The Sex Slaves Of Kerala

A lucrative human tracking network preys on vulnerable women in Kerala and sends them to the GCC countries. The police finally crack down on it.

- Jeemon Jacob

West Riffa, Bahrain’s second largest city, is home to the Gulf sheikhdom’s extremely well-heeled, including the king and several of his ministers. It boasts of an iconic clock tower, the national stadium and rows of well furnished four-storeyed residential buildings. Sona (not her real name), a 22-year-old housewife-turned-beautician from Kochi, describes one such low-rise as being straight out of hell. She was lured by recruiting agents in Kerala who promised her a job, imprisoned here by a human trafficking network for 59 days and forced to sleep with hundreds of men who flocked to the city on weekends. She was among a dozen women imprisoned in one of three sparsely furnished flats of the building, tortured and forced to entertain 8-9 expatriate workers each day, each of whom was charged Rs 7,000 for a half-hour. Refusal meant torture in the makeshift brothel. One of the traffickers broke her left leg with an iron rod when she refused a client.

Sona was released, but only after her husband in Kerala paid Rs 2 lakh to a pimp in Kochi in September. Fearing that she would be harassed further, she did not complain against her tormentors at first. She now sits in a two-bedroom flat in a suburb of Kochi as she recounts her ordeal in hell (see interview). The dark side of the Gulf Malayali boom which sees some 2.5 million employed in the Gulf countries alone (close to a million more in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) and whose annual remittances of Rs one lakh crore keep the state’s economy afloat. Sona is the prime witness in a sordid “Gulf sex industry” that the Kerala police estimate is worth Rs 50,000 crore.