One Woman’s Fight to End Human Trafficking in India
By the time Sunitha Krishnan was eight years old, she was teaching dance to children with disabilities. By twelve, she was running makeshift schools in India’s slums. Today, she leads one of the world’s largest efforts to rescue and rehabilitate children trafficked for sex.
At fifteen, while working on a literacy campaign for the community known as the Dalit, which means “oppressed” or “broken” in Sanskrit, Sunitha was brutally gang-raped by eight men who resented her efforts.
Although left partially deaf from the attack, she transformed her trauma into a relentless drive to combat human trafficking and sexual exploitation. At the age of twenty, in 1996, Sunitha founded Prajwala, meaning “eternal flame,” an organization that, three decades on, has become the largest anti-trafficking shelter in the world.
“The youngest I’ve rescued was three years old. The youngest I’ve seen in a video [posted online] was six months old,” Sunitha, who last year published the memoir “I Am What I Am,” told More to Her Story.
The horror of sex trafficking in the world’s most populous nation often unfolds in the place where children should feel safest: home.
“Some children are kidnapped, especially from low-income families. But many girls here are not kidnapped but abused in their own homes,” Sunitha continued bluntly. “And their abuse becomes recurring online content.”
These kidnappings or forced disappearances are mostly carried out by organized trafficking gangs and recruitment syndicates, sometimes with permission from family members and often under false pretenses — promising education, jobs, or marriages. They prey on vulnerable families in impoverished and tribal regions, luring children with deceptive offers.
Once lured, children may also be kidnapped directly by individuals known to them or even by family friends, particularly from states like Bihar — some traffickers pose as companions or guardians before abducting minors. Traffickers most often originate from within India in states where economic precarity makes families susceptible. They often operate networks extending to Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, and even across borders.
The kidnapped children, Sunitha explained, are gradually manipulated and broken down.
“Many are groomed from as young as three or four years old, made to watch sexual acts, and gradually introduced to abuse. By age nine, they are completely conditioned to do as they are told,” she said.
Sunitha stressed that this is a systematic stripping away of innocence. The children lose their sense of self, becoming tools for the exploitation of others. Sunitha and her organization take great risks in intervening. Prajwala teams conduct covert, intelligence-led raids in partnership with police and survivors working as decoys or counselors, to rescue victims from brothels or trafficking rings; they coordinate verification, legal action, immediate crisis support, and often repatriation for foreign nationals.
Yet, even when rescue is possible, the damage cannot be undone.
Sunitha Krishnan speaks at at Pune International Centre on March 26. Photo credit: Courtesy of JioLeap
“For those kidnapped into trafficking, many even don’t remember their families, especially if they were taken very young,” she said. “And for those where the abuse happened in their homes, well, imagine there is nowhere to go.”
Sunitha tells me of one girl kidnapped at age five to create sexual videos for online audiences on the dark web.
“She was told her parents were dead and given a new name. When we found her four years later, she had completely forgotten her past,” Sunitha said. The children, reduced to mere property, are prepared for sale, their bodies manipulated for profit, she said.
“Many are given oxytocin injections to hasten puberty,” Sunitha continued, her eyes falling.
Making matters worse, many of the rescued children have been infected with HIV as a result of their abuse. The Prajwala team then works to ensure they receive medical and psychological treatment.
The organization has served over 28,600 survivors, most from the lowest of low in the lingering remnants of the country’s bygone caste system — a system that was officially abolished by India’s constitution in 1950.
India is estimated to be home to over 3 million people in sex work, with 40 percent of them trafficked children, and nearly 40,000 children abducted each year, most of it internal trafficking. Across the Asia‑Pacific, an estimated 29.3 million people are in modern slavery (this equates to 6.8 per 1,000 population), with countries like North Korea, Afghanistan, and Myanmar having the highest prevalence rates, while India leads in absolute victim numbers.
“The number of victims of human trafficking has risen each year since 2020,” says Tony Schiena, CEO of the Mosaic Group, a Multi Operational Security Agency with a strong presence in India, emphasizing that cases are drastically underreported, in part due to deep-rooted cultural taboos around discussing such crimes — especially when the majority of victims come from historically marginalized lower castes, whose suffering is often ignored or deprioritized by authorities.
Legal Implications
Sunitha pointed out that her country’s legal system, when it does respond, is frequently too slow and poorly prepared to provide timely justice.
She recounts a heartbreaking case six years ago: the organization rescued 36 children, and the police, she said sarcastically, “did excellent work completing a charge sheet in three months.”
The wheels of justice have since ground to an agonizing halt.
“Six years later, the case still hasn’t gone to trial,” Sunitha said. “The traffickers are out on bail, using legal loopholes to delay proceedings.”
These criminals, fully aware of the system’s frailties, exploit every loophole to prolong their freedom. Beyond trial delays, traffickers often bribe or intimidate witnesses, while child victims face re-traumatization in courtrooms lacking sensitivity. Weak investigations, missing evidence, a shortage of prosecutors, and overloaded courts all contribute to a system so fragile that traffickers not only stall justice—but routinely escape it.
“The longer they stall, the harder it is for child victims to testify,” she asserts. “Over time, memories fade, and victims don’t want to relive the trauma. The traffickers know this, and it helps them escape justice.”
Sunitha explained that her government is aware of the trafficking issue, but real action is limited.
“There are over 350 anti-human trafficking units on paper; these lack investigative powers, and cases are often passed to local police with other priorities,” she continued. “The legal system is overwhelmed, understaffed, and under-resourced, with judges handling up to 100 cases daily.”
A Path Forward
Ashok Sajjanhar, a former Indian Ambassador and President of the Institute of Global Studies, concurs that “child sex trafficking in India remains a deeply troubling issue with alarming growth.”
“One of the biggest challenges in addressing this crisis is the lack of comprehensive national data, which leads to underreporting and misclassification — many cases are recorded as kidnappings rather than trafficking,” he explained. “This makes it harder to track patterns, allocate resources, and implement effective interventions.”
A former United Nations consultant on Transnational Crime, Adam Saeed, also pointed out that “India operates under a federal system of government, which means anti-trafficking efforts are governed by both central (federal) laws and state-level policies.”
“Success or failure across the different regions is potentially uneven,” he noted. “A thorough legal and policy review would be necessary to assess the efficacy of existing frameworks with greater accuracy.”
However, this is where a prominent part of the problem lies, according to advocates.
Ambassador Sajjanhar stressed that despite existing legal frameworks and intervention measures, such as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act of 2012, which addresses child sexual exploitation, the Juvenile Justice Act of 2015, which ensures care and protection for vulnerable children and the Trafficking in Persons Bill of 2021 that aims to tackle trafficking (but remains pending in the Upper House of the Indian Parliament, known as the Rajya Sabha) government efforts “struggle to keep pace with the scale of the problem, leaving countless victims vulnerable.”
“To combat child sex trafficking more effectively, the passage of the Trafficking in Persons Bill (TiP) has to be expedited to provide a dedicated legal framework. National databases will have to be set up to track trafficking cases and trends accurately,” he noted.
Sajjanhar emphasized the need for community education programs to raise awareness about trafficking signs and the critical role of reporting. He also highlighted the importance of bolstering rehabilitation services, increasing investment in mental health care, education, and job training for survivors, and improving collaboration with neighboring countries to combat cross-border trafficking networks.
In sex trafficking, there are things people can never fully explain — the shame, the humiliation, the overwhelming sense of rejection, Sunitha continues. This trauma is often even more severe for girls, who face lifelong stigma, gendered violence, and cultural barriers that deepen their suffering.
She is a dedicated believer in the power of movement therapy, detailing how the healing process offers a glimpse of hope amid profound pain, and underscoring that while the scars of trafficking run deep — especially for girls — the human spirit remains resilient.
“Through movement, victims can express what’s been locked away. Sometimes they go into a trance and release what they’ve held inside. The drumbeats, the rhythm — it calms the mind. It’s therapeutic,” Sunitha added. “It’s because your whole being is so turbulent after experiencing sexual violence. I know this from my own experience 37 years ago. It’s something I carried with me for so long. But it didn’t, it doesn’t, define me.”