped her tour through Maine would encourage greater discussions of sex-trafficking in the state and what can be done to help victims.
“If that happens and the government begins to think about it, then by the next time I come, maybe there is such a shelter (for victims). That would be a huge victory,” she said. “That would mean a lot. That would mean the world to me, that I had been an influence.”
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