Fine Lines

In 2015, while I was in South 24 Parganas in West Bengal for a project documenting rape and sexual violence in India, I met a 17-year-old girl who had been trafficked on her way to school. Although I did not photograph her at the time, her story compelled me to research sex trafficking, and other forms of trafficking, in further detail, which eventually culminated in a photo project titled “We Cry in Silence.”

I met with survivors in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, and Dhaka and Khulna district in Bangladesh, among other places, and engaged in conversations with activists working on the issue. The Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024, put out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, states that fifty-five percent of trafficking involved forced labour, while thirty percent involved sexual exploitation.

There is varied and inconsistent data on the precise numbers involved, though, when it comes to bride trafficking, domestic-labour trafficking and sex trafficking in India. In addition, as the legal scholar Prabha Kotiswaran has noted, “the implementation of anti-trafficking law by many countries was over inclusive because it targeted women engaged in voluntary sex work and was under inclusive because trafficking for purposes other than sex work was effectively ignored.” Another recurring facet I found while researching the existing reporting on sex trafficking was that the survivors were often spoken of in terms of numbers and after their rescue, with statements such as “Girls found in the brothel have been rescued.” But where were the stories of the girls or women? How were they trafficked? What happened to them during the process?