HELP LINES, HYDERABAD

Women protection cell	040 -23240663
Women police station	040-27853508
Child line	1098, 040-23133550
State Human Rights Commission	040-24601571, 24601572, 24601574
Human rights law network	040-27661883
Crime stopper	1090
Child rights	1800 425 2933
Roshini helpline	040-66202000
Asmitha resource center for Women	040-27733251
Shaheens women’s organization	040-24386994
AP women’s network	040-27014394
POW   Ms.Sandhya	9849018471
Anti corruption wing	040-24720196, 24720197
Satyam helpline for health	1056, 104
Emergency Management Research Institute (EMRI)	108
Alchoholism rehabilitation center	040-65969896, 9849940500
Divya disha	9848186982
Prajwala (human trafficking)	040-65704048
Sweekar upkar for disabled	040-27814089
National Commission for Women	011-13237166
Helpline for senior citizens	1253
Anveshi	040-27423690
Ankuram	040-27017446
Sannihita Ms.Usha	9246573978
ALEAP (self employment)	040-23893644
Bread organization   (For Educational support)	040-65887177
BHUMIKA Women’s collective	040-27660173
BHUMIKA HELPLINE FOR WOMEN IN DISTRESS	Toll free number – 1800 425 2908/ 040-27605316

  Source: Website of Hyderabad City Police, Women's Corner

Slave to fear, for an eternity

Yes. Fear of abuse limits our freedom. But I can see no immediate way to change it. So we might as well learn to be strong, alert and sometimes scared. 

We face a constant trade off between being free-spirited and being careful. I don't know if your parents told you this, but it's so important that I might as well re-iterate. When faced with such a trade-off, I'm suggesting that you be careful. Sometimes, fear is a good and sensible thing. I want every girl to remember that and to remember it deep. Just because you were afraid and came back home early while the others had fun, does not mean that fear is unnecessary. When it really happens, it'll be too long before anyone can say anything or hear about it. 

One account of the story: 

Taken from investik8 (http://investik8.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/eden-a-sex-slaves-story/)

Eden: a sex slave’s story

with 355 comments

Wearing just their underwear, the girls line up with their backs to the wall, arms by their side, heads down, frozen to the spot. They dare not move.

Their captors walk up and down the line – picking them seemingly at random and tapping them on the shoulder – ‘You, you, you and you… come with me’.

In the back of a warehouse truck, they are driven for miles across the scorching Nevada desert until they reach a hotel. There, they are forced to have sex with up to 25 men one after the other.

This was life for Korean-born American Chong Kim who, at 19 years old, was sold as a domestic sex slave in 1994 to Russian gangsters and held captive for more than two years.

“The clients never came to the warehouse,” she recalled “That was just where we slept. There was nothing there but bed mats on the floor and we would just lay there.

“They would give us colouring books with fat crayons and we would colour. But then we would hear the knock outside the storage unit doors and have to all line up.

“If you were chosen, we would get in the truck and there would be a gallon of water between us. You could tell it was hot outside because it was made out of metal aluminium and it was too hot to touch.

“We were sweating when we got to the room and we’d get a make up bag and toiletries and they’d say ‘you have ten minutes to take a shower’. They would have lingerie laying on the bed.

“I remember sitting in the shower because it felt so good to be in water that I just cried. When I was done I had to basically lay in bed naked waiting for the customer to come in.”

About half of her clients were American and others were Russian but some had accents she wasn’t familiar with – they could have been British, Australian or European, she couldn’t tell.

“They all had one hour to spend time with us but most of the time they didn’t spend the whole hour, they just came in, raped us and then they would leave. And then we had to shower for the next client. That was pretty much our day.”

The traffickers would take up to 15 girls to ‘service’ hundreds of men in one day.

“One time, I could hear the screaming on the other side of the hotel room and I could tell another girl was being raped and she was screaming and it was really, really hard for me to concentrate.

“And when we got done throughout the day we would get so sore that I remember asking for a bag of ice and had to put it between my legs because it hurt so much.”

Sometimes the girls were returned to the warehouse, sometimes they didn’t. Any attempts at fighting back or escaping were met with brutal beatings and torture.

“I tried to escape numerous times,” says Chong, now 38. “I remember one time the warehouse truck stopped somewhere and we had to get out to get changed and use the bathroom and that’s when I started running.

“We were in the middle of the desert and I didn’t know where I was. The next thing I knew, I had what I think was a crowbar hit me in the back of the head. When I woke up, I was tortured. I was on a meat hook and beaten like a piñata. Other times they would bust both my knee caps or they would put me in a tub of ice naked.”

As time went on, she would witness as much cruelty as she was subjected to and she would regularly be transported with up to 50 other girls from warehouse to warehouse, state to state.

The girls were all ages and ethnicities, some having being trafficked through Europe or Russia before ending up in the USA.

“I witnessed murders, tortures, sodomy, rape,” she says quietly. “The youngest girl I saw there was just seven years old. They tied me down and made me watch her get raped by 12 adult men. It made me so sick to my stomach. I still see her face in my dreams.”

Forcefully injected with heroin, meth and cocaine and held in a dark, windowless warehouse, time ceased to exist.

“I never knew what time it was because we never had a window to look out. There were times when it would feel like forever,” she said.

“I turned into a puppet, I got tired of fighting back. There were moments where I asked for help and nobody helped me. The traffickers would say, ‘see you are nothing, that is why nobody is helping you’.

“We had no military guys or swat teams to come in and break down the doors and rescue us, that was a dream.”

Her only option was to gain the trust of her traffickers and rise up the ranks to find a way to escape.

Jamie Chung in the movie ‘Eden’

“I felt that I would never get out and the other part of me was getting angry,” she says. “I kept looking at my situation, all the times I tried to escape I was unsuccessful. And so I wanted to know where were these people coming from, where were the parents? Why wasn’t anyone looking for them? And so the only way I thought at that time was to act like I was going to be a part of them so I could find out all of their secrets.

“I approached the head trafficker and I said ‘I could be the Madam, I am a woman, I can use my feminine charms and to manipulate and to get more girls. And I can help you make more money’.”

After gaining their trust, she soon found herself in the terrible position of recruiting young girls into sex slavery, just two years after the very same thing happened to her.

She was recruited into sex slavery in 1994 by the person she believed to be her boyfriend.

While studying Law at a technical college in Dallas, Chong met a man claiming to be a soldier in a bar who she knew as Keith, only later discovering that was not his real name.

She described him as chivalrous, adding: “He would say to me ‘you should smile more often you know’, he was very, very sleek. That’s what makes him poisonous.”

Estranged from her family, Chong was vulnerable and looking for her ‘Prince Charming’ and he manipulated this to recruit her, she says.

“It’s like a hunting game, they know how to hunt, they look for them, they watch, they observe. They’ll do a round of tests,: says Chong. “A man will go to the bar and he will say ‘who wants to get me a drink?’ and the first woman who says ‘I will’ without knowing him gives him the signal that she will do anything for him.”

After just two months of dating, he drove her to an abandoned house in Oklahoma telling her that he needed to help a homeless friend.

“I said I’d wait in the car and that’s when he grabbed me by the neck and said ‘you’re going to do as I say’. And my first thought was ‘what did I do wrong?’”

He chained her up in the basement and burned her passport and documents. There, she was raped and tortured before she was transported to the warehouse somewhere in an Indian reservation in Nevada.

“When I was taken to the storage unit and I saw the other girls, I was just shocked.” She says. “It was like a giant factory of children. And I literally thought I was in a different country because I was so Americanised that I thought it can’t be here.”

But when she became a Madam she learned about the scale of the operation and the so-called respectable people who were her customers.

“I learned about the corruption – there were politicians, judges, police officers that would buy a girl and pay the agency to keep quiet,” she says. “It scared me so much that I decided I need to run away.”

Her opportunity to escape came in 1997 when she was staying in a wealthy client’s hotel in a casino in Vegas.

“I remembered watching a James Bond movie with my father and he’d crawled out through the vent to escape,” she says. “I remember the vent being big enough and I thought ‘you know, it’s worth a try!’”

Making her way outside the building, a man pulled up in his car and spotted her escaping still wearing her lingerie.

“My heart was beating so fast,” she says, “I got in the car and took off my Stiletto shoes and beat him over the head. He was unconscious, I didn’t kill him. And I moved his body out and I stole his vehicle.”

For many years after her escape, she “lived like a hobo” fearful that her kidnappers would trace her if she used her social security number. After seeking help from a women’s shelter and with intense therapy, she slowly started to rebuild her life.

Chong Kim today (l) with actress Jamie Chung (r) who plays Eden in the movie.

Her incredible story is now the subject of an independent film to be released this Friday (July 19) in selected UK cinemas, starring Hollywood star Jamie Chung.

And today, mum-of-one Chong shares her story to educate law enforcement personnel and attorneys all over the USA.

Her advocacy work for victims has been commended by campaigners including Academy Award winning actress Emma Thompson.

But despite helping scores of victims, Chong feels emotionally conflicted about her time as a Madam working for the very people that abused, raped and tortured her.

“I worry about being judged,” she says. “Even when I was a Madam I was still being held as a slave. I never kept any money, I was being monitored all the time.

“There’s not a moment I don’t think about the girls, their faces, their tears I only hope that they were able to be rescued or escaped.”

Chong is working with private investigators and members of the FBI to give as much information as possible to help bring her traffickers to justice.

But the organised criminals, who were also involved in drugs, arms and money laundering, were clever enough to use false names and move the girls from site to site to avoid being traced.

But by telling her story, Chong is speaking up for all survivors of sex trafficking, she says.

“I have people who say ‘I’m sorry this happened to you’ and I say don’t tell me you’re sorry, tell me that you’re angry and you want to do something.

“There are so many of these men who come to different countries whether it is in the UK, South East Asia or America and their intention is for paid rape. And the woman’s voices will always remain silent as long as the law enables these predators. So we need to find a way to say ‘No more.’”

* ‘Eden’ is in selected cinemas including the Brixton Ritzy and Empire Leicester Square from July 19. It is also available for download on iTunes. For more information, go to http://www.edenthefilm.com/

To men reading this, say no to sex trafficking and rape. If your friends know such places, try doing something for them. A chance to escape, a rehabilitation center, anything. Even in it's most free and legalized form, do try to see the kind of desperate circumstances that could have brought them there. Empathize. 

On Me Being Female in India, Hyderabad

Dear, 

I'm tired of being stereotyped 'tom boy', 'sexy', 'pink' or whatever, cast aside, not being taken seriously. 

I am an Economics student and I don't like the way all the domestic labour that women contribute to, day in and day out goes unrecognized in every Statistic. 

I do not like little girls being told not to swing their legs, not to sit comfortable, not to play around with boys, or to run, jump or anything. 

Earrings... the alleys in my home town that my brother and me walked through to get my customary ear piercing done.. it was like yesterday, I told myself that it was just like an injection and that if I was a brave girl, I'd get through it without crying... I was 4 or 5 years old back then... I still wonder what drives people to put such tender skin of the little girl they love so much through that unnecessary pain. Why not let the girl grow up and decide? (I did take them off later, but the marks just wouldn't fade.)

At 11, they took about half an hour to get me dressed for a cousin's wedding, I started crying. Because the more they dressed me, for some reason, I felt more depressed, they just kept trying to decide what jewellery to put on me.. And I felt like I was growing uglier by the minute. It was creepy, the way they stared and said 'No', try this one, again and again.
 I'm tired.

I'm vexed up of being expected to dress like a posy at any point of the day... I feel sick when someone tries to market me or any girl for that matter, to find a groom through dresses and jewellery or tell me how to act for it. 

I did not like the growing up phase. The menstruation, the pain, the physical and mental disadvantages. My mother always told me that I'll understand when I grow up and that motherhood is such a wonderful experience that it shall all make it worth it. I waited for it, with eager eyes, I thought that it was natural and that it would make me feel so loved. I grew into the age of maturity and realize that I don't want it. I just want to study without having to take a couple of years off for baby-sitting. I want to learn, explore the world and travel to places. I'd rather wish that I be spared the pains... 

I wish that I didn't have to go through the embarrassment in being objectified in the streets, the buses and a lot of other places. There were so many times when they'd call me names, I'd get hurt and angry, then my family's face would come to my mind, telling me of such situations and how to act in them... I've been told that the best retribution a girl can give a man is to ignore him, reacting to such an insult would just entertain him further. I didn't know what to do lots of times, and just walked away wishing the ground would just open up and swallow me or at least my cowardice. I remember coming home and dreaming up of the clever things I'd say to them, the way they do it in the empowered movies, or the karate kicks... the incidents repeated and I dreamed more.. 

I wish that in the first relationship that I ever had, my boy friend saw my capacities instead of the fair skin and sexuality and that I had not been blind to it. Physical attraction is no doubt quite flattering, but it's not enough. 

 I grew up seeing every grown up image of myself, all the women, being dominated. I desperately wanted to be a Cartoon girl... and my desperate search could only get me as far as Buttercup from the PPG. All the other Cartoon girls were like Olive from Popoye always falling into traps and calling out to the sailor man or they were just built to radiate sexuality. 

Then I read from books of all the historians, kings, warriors and scientists, taking vicarious pride in the achievements of those lone one or two women I could spot successfully. My idea of fun back then, was made up of wearing long saris, and walking like the models, cooking leaves in little bowls, bursting with joy the first time I smelt a lipstick, dreaming of having hair as long as the Rapunzel, which to deck a whole garden of flowers would be needed at my wedding. I remember wanting to look good, and to gain appreciation from every one's eyes this way. But the boys had been taught differently, if a boy dressed up, or wanted to look good, or even liked something as simple as cooking, he lost the acceptance. He is told to man up… to pursue things actively, and to make something out of himself more than a pretty face. 

I remember noticing the difference, because my parents hadn't been so. They didn't expect me to make a marriageable girl; they want to make a strong person out of me. While my father wanted intelligence, my mother wanted me to be brave. It was easy for me to contrast and see what was wrong with the world. But it isn't so for a lot of little girls, at a young age. It's just not right to have our boundaries determined before we learn to take our first step.

It is one thing for inequality to exist, and a whole new thing to act like it doesn't. I guess, this bothers me the most. The way my mother works at the office and manages all the household labour and still believes herself to be free, the way everyday in our neighborhood the women are loaded all the responsibility of child-care while the men get to enjoy economic freedom and name them after their families... it's not fair.

So well, I'm writing this blog to complain, to be heard, to listen to, to understand, discuss and possibly contribute back to what is important about gender from here. 

Love,

(For taking the time to scroll this far at least)

Sindhu.