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KOLKATA, India, Jul. 30 (IPS/GIN) -- Shanti, 19, had never stepped outside her village of Thakarnagar in India's West Bengal state. So when her best friend invited her to board a bus to a neighboring village to meet some 'relatives', she readily agreed.
Instead, the friend took her to the railway station, where they boarded a train for a 2,000-kilometer ride westward to the bustling metropolis of Mumbai.
Within 48 hours, Shanti found herself sold to a brothel owner in the notorious red light area of Kamathipura.
Eight months later, scarred and broken by sexual abuse, she was rescued by police and transferred to Liluah, the West Bengal state government's remand home in Howrah. But by then, she was five months pregnant and HIV-positive.
Nupur from Murshidabad was trafficked into prostitution at 14. Though rescued by police in 1995, her actual 'release' from custody only happened this year.
For the past seven years, she has been a captive of the state that took little interest in her plight and allowed her to languish at Liluah while her case dragged on in the courts.
Shanti and Nupur are grim examples of what happens to hundreds and thousands of nameless victims of the highly profitable business of prostitution.
Whether coerced, duped or abducted into the flesh trade, these women and girls seldom escape the clutches of pimps and brothel owners and are often doomed to lives of sexual slavery.
Even when rescued and shifted to welfare homes for rehabilitation and reintegration into society, stigma...