That Takes Ovaries! (18 page)

As we were about to enter the doorway of the brothel, my cameraman suddenly turned to me. “It’s too dangerous. I’m not going to do it. I’m not filming any more. My equipment is expensive; it could get damaged. We could get
killed!”

He had a point. The fourteen-block red-light district we were in was no picnic. It was controlled by ruthless gangs, protected by India’s senior-ranking politicians, and patrolled by corrupt, paid-off cops. There was a powerful nexus between these groups and the mafia, which ran the country’s sex trade. Danger was all around. As we investigated our story, we were constantly told in polite and not-so-polite ways, “Don’t do this!” Cops harassed us, intelligence agencies stalked us, and everywhere we parked, mafia goons stoned our car. We ventured into the lawless brothels without any protection from anyone. Once we climbed their narrow stairways, there was no easy escape; we were at the mercy of the often violent thugs inside. We had to make a decision to do it and not think about the consequences. But now, a few days into the filming, at the doorway of a particularly
menacing-looking brothel, my hefty, six-foot-tall cameraman got spooked.

I was, too, but my outrage at the exploitation I had seen, and my need to do something about it, pushed me forward. I was going into the brothels so I could expose the horrors inside—the hundreds of thousands of girl sex slaves imprisoned in Bombay, India.

I looked up at my cameraman, “If I, who am half your size, can do it—
and can even go in ahead of you
—why can’t you? I face worse consequences: I could be raped, too.” I guess I shamed him sufficiently, because as I headed up the rat-infested stairs, he followed me.

It had been a year earlier when I had visited Nepal and stumbled upon village after village void of girls.

“Where are all the girls?” I asked everyone.

“In Bombay.” A snicker or a slimy look usually accompanied the answer. “Don’t you know that the girls go off for prostitution?”

I didn’t.”
All of them?
”

I came to learn that the sale of girls is no secret; it is all done in the open, like any business. There is the local procurer, an uncle or fellow villager, who buys the girl from her parents for twenty to thirty dollars. He’ll collect three or four females, aged seven to thirty, bring them to a bigger town, collect another dozen girls from other rural areas, put them all in a truck, smuggle them over the Nepal-India border (where he’ll pay off the border police), then sell them to the next middleman up the chain, in India. The new men take the girls to small boardinghouses. There they rape the girls, beat them, subjugate their spirits completely until they do whatever these men want. The men sometimes use ice to break in the premenstrual girls. Then the girls are taken to Bombay and sold to brothel madams for three thousand rupees apiece, about forty to fifty dollars.

Back in Bombay, I heard how the half-grown children are bonded sex slaves for the first five years, unpaid and forced to
“service” twenty-five to thirty men a day:
raped
twenty-five to thirty times a day! “Clients” stub out cigarettes on their young breasts and shove bottles up their vaginas. They are kept in five-by-seven-foot rooms, each crammed with about four miniature beds. The rooms have no walking space, just beds and curtains separating them. Windows are barred, entrances locked and guarded. A severe beating follows any attempt to flee. After five years, they are allowed to keep half their meager earnings. By then the madams have made sure that the girls have become addicted to drugs and alcohol and have had a baby, so they won’t run. The girls, now with distorted, almost caricatured bodies, get trapped by disease and debt—they have to pay for water, bedding, and food. By age forty they are usually dead from AIDS.

I learned that this horror goes on around the globe, from Africa to Albania. Each year 4 million girls are sold by their impoverished parents, tricked with false promises of good jobs, or outright kidnapped. They are brought to big cities in their own country or sent abroad to rich Western nations. Fifty thousand are shipped to the United States each year.

It’s a whole institution,
I realized.
Like the arms or narcotics trade, like gold smuggling. Only this is the
flesh
trade.
I’d uncovered something, and now, risky or not, I had to investigate it.
No one should have to go through this—especially kids,
I thought.
And if I can’t hold the powerful, faceless men who run the industry accountable, maybe I can make
society
realize what is going on here.
I contacted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. When they funded my proposed documentary and supplied me with a crew, I set out for the brothels of Bombay.

I already had two documentaries under my belt, but this would be my first focusing on women. I considered the difficulties ahead. The girls didn’t trust anyone. They felt everyone was always out to get something from them. And they were right. I didn’t want to participate in yet another form of their exploitation by forcing them to talk. I wanted to win their trust the real way, by earning it. So I just hung around, on the streets and in
the brothels, for six months. We built friendships based on equality. We exchanged information about our lives—very intimate information. These women came to know more about me than my closest friends and family.

From day one I said, “I want to share your story with the world.”

The girls didn’t think anyone would be interested. “Why?” they asked skeptically. And with understandable resistance: “We don’t want to tell our story.” They faced discrimination, stigma all the time.

So I talked about philosophical issues with them: how women can empower each other; how women can change their own lives; how life is not simply about destiny, but also what you choose. We talked about men, too: the role of men in our lives. The role of men in
their
lives was clear.

I could tell that as they watched me interact with the men in my team (director, cameraman, sound recorders, location manager), they were discovering something—a woman friend who was also a role model they could relate to.

We were the first film crew to get inside the Bombay brothels, and we had to get permission from the madams. It was relatively easy. Instead of seeing me as a threat, they were intrigued. “We’ll let you shoot if you don’t film the clients,” they said. We agreed.

I was inside interviewing girls almost daily for six months. I did not film the servicing of men, out of respect for the girls, but the beds next to me were usually shaking as I conducted my interviews.

This took a toll. I felt personally violated watching the violence perpetrated on these young girls. I could not be sexual or at all physical while working on the film. My grandmother, whose house I stayed in during the filming, said I often talked in my sleep: “Don’t touch me!”

The emotional damage was real, but the physical risk was greater. Once, when we were in one of the tiny rooms jam-packed with small beds, we were interviewing some teenaged
girls from Nepal when suddenly, abruptly, we were surrounded by men. Clients—clients closely allied with the mafia who controlled the brothel. The tension in the room became thick.

Okay, I’ll just finish this interview and move out quickly,
I thought. But it was too late. One man put his hand in front of the camera, another pulled out a knife and pointed it in my direction. “You’re not filming,” he said.

I was so immensely involved with my work, my first thought was:
But I haven’t finished the interview yet!
Then my brain froze. Somehow I knew I had to get a dialogue going. “Hey, I’m not doing anything to hurt
you,”
rushed out of my mouth, and then, more cautiously: “What do you plan on doing with that knife?

“I’m not going to let you film.”

“Fine, fine, we won’t film. But why don’t you put away the knife.” Whenever there is trouble, the madams are nowhere to be found. We were alone now, with just the dangerously agitated clients and the usually passive young women.

“No. People like you should not come to the brothel,” he said.

My dialogue idea was working—sort of. It seemed we had both relaxed, if only slightly. “Okay. But why don’t you just let me finish what I’m doing…” I had a habit of pushing the envelope. Besides, I was still thinking about my incomplete interview.

Bad move. The client raised his knife to my throat and pressed. “Haven’t you gotten the message? We’re not going to let you continue.”

My cameraman was ready to bolt—but there was no way out. One of the clients purposefully blocked the door.

I could do nothing.
We’re goners,
I thought.
I hope he kills instead of just maims me.

That is when the girls stepped in, four of them. They just moved in front of me. “No, this is our room,” one said.

“We
invited her in, and she is going to get our stories,” another said.

“You
people should leave,” the first spoke up again.

The young women completely surrounded me now, getting between my body and the armed men. “You are going to have to kill us first,” they declared with rare conviction.

The men shouted angrily, but then left. If it hadn’t been for the girls protecting me … well, let’s just say it was a narrow escape.

The documentary,
The Selling of Innocents,
came out a year later and won eleven international awards, including an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Now I show the film in rural villages as a preventative tool. In one poor village in Nepal, a father said, “I was going to let my daughter go to a brothel. At least there she’d get two meals a day. But now that I’ve seen the film, I’ll never let her go.” That single statement meant more than any award ever could.

Ever since I was twelve years old, when I first learned about Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees, I longed to follow in her footsteps: a woman, out in the wild, studying primates by herself. Unlike Goodall, though, my imagination was fired not by chimps but by gorillas. I was awed by their size, power, and
grace. It never crossed my mind, however, to actually go to Africa to see and study them; it was always just a dream. My reality was my husband and two dogs here in the United States.

Then one day I saw that a university biology department was looking for a minority biologist to study birds in the Dja Wildlife Reserve in southern Cameroon, West Africa. Speechless, I read the announcement over and over. I was perfect, an Hispanic woman with all the experience they requested. But to me, the birds were a side interest. The most exciting aspect of the project was its location; that was where western lowland gorillas were found.
I have to give it a shot,
I thought, sending in my application. Within a week I heard from the project coordinator, we met, and she offered me the job on the spot. Two months later I was on a plane headed for Africa.

Before I left I brushed up on all the gorilla information I could find. As a result, I was familiar with quite a bit by the time I arrived. Once there, I asked members of the Baka tribe, who lived near the reserve, to teach me everything they knew about the gorillas native to the region. Generously, they taught me how to recognize gorilla sign, like food remains, feces, knuckle-prints, nests, and smells. Unfortunately for me, though, when the Baka sensed a gorilla close by, they would make noise to scare it away. And with good reason: Adult male gorillas, known as silverbacks, can be huge—five and a half feet tall, and up to four hundred pounds of pure muscle. They have been known to bend the steel frames of cages and rip apart a man’s leg with a single bite. Running from one would be pointless. They plow through thick jungle vegetation like a bulldozer, whereas we Homo sapiens could only slowly machete our way out. By making a racket to scare away the gorillas, my guides felt they were protecting me and being respectfully cautious. I soon realized that if I wanted to see any gorillas, I would have to go into the forest alone.