All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  Neelam, at fourteen, exclusively supported this family of five. From eight thirty a.m. until five p.m., six days a week, she worked sewing embroidery to earn 1,200 rupees a month, the equivalent of $27 U.S. (and one-tenth of what Natasha’s pimp charged each client). It was not nearly enough to feed them all; Neelam’s diet was supplemented through PSI’s nutrition program, which provides families in need with rice, wheat, sugar, lentils, cooking oil, and nuts. After work she had a half-hour break, at which time she then went to night school until nine p.m. Neelam was incredibly bright and eager to learn. English was her favorite subject, and she wanted to be a flight attendant. Her brother and sister were able to go to school, but this small child was at home each day only long enough to eat a little bit and to sleep. It dawned on me later that her baby sister’s hair was shiny and smooth because Neelam took care of it, as a mother would. But there was no one there to take care of Neelam’s hair.

  She told me she liked where she worked, she liked sewing. She had no idea that having a job was illegal at her age. She had no sense of our outrage. She had simply adapted, naturally, for the survival of the four who relied on her.

  Where Neelam was all gentle responsibility, her baby sister was all attitude. She told me she wanted to be a human rights lawyer when she grew up, to help poor people. I had no doubt she would be qualified, cut out for it, capable to the max. The question was, of course, could she make it out of the slum first? Girls like Neelam and Komal were exactly the kids who were trafficked. Easily, so easily, a man in the neighborhood with financial pressures of his own could invite them for a snack and whisk them to a brothel. Easily, a male relative could show up and say they were his “responsibility,” and because he himself was poor beyond poor or he came from a state where child marriage was still common, he could sell them to a pimp, arrange a marriage for the dowry money, dispose of them.

  In talking about our dreams, Neelam said all she wanted was to make others happy. Life had taught her, so young, that that was her purpose. But I encouraged her to read, to play, to talk to an imaginary friend, to find something, anything, that could be just hers inside of herself. I explained that unless she built up a sense of her own self, she would have nothing to actually give the others she clearly loved so much. It was not lost on me, even then, that I was in a way talking to my younger self, offering her the lessons it had taken me so many years to learn.

  At the end of our visit, the girls looked at each other expectantly and then asked me to bring them home with me to America, saying they wanted to live with me. I realized they had planned this moment. They had coordinated their request, maybe they had even rehearsed it a few times prior to my arrival. I imagined my own sister and me as little girls, collaborating in an effort to have our way about something.

  I was having a flurry of fiercely competing thoughts. I wanted to say “yes” although I knew it was not practical. I could not adopt them simply because in this moment I did not want to endure the pain of seeing their faces fall when I denied them their birthright, a childhood free from hunger and want, a guaranteed education—things I obviously could provide. But what about the real complexities of international adoption? Indian bureaucracy? My husband? Did I have the right in this instant to say “yes” simply because they had asked, when I couldn’t guarantee it would be allowed, and I would be making a huge unilateral decision within my marriage?

  In fact, I believe that I did have the right to say yes. Just as I, as a little girl, had had the right to hear “yes” when I begged a variety of adults to adopt me, to take custody of me, to give me safe harbor away from a life that included terrible abuse. But those adults, even grandparents who cherished me, had said “no.” And now, so did I. In that moment, as I quietly turned down two vulnerable girls, I became the kind of adult I had sworn I would never be: a practical person constrained by “reality” who says no to little girls in pain, grief, and need, children who would go hungry and be unprotected when I walked out the door. It gutted me.

  Although I could not give them the “yes” they deserved to hear, I gave Neelam and Komal hugs, kisses, strokes, words of positive encouragement and reassurance as I thanked them for the very special day. “I can promise you that I will never forget you,” I told them. “I will always pray for you. And I will do my part to be sure that girls like you can be educated, and empowered, and realize your dreams.” With one on either side, they escorted me through their labyrinthine neighborhood back to my car. By the time we reached it, Komal, the sassy one, was tired of me. I was tired of me, too, my lame answers, the futility of my speeches to girls like these.

  That night, I sat alone in my room to contemplate what I could do for the young, vulnerable girls I had met: what was realistic financially, how I could best help, how much/how many of them I could take on. My intention was to increase my conscious contact with the God of my understanding, praying for direction. Would it be letter writing? Simply praying for them? Each had taken hold of my heart in such a special way. It felt powerfully mystical, in a world so crowded with souls, to find my way somehow, through circumstances, coincidences, timing, and fate, to the people I met. I lived halfway around the globe. There were 1.2 billion people in India. How exactly had I ended up in Kausar and Nasreen’s slum, climbing their ladder, sitting on their floor, hearing their stories, finding myself in their preciousness and resilience and vulnerability? Or Neelam’s? I could not walk away without taking with me some kind of responsibility for the meeting by helping out in some tangible way. I wanted to do more than remember them and tell their stories. Too many children—oh, Ouk Srey Leak—had slipped out beyond my reach.

  In New Delhi, on the next leg of our journey through India, I found the answer to my prayers.

  When we arrived in India’s capital city, the first thing we all noticed were the trees! And then, along the highway, was a large, hilly verge awash in flowers! I squealed. These weren’t just accidental flowers making an evolutionary stab at surviving, it was a proper, planted, cultivated flower garden, and it was a sight for sore eyes. We passed a few families and individuals living on the sidewalks of our leafy hotel neighborhood. They had set up little shelters for themselves, stretching a bit of fabric or plastic or cardboard to make a roof. I saw a few small fires built for cooking, but not many. I later learned that Delhi has a draconian antibegging policy, which has effectively criminalized poverty, pushing it back from the streets where visitors might see it.

  There were important people for me to meet here and more media events. But the project I most wanted to visit was a community-based antitrafficking NGO called Apne Aap. When Gloria Steinem heard that I was going to India, she told me that Ruchira Gupta, founder of Apne Aap, was the one person I had to meet who would rock my world, and was she right! In the early 1990s, when Ruchira was a journalist, she exposed a criminal organization that kidnapped Nepali girls and sold them into slavery in India. Her experiences with the trafficking survivors inspired her to establish a small group for women to empower themselves through education, vocational training, and advocacy. Since then, Apne Aap has grown into a network of 150 such antitrafficking self-help groups across the subcontinent, and Ruchira has become one of the world’s most dynamic and authoritative voices for the abolition of sex slavery.

  Apne Aap runs a community outreach center right in the heart of Delhi’s red-light district. On the street below, a baby was being bathed by her mother in the street, the water flowing into open drains. Upstairs, the suite of rooms were clean swept and beautiful, with murals painted by members and simple, flat woven mats to sit on. The group has an open-door policy that invites anyone from the ’hood to join for only 10 rupees. Apne Aap uses a holistic approach to empowerment based on “learning, livelihood, and legal protection.” The members teach one another self-reliance, self-efficacy, self-respect, self-love. It can be slow and hard going, but achieving sustainability is a process in the individual’s mind and soul. It is capacity building at the most essential, elemental l
evel. A trained staff offers vocational classes; I ran my hand over the black sewing machines, blessing the steel that helps a girl learn a trade that can save her life. They have English and computer instruction, classes to build social skills. The small self-help groups within the organization access banking and microcredit programs. And they also have lawyers on hand to train them to negotiate for their rights with the police and government bureaucrats.

  I had brought a group from PSI, including Seane, to meet Ruchira Gupta at the center. She’s a compact force of nature wrapped in a sari, greeting us with a burst of positive energy that about knocked us over. I could see right away how she could stare down brothel owners and traffickers to rescue sex slaves.

  Ruchira is well versed in the reciprocal cycles of poverty and exploitation and how gender inequality sets the stage. The NGO is based on two Gandhian principles: ahimsa, or nonviolence, in its methods of confronting the violence of sex trafficking; and antodaya, which translates into “rise of the last,” which means uplifting the poorest and most desolate girls and women into a world of dignity in which human beings are not bought and sold. Apne Aap also addresses the need to uplift and reeducate the men who exploit prostituted women and sex slaves, acknowledging that the destruction that happens in the soul of an abuser is equal to the victimization of the abused. It’s something I talk about often, that misogyny is as harmful to men and boys as it is to women and girls. The prescribed definitions of manhood are as limiting and damaging to them spiritually as the consequences are to women.

  Apne Aap groups support more than ten thousand girls and women who have either survived trafficking or are vulnerable to being trafficked. There have been many wonderful success stories, but also heartbreaking setbacks. Ruchira told us a particularly enraging story, involving a woman named Meena who had been trafficked to a brothel as a child. She was able to make a rare escape but tragically had to leave her small children behind. Meena rehabilitated her life, a heroic act in this culture, and tried unsuccessfully to rescue her children, to whom she had given birth in the brothel. When her young son escaped and told her that her daughter, Naina, had reached puberty and had been sold to another brothel, Meena contacted Ruchira Gupta for help. Ruchira pressured the local police to raid the brothel and rescue Naina, whom they found drugged and broken. They returned her to her mother, but Naina’s agony wasn’t yet over. The pimp from the original brothel sued Meena for custody, claiming Naina was his daughter. The judge deemed the mother of “bad character in her past life” and then declared that the pimp who sold her was the father. The child was sent to a remand home, meaning a juvenile delinquent house. Appalling, impossible? Only if you don’t know India.

  I instantly offered to stay in India as a public protest until that girl was freed. I was ready for civil disobedience on the curb in front of the remand house, or the judge’s house. I was ready to fast, to call friends to travel to India to raise high holy hell with me. But Ruchira told me such a gesture wouldn’t help. The Indian bureaucracy could be moved only from within; it took time.

  Ruchira Gupta is dedicated to these individual cases, determined to save one life at a time. But her goal is much broader: She wants to fight sex trafficking on an institutional, international, and cultural level by abolishing prostitution everywhere. This position is not widely accepted, but it is gaining momentum as more and more studies show that legalizing and regulating prostitution does not put an end to trafficking, it enables it. A far more effective way forward is to criminalize demand. I could write a whole book about this issue, but suffice it to say that my eyes have been opened to the fact that we cannot bargain with the slave traders. We have to put them out of business. It’s a practical and a moral imperative. I agree with Apne Aap’s policy that prostitution is a systemic form of violence against girls and women, that it is driven by demand for purchased sex, which is driven by a culture of domination, and that exploiting women for sex is not inevitable, it is a choice that men make, and they can be deterred from making it.

  Before we left the center, I sat with a group of young women and listened to their stories. One girl shared that her parents had chosen her husband, and she was resolutely denying the marriage. She insisted she would marry in her own time, for love. She was learning there were alternatives; there should be alternatives. Her folks were furious. “Apne Aap is spoiling your attitude and mind,” they told her. She just kept coming back.

  When we talked about abuse, one girl said, “Oh, when they beat us, it’s okay if we’ve done something wrong. That is not abuse.” I died a thousand deaths. Cultural change is so slow. I anguish over it sometimes, it is so slow.

  I wanted them to know that we were all on a level playing field. When I asked, “Who among us has been abused?” I raised my hand, as did most of the others in the small group traveling with me. I noticed there was a writer from Reuters in the room, and I briefly worried that he would spin a story about how I raised my hand to my own question. Then I thought: So be it. Most folks know I am in recovery, and I wouldn’t be if I didn’t have something from which to recover—the logic follows. At this stage, I am actually beginning to have gratitude for my painful past, in that I may be qualified to sit with oppressed people all over the world, to be a part of a grassroots social justice process that speaks volumes about the promise of ending poverty, of an age of justice.

  As our time drew to a close, each of us offered something we loved about ourselves. To break the ice, I held my bosom and said, “I love my boobs!” Peals of laughter erupted. Most girls were able to find something … teeth, hair, hands, eyes. Oh, but the struggling few who could not put words to one single admirable thing about themselves. Surprisingly, a girl who had been speaking up a great deal was one of these. When I said to her, “Well, I love your voice!” she was so pleased. The girl whose parents were attempting to force her to marry was also too ashamed to say anything good about herself; I told her I loved her strength. Funny, isn’t it, that the ones who are so visibly special, so clearly gifted, carry so much shame?

  That night, Seane came to my room and we each shared about our touching yet simultaneously troubling and triggering experience with Ruchira and Apne Aap. We were on our way to yet another cocktail party. Seane looked gorgeous, of course; my hair was wet, and my dress was still wadded up. As we were dashing off, I realized I hadn’t said my prayers. I ran to the bedside, fell to my knees, and lo and behold, there she was beside me, also on her knees, hands clasped together earnestly. That’s a friend, on her own path, a challenging and empathetic witness of my own. We finally made it out the door for what I hoped was our last late evening event for this trip.

  The party was hosted by Vinay Rai, a huge philanthropist in India, whose Rai Foundation supports education for girls and women. Mr. Rai is an industrialist, engineer, and philosopher who is spiritually inspired to give back parts of his family’s great wealth to help lift up his nation, especially through education. The foundation’s motto is “Manav Sewa Madhav Sewa”—“Service of Humanity Is Service to God.” Right up my alley.

  I sat on a small stage while the Rais’ well-dressed, beautifully mannered guests took slipcovered seats. Mr. Rai said nice things about Kate and me, described how his family’s education fund was endowed with $150 million to send poor girls to college, covering even their clothing, so they would blend well with wealthier students. Then I took the stage.

  If do say so myself, I gave was one fired-up, kick-ass, hyperlucid, emotional, effective, come-to-Jesus-meeting of a talk. I had called Bono earlier that night just to thank him so much for having reached out to me five years ago, for getting me into this “holy mess,” as I called it. And as I was speaking, one of his great lines came to me: This is not about charity, this is about justice. The whole trip and especially the stories of Neelam, the orphan, and Naina, the trafficked girl in the detention home, lit a fire in me. Tonight, I would not back down.

  I told the stories with all the passion in my soul, then I did something
simply not done in Indian society: I asked the guests to give money. I knew most Indians’ spiritual practice required them to give anonymously (“the right hand should not see what the left hand gives”). But the point was to break the seal, be mavericks. And it worked. We raised $25,000 on the spot. The money was used for the nutrition camps that provided food for Neelam and others like her.

  Mr. Rai retook the stage and seemed not at all perturbed by my impertinence. In fact, he made a surprise announcement: He was going to take care of all the orphans I had met on my trip and pay for their educations! What a remarkable, humbling, and rapturous answer to my searching prayer for these girls. What a priceless, indescribable gift. It seemed it would be radically life-altering for these children. Education is the surest way out, and tonight theirs was guaranteed.

  The spectacular nature of the night was not yet over. After Mr. Rai’s announcement, I spontaneously decided to retake the podium and make a special plea to the guests. “There is a gross miscarriage of justice to which I would like to draw your attention,” I said. “I am a white American. What judge here is going to listen to me? I urge each and every citizen of India here tonight to use your voice to help Naina, a child born in a brothel, rescued by her mother, but now, insensibly, by a judge’s order, in a remand home …” and I told the story.

  Before the evening was over, Mr. Rai told me that two very prominent lawyers had agreed to help Ruchira with the mother and daughter’s case. He explained that the lower courts, where this judge made the obscene ruling, are corrupt, inefficient, bothersome, mired. But in India, cases may be taken directly to the highest court in the land—which the lawyers were willing to do to reverse such a travesty of justice. I was ecstatic (and even happier when I learned that Naina was soon released and reunited with her mother).