Abstract
When first asked to write a book review about trafficking for this issue, it was important to me not only to focus on literature that centred on the issue of the young ages of victims due to the lack of attention to child issues internationally but also to find a text that revolved around the victims and survivors in South Asia due to the sparsity of literature covering this region. It was challenging to find a book that focused on South Asia that was not a fictional text or a nonfiction text which perpetuated white saviour narratives and glorified the economic advantages of rescuing victims of trafficking, centring capitalism as a reason for rescue. It was an even greater hurdle to find a text that focused on India, where this ICB journal has its origins. As such, I was pleasantly surprised to find a text so closely suited to the task in Dr Pande’s writings on the sex trafficking of women and girls in South Asia with a special focus on India. Dr Pande’s text is a culmination of a long and important career of extensive presentations, teachings, and publications in women’s studies with a focus on working with and writing about women in the margins.
Dr Rekha Pande, according to her website, is the Director of the Society for Empowerment through Environment Development (SEED), and Professor of History at the University of Hyderabad. She is the former Head of the Centre for Women’s Studies and the Department of History at the University as well. Dr Pande is a self-described ‘academic activist,’ and has worked closely with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) on research projects and consultancies. She has extensive experience working with government at all levels and brings a historical and cultural feminist lens to her work. Her focus has been on issues related to the minority Muslim community in India with a specific focus on women. Dr Pande maintains connections with activists in this area of study across the globe in her effort to ‘transgress and bridge borders key among them between disciplines, periods, theory-praxis, and between the Global South and North’ with special attention to issues of gender (
Dr Pande introduces her book, by discussing how her research on Devadasis and its connection to prostitution is what led her to look closely at the issue of trafficking. Devadasis are unmarried, typically pre-pubescent girls dedicated to a temple and deity in a Hindu marriage-like ceremony. The girls are expected to supply not only temple duties but sexual services to patrons. Once puberty is reached, the tradition dictates that the girl’s virginity is sold to the highest bidder and often these girls end up being sexually exploited. Even though this tradition was outlawed, it continues, with direct and indirect links to trafficking, especially due to the legacy of children being born to Devadasis and their inability to get out of the cycle of being seen as a cursed community with limited access to wealth and social mobility. Dr Pande was especially interested in how the Devadasis institution has a century-long religious and cultural history in India that cannot be ignored when examining the issue of trafficking. She argues that we must understand how embedded certain views of women are in Indian society and how these views are inextricably linked to how they are undervalued and that this embedded view can be extrapolated as a frame from which to understand the complexity of social issues and their links to matters such as trafficking in other parts of South Asia and abroad. Dr Pande states,
Trafficking is a multi-dimensional problem encompassing a whole range of economic, social, and cultural issues which are varied and highly complex. Most of the victims are trafficked with the promise of better jobs, better career prospects and marriage. Some are inducted forcibly through abduction…Devadasi, and prostitution establishes links with frequency and magnitude of women trafficking in different regions (p. 14).
She goes on to illustrate how this cultural and religious practice cemented certain views of women and girls and the ways this practice became intimately linked with present-day trafficking. Dr Pande goes on to discuss how the practice of exploiting women and children through trafficking is deeply wrapped up in globalisation, migration and immigration, cheap labour, drug trafficking, and the movements of financial capital. Dr Pande ultimately stresses that patriarchal socio-cultural practices are both directly and indirectly related to the issue of trafficking women and girls (with a brief mention of boys), and cultural change is just as important as structural change, if not more so, for addressing such a massive issue.
To demonstrate her proposition, it is important to highlight that the frame for Dr Pande’s book was a research study. The purpose was ‘to examine and look into the problems and issues related with women victims of trafficking with a special focus on two Indian states, namely, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana’ (p. 40). They traced the journeys of 225 women and girls from the start of their trafficking as best as the women could recall through rescue, ‘rehabilitation,’ and re-integration. They also examined the role of police officials, which comprised 30 of their respondents, and the role of NGO’s which 45 of their respondents. Dr Pande and her team completed surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and field observations. Dr Pande highlighted that the interviewing work was conducted in a trauma-sensitive manner, where personnel involved intervened if they had a concern that the survivors would be re-traumatized or triggered by interviews. According to Dr Pande, the women had control over how much of their narrative they wanted to share. It was unclear, however, how much she considered, or the connection directly established between the possibility that the presence of certain officials may have limited the women’s responsiveness in these interviews. Dr Pande herself later discusses corruption as being rampant among the so-called ‘rescuers,’ of trafficked women who are also known to exploit them physically and sexually or keep them as ‘inmates,’ of the rehabilitation centres. Dr Pande ends by discussing that she found quite a pervasiveness of abuse and lack of choice in shelter homes that contradicts the ‘objectives and ideologies of rescue and rehabilitation organisations of victims of trafficking… [and that] the actual practice works negatively for them as it negates agency and authority of trafficked women over their lives’ (p. 188). Dr Pande includes critical and heart-breaking excerpts from these interviews in the book, giving voice to and demonstrating only a fraction of the horror the women went through.
Structurally, the book is a short read at 190 pages, not including the appendices, and is organised into eight chapters, (1) Introduction, (2) Key Legislations Related to Trafficking, (3) South Asia: The Material Context of Trafficking, (4) Profile of the Trafficked Victims, (5) Life Experiences, Rehabilitation, and the Aftermath, (6) Institutional Response to Trafficking, Role of Police, NGOs and Civil Society, (7) Case Studies, and (8) Summing up. The part of the book that I and most people may find of greatest import begins with Chapter 4, where the women involved are brought to life unironically through the data Dr Pande presents such as their religion, Caste, and education and again further in Chapter 5 when the reader is presented with the statistical picture of how young many of the women were when they were first trafficked, with most in the study in the 11–15 year age range followed by less than 10 years, and closely by 16–20 years old. Additional data was presented on how many years they experienced trafficking, the reasons it occurred, and methods used if known to coerce them, their sociopsychological well-being, health status (HIV/AIDS and STD’s) as well as rescue and rehabilitation data. It is one thing to hear but another to read and see how incredibly young many of the women were and truly awful to consider children being exploited in this way. It was further a stark picture to see what happened following rescue for women whose families could be reached, and how reintegration in numerous cases was impossible due to families being concerned about shame being brought to them or the siblings of the women who could not afford ruin upon their marriage prospects. There is no doubt that the data presented is incredibly important and should be used when considering policy, cultural changes, and development in this region.
Despite the strengths of the book and the extreme importance of Dr Pande’s research, the text suffers from a significant lack of editing grammatically, organisationally, and is marked by redundancies that impact the readability of what is important research. This is not said in any way to undermine Dr Pande’s work, but there were many grammatical and punctuation errors and times when certain paragraphs were verbatim written earlier in the chapter or appeared later in another chapter in a remarkably similar form. I also found that the most illustrative data appeared too late in the book, and this could have been helped if the first three chapters received far more incisive edits. Although trauma was mentioned and noted in the data, it was brief. However, this was of little fault to Dr Pande and somewhat outside the scope of her research. She made clear that the lack of mental health infrastructure made it challenging for the women to receive the support they needed and in lieu of this there appeared a greater focus on the role of God or religion in their ‘rehabilitation,’ and only brief touches on clear symptoms of posttraumatic stress that these women were exhibiting. I recognize my biases here both as a Clinical Psychologist and someone trained in the United States. However, as someone who reads, writes, and researches from a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, I very much understand the role of religion in the community.
Nevertheless, I still found one case and the way it was described, particularly problematic because there was one woman presented explicitly as a ‘Success Story,’ because ‘meeting her and talking to her we realised that here was one-woman who did not give into all her sufferings and tortures but took it as a challenge’ (p. 167). Dr Pande then goes on to describe the way the woman never gave in at the brothel and endured torture and starvation through her refusal to serve men in the brothel and how she kept her faith in God. Dr Pande described the woman as now having a ‘name and status,’ and that she was a working woman who married an NGO staffer and she and her husband continued to help other women who are survivors. It is important to note the woman described her faith as particularly important to her in her own words but the way in which her story was integrated held on to some of the problematic cultural and religious biases discussed as contributing to the maintenance of trafficking in the book. Although Dr Pande wanted to present and uplift a story of success, she fails to do so without some of the very societal prejudices and norms she aims to combat spilling through in the presentation of this success story. If a success story is a woman not losing her faith in God, then what does that mean for other women? If a success story is about a woman who fights her captors, what does that mean for the other women who did not? If a success story is a woman who gets married, what does that mean about the stigma hanging over the unmarried women in Dr Pande’s research who chose to live as widows so they would not have to endure the abuse of a man ever again? The lack of critical writing in this success story is still nestled uncomfortably for me within the frame it sits.
Due to the stated structural concerns and lack of synthesis in the text, the book took much longer to sort through than was necessary for such a short text and I have concern that this will overshadow its importance of it. Therefore, I highly suggest that if you do pick up the book, which you should for the valuable research, you may want to take a reading approach that begins with the chapters that I found of greater illustrative import and then backtrack to the chapters that were, though useful, more redundant in their wandering focus on the theoretical issues of trafficking. I also suggest strongly that you read the stories of the victims with both a critical and culturally humble eye. Dr Pande ends her text with a focus on suggestions and strategies for audiences who may find this text useful, which includes professional associations and organisers of training regarding trafficking, NGOs and CBOs, local schools, local media, police and anti-trafficking teams, shelter homes, employment agencies and governmental welfare institutions. I would add that this text would be particularly useful in building proper infrastructure to help support the mental health of women, which is a glaring gap in the support available to them.
