Forced prostitution
- Mura, Far Western Province, Nepal, Nov 2007. The Badi caste in Nepal is a Dalit ‘sub-caste’. Many Badi women are forced into prostitution and end up being trafficked to Mumbai’s sex industry. Soni Badi, 25, is a sex worker. As a Badi Dalit she is prevented from owning land, has little access to education and other services crucial to sustain life and avoid lifelong poverty.
Thousands of Dalit girls are forced into prostitution every year. The link between caste and forced prostitution is apparent in the Devadasi and Jogini systems practiced in India.
Originally a sacred, religious practice, the Devadasi dedication of girls to temples has turned into a systematic sexual abuse of young Dalit girls serving as prostitutes for dominant caste community members and subsequent auctioning into brothels. Most girls and women in India’s urban brothels come from Dalit, lower-caste, tribal, or minority communities.
Keeping Dalit women as prostitutes and tying prostitution to bondage is a means of subjugation by dominant castes seeking to enforce their social status and economic superiority. Human Rights Watch estimates that up to 15.000 Dalit female children in India are taken from their families and raped and auctioned into prostitution every year (HRW 1999).
This type of practice legitimizes sexual violence and discrimination and highlights the intersection between discrimination based on caste and gender.
Among the Koltas, an indigenous people grouped as one of the lowest castes in Northern India, trafficking of multiple wives as a part of the bondage is a widespread phenomenon.
Key Resources
Women in Ritual Slavery: Devadasi, Jogini and Mathamma in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Southern India, Anti-Slavery International, 2007.
Read an article on forced prostitution in India's southern states
Read about bonded labour and other forms of slavery
