In places like Thailand and India, these girls begin their careers as sex workers as young as 12 years old. The Banchara community calls the practice of placing your eldest daughter in the sex trade “Nari Mata.
Those words mean she will add years to an already life sentence as a slave to the sex industry. She will add countless more nights of being used by men who don’t care about her.
Som is getting older now … much older than the average sex worker in Thailand. But once her fourth child arrives, she will likely have no choice but to return to dancing and selling her body to earn an income. It’s the only thing she knows.
Although she didn’t wear physical chains, she was nevertheless a slave — a slave to poverty and to a society that normalized treating women like property.
During the worst moment of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, between 800,000 to 1 million people were killed in 100 days. Most were hacked to death with machetes.
