The auditorium fell dead silent when Dr. Sunitha Krishnan stepped onto the stage at TED India on November 6. And Tedsters around the world, watching via a live stream webcast, were transfixed.
The diminutive, soft-spoken, anti-trafficking crusader, who was gang-raped as a teenager, began her talk with the heart-wrenching stories of three children – Pranitha, Shaheen and Anjali – whom she rescued as part of her work with Prajwala, an organization she co-founded in 1996.
Pranitha’s mother, Dr. Krishnan said, had been an HIV-infected prostitute, who, when she became too ill with AIDS to work, sold her then four-year-old daughter to a broker who prostituted her. Little Pranitha, whose angelic face smiled from a huge screen behind Dr. Krishnan, was raped repeatedly by dozens of men day after day before she was rescued.
The second toddler, Shaheen, was so brutally sexually assaulted after being trafficked that her intestines burst through her abdomen, and had to be surgically re-inserted into her body.
According to Dr. Sunitha the biggest challenge she faces while rescuing the girls is not from the people who are involved in the business but the biggest challenge is "Our civic society". They do not get the acceptence from our so called "Civic Society". My biggest challaenge is the block of you of me to accept them as one of them. In her own words
"It’s very fashionable to talk about human trafficking in this fantastic AC hall. It’s very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. It’s not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. It’s not nice for our children to study with their children. There it ends. That’s my biggest challenge."
They need you compassion, your empathy more than anything else they need you acceptance.
For more about Dr. Sunitha krishnan and her work please explore at :
Watch her talk at Ted India
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