Acceptance Speech by Founder Ruchira Gupta at Clinton Global Citizen Award, 23rd September 2009

Good evening. I appreciate the attention that President Clinton has devoted to the issue of human trafficking by conferring on me the Clinton Global Citizens Award. I receive this award on behalf of the victims and survivors of human trafficking who are members of my organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide in India. I also receive this award on behalf of people who want a world in which it is unacceptable to buy or sell another human being and to imagine an economy in which one is not forced to sell oneself. Among these I would like to mention Peter and Jennifer Buffet.

My organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide has reached out to over ten thousand trafficked women and children trapped in prostitution. They were kidnapped, sold, coerced, tricked or forced into situations of sexual exploitation. Some were as young as seven. They were kept in small locked rooms and raped repeatedly. Many died by the time they were thirty or thirty five. They never had a past but now they have a future. They are rid of their terror. Apne Aap has found a woman-centred solution that transforms women in the community from victim to leader.

We help women organize in social groups and small economic cooperatives known as Self Help Groups. This is a Gandhian model applied against human trafficking.

These self-help groups are linked simultaneously with livelihood, learning and legal protection by Apne Aap team members. These groups of victims and survivors are assisted in finding localized and viable economic options, provided a safe and accessible space to meet that is separate from the place of exploitation, enabled to have the courage to tell the truth through open mikes, conversations and a newspaper published by the prostituted women called Red Light Despatch and empowered by protecting themselves and their children from sexual exploitation through legal protection and enrolment in schools.

Apne Aap has been able to establish 67 self-help groups of women, put 2500 children of women in prostitution into schools. The existence of these self help groups has challenged the notion that slavery and prostitution are inevitable. They show that women want change and will begin the journey from commodity to entrepreneur if help is available.

One of the self-help group members, Meena, trafficked when she was ten, found the courage within this group to rescue her daughter Naina, 15, from a brothel in Katihar. Today, three years later, Naina is studying to be a videographer, and Meena is a community mobiliser motivating women to set up more self-help groups. Naina’s one question to me was: As long as their are are traffickers and customers there will always be other little girls that can be bought. I want to do something about it. Naina and Meena are both courageously standing up to traffickers. Now they challenge us to do so.