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Documented on the original SlaveryMap (2008–2016). We don’t have a verifiable source on file yet. Know one?
What happened
A 38 year old woman, a suspected manager of a New Delhi brothel where police recently rescued several underage girls, was charged in or about August 2011 with kidnapping, the kidnapping of minors, forced prostitution, rape and operating a brothel, New Delhi police officer Surinder Kaur told CNN reporters. The woman has been jailed under India's Immoral Traffic Prevention Act. Kaur said she could not release the woman's name but described her as an Indian citizen and a former prostitute herself. Under Indian law, prostitution is legal, but profiting from another person's prostitution is not. One of the girls rescued is 10 years old, said Triveni Acharya, the president of the Mumbai-based Rescue Foundation, an anti-trafficking group that tipped off police. Five of the nine girls taken from the brothel have been confirmed to be underage, and tests are pending on the remaining four, Kaur said. All are estimated to be 16 years of age or less. Three of the girls are Indian, and the remaining six are from Nepal - the source of a steady supply of sex slaves for the brothels of Delhi and Mumbai, many of whom are forced into prostitution by traffickers.
Response and intervention
Investigators have 90 days to present their case to a court, Kaur said. Meanwhile, Kaur said she hopes to arrest the brothel's owner soon. Brothel owners are rarely on-site and are typically hard to track down, Acharya said. The police raid resulted from a tip the prior month from an unidentified “charity group,” assumed to be the Mumbai-based Rescue Foundation. Aslam Khan, New Delhi's Deputy Police Commissioner, told CNN: "We went there to raid. We first of all blocked all the entry gates. Then we [carried out] a search [and] we found that there were nine minor girls." Acharya of the Rescue Foundation said police in New Delhi were previously not willing to cooperate when the organization had information about children who were being used as sex slaves. "And now, police are becoming very sensitive. It's a big change. I think a historical change," she said. In addition to making child prostitution a higher priority, police in New Delhi are also starting to treat the girls as victims and not as criminals. "Earlier they talked to the girls rudely. They used foul language," Acharya said, explaining that victims are now treated with more respect. No aftercare was reported.