Slaves among Us by Monique Villa

Author:Monique Villa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Children of Bal Ashram

India is the land of paradoxes. The biggest democracy in the world hosts more than a third of the world’s modern slaves, including millions of children.

And the children coming out of slavery—when they are lucky enough to be rescued—face exactly the same kind of PTSD as adults enslaved all over the world. Rebuilding trust in a child is no easy task and I have witnessed this extraordinary effort in Rajasthan.

We have already met the Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi. The NGO he created thirty-five years ago, BBA (Bachpan Bachao Andolan, Hindi for the Save Childhood Movement), has rescued some 85,000 children from slavery, forced labor, and bonded labor, and it houses and treats some of them at two rehabilitation centers in Delhi and in Rajasthan, staffed almost exclusively by ex-slaves.

In May 2017, I spent three days at Bal Ashram, the Rajasthan center, with the rescued children and Kailash and his wife Sumedha, who is the ashram’s director. It is a literal and figurative oasis in the middle of an almost barren desert: hundreds of trees of all sorts have been planted, one for each child educated there, and flowers bloom in spite of the heat. Most of the buildings are constructed with salvaged materials.

When I visited, there were sixty boys in residence (BBA does education and empowerment programs for girls, too), all of them jostling for the pleasure of jogging with Kailash when night settles and the 45°C days have come down to a much more palatable 35°C (still 95°F)!

Alpana Rawat, a counsellor at the ashram, is a smiley, warm, and charming woman who wears her saris with dignified grace and a lot of style. She seems very young, although she has been a practicing social worker for a number of years now. She sees the children immediately after their rescue and sometimes participates in the raids to free them. She sees the same PTSD symptoms over and over again.

All the children she treats have been mentally abused by their traffickers, says Alpana. “Mental trauma is big, and they are not able to open up themselves to anybody. They have a kind of fear in their mind, which their traffickers have put there; they say things like, ‘If you open up your mouth to anybody except me, I will put you and your parents in jail.’ Their goal is to frighten the children permanently. And it’s easy: children are innocent. A seven-year-old boy doesn’t know anything about the world.”

When the children are rescued, they have generally not had any contact with their families for a long time, sometimes as long as six years. As far as they know, nobody has been looking for them, or even tried to communicate. Isolated from the world, they have interacted only with their traffickers and their fellow slaves for years.

In addition to the psychological trauma, they have also suffered physical abuse.

Alpana told me about a group of twenty-six children rescued from a garment factory in Delhi three months before my visit in 2017: “The kids were so sensitive.

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