Dutch filmmakers Chris Relleke and Jascha de Wilde’s 2002 film, Starkiss, depicts a young girl gripping a rope with her teeth as she is spun several meters in the air in front of a mesmerized audience. The film explores the enslavement of children in Indian circuses, what the filmmakers describe as “a world hidden behind the spangles, spotlights and smiles of the big top.”
I spent much of this year in India, investigating different modes of trafficking that occur within various trades—from domestic servitude to brick kilns, from bangle factories to brothels. But even I was shocked to learn about the trafficking of young children into the circuses of India. Impoverished families—particularly in Nepal, where young girls are considered to have more exotically attractive features and flexibility— are approached by agents who manipulate parents into “contracts” that trade their children for a pittance. The girls, as young as five years old, are taken to be trained in often terrifying and degrading acts, like the “starkiss” (see video at bottom of post).
I talked to India’s Childline, a coordinating body appointed by the government to develop systems of advocacy and research on the rights and protection of children. It also operates a 24-hour hotline to assist children in need of care and protection (“1098″ within India).
Komal Ganotra has worked with Childine for the past three years and has been actively involved in circus rescues and drafting legislation that deals with the issue. I spoke with her in Delhi.
Human Goods: How many children are involved in India’s circus industry?
Komal Ganotra: If we’re talking about people under 18 years old, there are an estimated 300 – 400 children involved. It’s a very rough estimate because we have not visited all circuses. But we are intercepting a lot of children who are being trafficked on the way. We guess there are about 300 circuses operating in India, many of them very small, and we cannot access them all to see how many children they exploit.
HG: Where are most of the children who are trafficked into the circus coming from?
KG: Most of the children were coming from Nepal. We understand that they are reducing—the numbers coming from Nepal are getting smaller but still they’re coming. Several years back the trend was that it was mostly Nepalese children, but the traffickers are finding out that the laws are very strict—the Indian law is very weak with traffickers but the Nepalese law is very strict.
HG: Why are Nepalese girls more appealing than Indian girls who can be trafficked domestically?
KG: Some circus owners have said that they wouldn’t take an Indian girl – that the kind of flexibility Nepalese girls have cannot be found in an Indian girl. They say that genetically the Nepalese have a very flexible body to perform, so they prefer those children. Biologically I don’t know if that’s true or not. But they feel that Indian children cannot do those things. They often get trafficked from within India, near places like Darjeeling, because there are many Nepalese settlers living there. The girls from Nepal are considered to be more exotic.
HG: To the Indian eye.
KG: Of course.
HG: Why is the Indian law weaker than Nepal’s legislation?
KG: Well, the legislation on trafficking from India is not that strong; trafficking to India is a little stronger. That’s what the government says on record. But the fact is the law doesn’t address trafficking for labor. The legal framework addresses trafficking for sexual exploitation. Suppose a girl is being trafficked for prostitution, then it’s a big deal and we have a very strong law in place. But if a 14-year-old girl is being brought from a rural place to work in domestic labor, its very difficult for India to prosecute the trafficker. The legal framework doesn’t give much scope. Just bringing a girl from one place to another to get work does not merit prosecution. So that’s the problem—the legal framework is so weak that you’re just not able to prosecute traffickers. And in Nepal the legal framework for trafficking is pretty strong.
We intercept traffickers—like we get calls from people who see one man with seven girls in an area near the Nepal-Indian border. We get a lot of cases like that. But then when you intervene and take him to the police, the girl will say, “He’s my uncle.” It’s very difficult at that moment to prove that this is a trafficker. Even if you get through in individual statements, you find anomalies in statements, partly because the police don’t really understand how to interview or execute the case. So we’ve not had many successful cases of prosecution in India.
HG: Do the girls say that because they’re afraid of the traffickers, or at that point do they still believe they’re going to do legitimate work?
KG: There are both kinds of trafficking. There’s trafficking under threat, where once you’ve left your village, all you know is the trafficker. All other people are strangers to you. So you stay with the trafficker because you don’t know what the police or an NGO is going to do to you. You stay out of fear. You might be worried for your family, because traffickers are also influential people within villages. Second, sometimes when girls are trafficked there is some kind of exchange of money between the trafficker and the parents. So they feel obligated because the trafficker has paid 1,000 or 2,000 rupees ($20 – $40), which is like peanuts. The girl’s understanding is that this man has paid her parents, so she is obligated to work. And if she doesn’t work, there will be problems for her parents.
There is also the promise that you will be able to learn things in the circus, that you will learn to perform and in Delhi you can be in movies. And the amount of money you can earn is much higher after five or six years. So they give a very rosy picture of the situation.
HG: Is it mostly girls being trafficked to the circus?
KG: It’s a greater number of girls, although there are boys too. It’s like an 80/20 ratio. Every circus would have one or two smaller boys.
HG: How big are these circuses?
KG: There are different categories of circuses in India. One includes very small groups that perform in the open and just put their tent around them. This would have ten to fifteen people. Proper circuses have poles. They’re defined in terms of having poles – a two-pole circus, four-pole circus, six-pole circus, eight-pole circus. The number of people in a two-pole would be less than 20. An eight-pole circus would have at least one hundred. The number of poles determines its capacity—the number of performers, the size of the audience, the kinds of acts.
HG: Where do they perform?
KG: The small circuses work on small budgets, because now with television, the internet, and so many options for entertainment the circus has not remained a very popular option. So they now access the suburban areas where people don’t have as many technological options and people would still go to watch the circus. In bigger cities, the amount of people they get is diminishing.
Older circuses have now started hiring foreign artists – Russian and British—to change their ways, to modernize. But the smaller circuses are the ones who are having problems, and that’s where the exploitation is primarily happening.
HG: So the bigger the challenge of drawing an audience, the greater the degree of exploitation?
KG: Yes. A couple of years back, there was a ban on using animals in circuses. Animals used to be a big attraction. But animal rights activists had these issues against the circuses, and the Supreme Court came to a decision that you cannot have animals in captivity in circuses anymore. They use dogs and birds now, but they can’t have elephants and lions. So they’ve lost a lot of visitors because animals aren’t there. That was one of the attractions for children.
HG: Did that result in increased trafficking of children to those circuses?
KG: Yes. You have to maintain the attraction of the circus. When you don’t have animals, you have to have more acts featuring humans. And one thing the circus owners have told us is, We can’t start training a person who is 14 years old to start performing in a circus. Indian law says child labor means below 14 years old. A child’s dexterity of fingers and muscles is very good around 8, 9, 10 years old. So the child has to start learning at that age so they can perform later. The owners tell us, If you want artists, the artists have to be trained early.
The problem is that if they train at 9 years old, they will have no schooling. And the training process is demanding: They get up at four in the morning to be trained, from four to 12. Around one pm the show starts, and it goes until 12 at night. They sleep at 12 and get up in the morning again at four to practice.
HG: What does the training involve?
KG: They learn all the acts of trapeze, gymnastics, hanging from a pole, whatever acts you see in different circuses. It’s often a situation where they’re hanging from a height. They start very early, around eight years, and what we have come across is that children say the learning part is the most stressful. When girls come in, they come with very rosy pictures. But when you’re a little girl and you’re made to stand at a height and hang with one hand , you say, I want to go back home. This is the time when they try to run away. They’re then beaten with wet ropes. They’re stripped in the presence of others.
On our first rescue, the police and the labor department went with us. We wanted all the girls to be removed and brought to us, and then asked whether they wanted to be in the circus or not. But the police did not agree. In front of the circus owners, they asked these girls, Do you want to stay here or do you want to get out? None of the girls said, We want to get out. Only the girls whose parents had come from Nepal got out.
Those girls said, We had a very high level of threat. The circus owners also do mock exercises of rescues. He has is own people coming and asking if they want to get out.
HG: Like a test? Sounds like a KGB technique.
KG: Exactly. And if they say, Yes we want to get out, they’re often stripped in front of others, beaten naked. In one of the circuses we visited in Haryana, the girls started crying in front of the circus owner, saying that they didn’t want to get out. We were so confused, all the girls saying they didn’t want to get out and crying. What was this? We decided to remove them anyway and ask them if they wanted to go back or not, though this was not a rescue, it was a negotiation with the circus owners. We took them two kilometers away and asked them if they wanted to go back. They didn’t.
HG: How many rescues have you done?
KG: I know of three circuses that we have rescued. Two of the rescues have had children – girls who have reported rape or regular sexual abuse, like the owner coming to watch when the children were taking a bath. It’s a situation of total threat and power that is being used to abuse the children. You don’t understand why they don’t run away. But there are so many threats and no options. They’ve been in that custody for seven or eight years and they don’t know anything else. Even if you want to get out, you don’t know any other life that is possible for you. You don’t have an alternative: that’s the only life. There’s no other social life outside of the circus. No other family life, no other friends. They can’t go out of the circus without permission. No woman or child could go out alone. You live in custody: You eat what they give you and go where they tell you.
Childline India works with the Esther Benjamins Trust to rescue and rehabilitate girls trafficked from Nepal to Indian circuses:
HG: How do these children end up in slavery?
KG: We have recovered bonds which the parents and the circus owners sign. They tell the parents, “We’re taking your child for ten years for training in the circus, for about 100 rupees ($2) per month, or a one-time payment of up to 10,000 rupees ($200).” But then what happens in the children’s mind is that this is a loan that has been given to the parents, a debt against the child. They think, if my father has taken 10,000 rupees for me to work, I cannot go back unless I’ve repaid that.
HG: What do these documents, or “bonds,” look like?
KG: They usually say something like the child will be trained for a certain number of years, and after that period the child will be issued a certificate of satisfaction, so they can go somewhere else. The whole point is, that they say it has been notarized, meaning with a government stamp. But there is no such thing as authorizing a child into work this way, it doesn’t exist. The parents think it is a legal document that they have signed, and therefore they think they cannot get their child back.
HG: Can the parents even read it?
KG: Most of the time, no. They sign it with a fingerprint when they can’t write their names. The parents don’t understand that this document has no value. It’s illegal. But the parents think the deal is done, and so they won’t even approach to try to get their children back. It’s a sheer and total violation of the law where the people don’t even understand what’s happening to them. It’s a threat.
HG: What happens if the parents decide to try to get their children back anyway?
KG: Many times, when the parents have come from Nepal to the circus, and the trafficker has brought the child to that circus, they will just transfer the child from one circus to another. The circuses are all interconnected. Or they will try to just sell the performer. They advertise, this is a good performer, and try to sell her off. The parents are not able to trace where the child has gone.
HG: Are they still traded this way when they’re adults?
KG: When they are adults they have more power to do their own bargaining. But this gets into another related phenomenon: forced marriages. When a girl gets older, like 16 or 18, the owner might become concerned because he doesn’t want her to leave the circus. So he will force her to marry someone else in the circus. Most circuses have adult couples staying as performers, and a lot of these marriages per se are forced. The girls are compelled to marriage. This is a trend we’ve been witnessing in the very recent past. Before, children would go back to their villages more frequently to marry, but now the number of children who are going back is drastically reducing.
HG: When people do go back, are they accepted into the community?
KG: It’s very difficult. That’s why we have a specific process of rehabilitation in Nepal. When children are going back to their villages, the Esther Benjamins Trust operates a halfway home, a facility and training center for the rehabilitation of girls who have been trafficked to circuses. If girls are just sent straight back home, they usually end up in worse situations. But that depends— parent to parent, area to area. It also depends on the age and attitude of the girl. But as a general rule, children that go right home are re-trafficked. Or married into situations that are worse.
Most of these girls when they go back, they feel very left alone in their situation. They’re down in the interior in one village where you really don’t know what to do. Your parents would expect you to work and contribute for meals, which you don’t want to do now after having been in the city. There, you have some amount of exposure, but here you don’t have a road, you don’t have a community that’s accepting you. Your community has questions for you—where were you? What were you doing? So the situation these girls face is very difficult.
The only alternative you have is to send these children to homes, which is also not a long-term alternative because they would be in the home until they were 18 years old and then they would have to go back to the village. There are organizations, like International Justice Mission, that are working on comprehensive rehabilitation. But this is not happening for the majority of children who are being trafficked, even from Childline. Even in the 83 Childline units that are running across India, we’ve not been able to have that kind of a rehabilitation practice. We usually have to use our links to other organizations because we’re not always present in the source area to see that rehabilitation occurs. We don’t have a system where the government would take up the responsibility – that’s a very gray area.
HG: Is this an invisible problem in India?
KG: It’s been happening in India for years. As an outsider, you almost never really see the exploitation that’s really happening. But trafficking has always been happening here. The trafficking of Nepalese children has always been there, but it hasn’t been recognized by child protecting agencies—the scope of the problem or how it worked. Reporting was negligible. Organizations from Nepal started working in India about 10 or 12 years ago, that’s when more work for the children of Nepal started happening. This is the time that trafficking was also reaching a peak. Around 1999/2000 trafficking was increasing. The domestic need for labor in India was much higher. More circuses started emerging. There were only a couple of organizations working on circuses at the time, including EBT. So it’s only in the last six years or so that rescues have been happening, although the children have always been there.
HG: How long does a rescue operation take?
KG: For us, every rescue is an exercise that goes beyond two months. The last rescue we did, our staff was in the field for about 50 days. We have to travel to the city, find out about the local organizations, figure out who’s who. The process of rescuing—filing papers, medical files, reporting – everything takes about 12 days at the place of rescue. And then you have to restore the children and follow-up with rehabilitation. It’s very intensive work. It needs a lot of time and attention. And the rehabilitation process is difficult. Our last rescue freed 14 girls, about 8 of whom were children, and we’ve been struggling with their rehabilitation. Dealing with the parents, mobilizing the district administration because they need some kind of compensation. For each child you have to go to the city itself and work out the details. If we were using a system that ran well to deal with this issue, it would be straightforward.
HG: Besides rescues, what other avenues are you pursuing to eradicate the problem?
KG: Now we are taking more of a legal route. If we do find smaller children in exploitation, we’re going in to rescue, but we’re also working with the judiciary. We want guidelines from the Supreme Court to say that children should be removed from circuses. And if there are children under 14 working, to articulate what should be the regulations under which they can stay or go.
HG: What are the current regulations?
KG: Right now no government has any record of any circus. We filed a couple of applications under the Right to Information Act to state governments, and asked them how many circuses are registered in their states: How many have performed in your states in the last two years; what is the mechanism of approval when the circus comes to your cities? And believe me, all have said there are no circuses registered, no circuses performed. India has 300 circuses and no state has said that any of them have performed! The fact is, there is no mechanism to document them. Every circus has to be approved for fire safety, it has to get permission for the area it uses, it has to get a water connection, an electricity connection. They take all this, but there’s no recording system – anyone who wants to throw a party must get these permissions. But there’s no specific licensing for circuses. If I open a factory, I must have a license from the labor department. But there’s a very big loophole for circuses when it comes to the exploitation of children. The Court has asked for guidelines from NGOs that work on the issue as well as governmental departments to submit a structure of how they think the system should work.
HG: What’s the public response from audiences who go to circuses?
KG: Pretty much zero. There’s almost zero awareness. It doesn’t show up much in most media, and very few people go out of their way to access such articles. For India, trafficking is not that much of an issue. Trafficking for labor is not an issue for most Indians. Child labor is not an issue. It’s a question of livelihood. What I’ve come across – even in educated circles – when I tell them not to employ a 13-year-old for domestic work in their houses, they say, “Come on, I’m giving them a better life.” The attitude does not question, why is this child working? Why is this child not in school? Why is this child even here?
HG: But is there a distinction in the eyes of the public between a child who is getting fair treatment and wages, and a child that is abused and exploited?
KG: Definitely. When there’s abuse—an employer beating the child or forcing them to work for long hours—then people frequently report it. But if the child is dressed well, healthy, then people feel like they have raised this child themselves. The employers believe they’ve done a great deal for that child and given them opportunities.
HG: And haven’t they?
KG: If that’s their motivation, why keep a domestic servant? Why not adopt the child?
For more information, check out last year’s article in the Times Online, and the Esther Benjamins Trust.
Excerpt from Relleke and de Wilde’s Starkiss
Democracy Now! interviewed 
