How Young Kenyan Girls Are Trafficked to India to Serve as Sex Slaves

A recent BBC documentary has exposed how women from Kenya and other African countries are trafficked to India to serve as sex slaves.

The girls, mostly from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, are lured to India with the promise of securing well-paying jobs but end up living miserably after being traded for sex.

Grace, a young Kenyan girl and a mother of one says she saw an opportunity to end her family’s poverty and provide for her child after she was told there was a job opportunity waiting for her in India. The dream was shattered immediately she landed in India as her passport was confiscated by a woman named Goldie, introduced to her as a caregiver.

Grace says she is just one of the more than 1,000 Kenyan women who were lured into foreign countries in the name of getting employment only to end up as sex slaves to make money for sex cartels. In less than 5 months, Grace says she has been forced to have sex with 400 men in order to sustain herself and settle debts that she allegedly owes her “masters”, the people in charge of her living in India.

“On a bad day, I sleep with nine men, and each pays approximately $10 (about KSh.1,000). All the payments are made directly to our masters, Princess and Goldie, to cater for the costs of bringing me to Tughlakabad, Delhi,” said Grace.

Grace also says the ‘cartels’ have invented a new way of trafficking women into India, where women pretend they are traveling there for cancer treatment, only to be engrossed in the deep ends of the sex trade. The people named masters are mainly former sex slaves who have mastered the art of the trade and use it to make money by recruiting other young girls, according to Grace.

Here, women are paraded in brothels that are referred to as the “kitchen”, where the majority of the buyers are African men working or seeking education in New Delhi.

“I hated it so much that a man has to come and pick you up the way you go to the market and pick potatoes,” recounted Grace amidst tears.

A sex session is said to have a standard price of 1,000 Indian Rupees (KSh.1,400), which is paid to the mistresses until the bondage of 270,000 Indian Rupees (Sh390,000) is recovered.