Indian police raid a Bombay brothel.
The madams are outraged.
This is the end of a month-long Channel 4 investigation.
We've come into the roof of this brothel that we raided. Come, come.
These teenage girls are victims of one of the fastest growing industries in the world.
Sex traffic.
India's northeast is famed for its tea estates and Himalayan views.
It's the ancient crossroads of trading routes between Bhutan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh.
And the town of Suliguri has always been at the hub of international trade.
These days, that's nothing to be proud of.
According to the UN's latest figures, about 30,000 children are trafficked into Calcutta.
And a lot of them come through Suliguri.
They're the only ones left.
They're the only ones left.
According to the UN's latest figures, about 30,000 children are trafficked into Calcutta.
And a lot of them come through Suliguri.
Some are local girls, abducted from their families.
Baruka, a self-help group, is fighting to rescue the children from the slave traders.
So, Tamali, what is this sort of gallery?
This is the first girl you rescued?
She's still missing?
She's still missing?
Rescued?
Rescued.
Rescued.
Rescued.
Tamali is saying that the problem of trafficking, shown by this little board here in one village in northern India,
that the trafficking problem is getting worse, mainly because people don't understand
and the naive villagers often illiterate hand over their girls into marriage or are taken away to work
and disappear and they're simply traded in the big cities as prostitutes.
In poor families, girls are often seen as a burden who'll need a dowry when they marry.
It can sometimes make sense to send them away to work, but many don't come back.
This is Rinky. She's from a family that has a missing daughter, one of about 30,000 people who go missing in this area every year.
I'll ask you a question.
The reason we came is that we heard that...
Nehru Rai here says that his daughter Pinky was 13 when his brother turned up at their hut with a labour contractor offering her work in New Delhi.
15 days went by and then they got a phone call saying that she'd just run away.
And he doesn't believe that they allowed her to run away, he believed that they just sold her.
The poor are easy prey for the traffickers. The victims and their parents suffer an unending agony.
Jermuti Burhan stopped me on the street.
Jermuti's just run up to me, embarrassingly enough, kiss my feet, begging for help because she has lost two daughters, one aged 10, one aged 11.
The 11-year-old disappeared when she was sent off to sell milk in the marketplace.
And three years later, the same thing happened to her younger sister, who was then 10 years old.
And she hasn't heard from her daughters at all. This is a land of missing children.
It's not just local children at risk. The trade is international.
Worldwide, traffickers add 3 million women and children to an ocean of sex slaves each year.
A quarter of a million are smuggled through South Asia.
Sylligories border police struggle to stem the tide.
How do you tell who is a trafficked child, who is a normal child?
From reliable source, source information, we've got information that they may...
Ah, so you get advance warning, maybe from the Nepal side or...
Or Bangladesh side.
Or Bangladesh side.
Girls are lured into slavery with promises of jobs in the big city,
or simply kidnapped and lost to their families.
But sometimes, the family fights back.
I'm with the pro-bat. He's a security guard at the local stadium.
Now, his daughter was trafficked all the way to Bombay.
He got together with the local police and actually rescued her and three other girls.
And another 13 who were released into the custody of the Bombay police.
Your daughter's here?
Down here.
So this couple here are the people that trafficked your daughter to Bombay.
Bombay? To Bombay?
How long was your daughter Pratima? How long was she kept in Bombay?
Nine months.
How old was she?
14 years old.
Here she is.
Pratima was drugged with a spiked mango juice,
raped in Calcutta, and then sold to a brothel in Bombay.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi, Prabhat. My name's Sam.
Did they beat you a lot? Were they violent with you?
Almost everybody used to beat her.
And did you get to keep any of the money?
Did you ever ask for help from the customers?
If you tried to escape, they would kill you.
Pratima had an extraordinary escape,
because some people tracked her down to Bombay
and approached the brothel keeper.
And the brothel creeper let her go,
and she was able to be returned here to her family.
If you met this trafficker, what would you do?
I would kill him.
Pratima's father gave me some leads.
I decided to see if I could follow her route
and retrace the ordeal of one victim
of an industry that rivals drugs and weapons.
Stolen out of their fields or sold into slavery from the slums,
the traffic girls from West Bengal and Bihar
find their way onto these trains down into Calcutta
where they will begin their lives as sex slaves.
More than five million people struggle to get by
in this swampy morass of a city.
A girl smuggled into sex slavery can expect very little help.
Here, the tards have very hard hearts.
I've come to Malka's house.
As she's a madam, I'm trying to get an understanding
of how the sex works.
Why there is such a huge demand for girls,
especially underage girls.
I had a chat with one of the brothel regulars,
closely supervised by Malka
from Durba, the sex workers union.
This is Sheikh Mohammed Inam.
He's a client.
And how often do you come here?
About three times a week.
Do you ever see any girls who come to Malka
three times a week?
Do you ever see any girls here who are under 18?
Wrong question.
Malha interrupted and said,
since Durba, her organisation is working here,
there are no underage girls.
But she does point out that women as young as 12
get married in India, although the official legal limit is 18.
And in a society like that,
it's inevitable that underage girls
are working very hard to get the underage girls out.
Calcutta might look pretty scrappy at the beginning,
but it is at the centre of India's economic boom
with an enormous amount of information technology
and other industries growing up out of this mess.
And that is fueling a consumer boom
in all kinds of things.
Among the products widely sold on the streets of Calcutta's
red-light district are children.
We had to film secretly because Durba,
the sex worker's union, which controls these streets,
doesn't like cameras.
According to them, there aren't any underage prostitutes.
But near here, Pratima had been raped.
And some of these girls appeared to be in their early teens.
What's your name?
Munta.
What's your name?
Munta.
How old are you?
How old are you?
Nineteen.
Nineteen.
How old are you?
Twenty-four.
Twenty-four?
Right.
And the moon is made of cheese.
If somebody came here and they said,
we can take you away from here and give you an education,
what would you say?
Are you afraid of getting any diseases?
She can't answer, why not?
If she is twenty-four years old, why?
That means she's old enough to have sex with whoever she wants.
She's old enough to vote.
How come she's not old enough?
I was hustled.
I was scared.
I was scared.
I was hustled off the streets by the madams.
They're getting very, very angry.
We're being escorted back to their office.
We were reminded that troublemakers got acid in their faces.
The sex workers union insists that all prostitutes are over eighteen.
They don't face violence and they are not exploited.
Derba is lobbying for the legalisation of prostitution
and it's won the financial backing of the British government and Melinda Gates.
But it would have been a very little help to a trafficked girl like Pratima.
I've just come from Siliguri and up around there
where I've met a number of girls who've been trafficked
and some families of girls who have disappeared into the sex trade.
And that is not voluntary.
That is slavery and therefore anybody who has sex with them is committing rape.
And some of these girls are under 18.
So not only is it slavery and rape, but it's rape of a minor.
But Chachu Dutta is Derba's boss and the son of a sex worker.
But Chachu says that his organisation is opposed to any kind of child labour
whether it's in the construction industry or sex work
and that that is why his organisation is getting together
and has a series of self-regulatory bodies
that keep the young people and the unwilling workers, sex workers out of the trade.
He says that since 98 there aren't any underage girls working on the streets.
But I've just taken a walk on the street here
and I've met about four girls at least who were definitely not over 18
and they weren't allowed to speak for themselves.
He's stuck to the party line.
Any underage girls will not be allowed to work, they'll be rescued
and there aren't any underage prostitutes in Calcutta.
Never mind the evidence of my own eyes,
the UN says that 30,000 women and girls are forced into slavery through Calcutta every year.
I wonder whose interests the sex workers union represent,
enslaved prostitutes or the industry that enslaves them.
The scale of this problem is phenomenal.
The practiser's journey into and out of prostitution started here in Siliguri.
That's where she was captured, she was then taken to Calcutta
where she was raped and prostituted and then put on a train
and sold into Sheila's brothel in Bombay.
So I flew to the subcontinent's commercial capital.
Sheila's did seem an improbable name for an Indian brothel.
But I've been given the address of someone who could help.
The Rescue Foundation is one of the few organisations I've come across
that actually rescues women and trafficked children from the brothels
and I'm going to try and find out if they know about this woman
or this place called Sheila's brothel.
And how many girls have you rescued?
I've rescued about five girls.
And how many girls have you rescued?
That figure is near about 400 girls.
400? Just in Bombay?
No, not in Bombay. Bombay, New Bombay.
I interviewed a girl called Pratima who was rescued.
She said she was held in a brothel called Sheila's.
Sheila, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know it?
I know Sheila. In Sheila's brothel I've been rescued, I think in the last five years.
More than 28 girls.
28 girls?
Bal Krishna Acharya had a tip-off that sex slaves were still being held at Sheila's.
We're going to go and see the local chief of police
and see what he's going to do about it.
Welcome, thank you.
Panharanath Wahuli seemed uncertain about the need for a raid.
He believes that without prostitution there can be no civilisation.
This is the need of the society. This is the need of the male person.
If this need has not fulfilled, I think they will commit some rapes
or some modesty of the other good girls and good ladies in the society.
So this is the good thing for a society also.
This is my opinion.
He did draw the line at child prostitution.
If they're underage, you go in and get them out.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the assistant district commissioner seems to be keen to conduct this raid
and he's also saying that everything's got to remain an absolute secret
and we're not even going to use police from the area around the red light district
because they can't be trusted.
They're using police that come from out of their area.
Only Bal Krishna knows where Sheila's brothel is
and he doesn't trust the police.
We're heading off to Kamalthipura but the police don't know where we're going.
The target, the brothel, has been kept very closely secret
by the rescue foundation to stop any last-minute leakages through cell phones.
We're getting very close.
So that's the second floor.
This is the ground floor.
Ground floor, staircase, second floor, hiding space.
Under the stairs.
We're going to go to the other side.
If there's a leak phone on the way, we're going to the left and right.
We're going to go to the other side.
We're going to go to the other side.
We're going to go to the other side.
Now there are calls going out, warning calls.
We're going to hear them whoo-whoo.
Is this it?
This is the light.
This.
Side watch.
Please come here.
This is a secret place.
There's some girls in here.
What's that other banging?
How many?
Just keep an eye on them.
Just one.
Two.
Have a chat with these other girls and see if they want to get out.
Tell them, don't be afraid.
We're not here to hurt you, OK?
Seven.
Eight.
They're under here.
Are there any more down there?
Good God.
We have just taken ten girls.
That's ten human beings,
trafficked and hidden in this space.
Out of this tiny area,
we're going to go to the other side.
We're going to go to the other side.
We're going to go to the other side.
We're going to go to the other side.
We're going to go to the other side.
This is a secret space.
Out of this tiny hole here,
which is
four foot
by three foot,
six girls emerged.
Six.
And there were four in the tiny space that I'm in
right now.
They're all sticking to their story that they've been told to say,
25 years old,
which is self-evidently not the case.
The girls are told to wait
and two police are posted on the doors,
while Bal Krishna leads us
to another part of the building.
Bal Krishna knows that up here on the first floor,
there's a trap door that leads to another secret chamber.
He's just ranging to get a crowbar
to break this
lock.
These are the cells where young girls are forced
to have sex with strangers
just to earn their key.
We could hear voices above us calling for help.
They were short of air.
We could hear voices above us calling for help.
They were short of air.
She's tiny.
Come on then.
We've come into the roof of this brothel that we've raided,
and we've already brought down
about six girls up here.
The others are now
being persuaded to come out.
They've been shoved into this roof.
Three of the girls who've come down
have been suffering
from a sort of suffocation
and been very short of breath,
almost unable to walk.
Please take.
This is not a big deal.
Where are the girls?
They ran out.
You didn't stop them?
We both only.
But the other police?
They already came here.
But were the ones next door?
They all ran away.
What started off as an incredibly dramatic raid
has now collapsed into farce.
All of the girls have been allowed to run away
into the crowd.
How are you going to find these girls?
They will get the girls.
I hope so, because they could be in danger.
No, no, no.
Their life? Never, never.
We have your guarantee of that.
100% guarantee their lives are not in danger.
Good.
Now I see what you've faced.
A third of the girls that Balkrishna has rescued
over the last 15 years are HIV positive.
The sex trade is booming alongside India's economy.
This is being done to curb the demand for underage girls.
More and more will be condemned to an early death.
Thank you.
