THE FREEDOM GALLERY FOR GIRLS:
ART SUPPORTING THE STRENGTH, FREEDOM AND RIGHTS OF GIRLS IMPACTED BY MODERN DAY SLAVERY
50% OF PROCEEDS FROM ART PURCHASED IN OUR "SHOP" WILL BE DONATED TO
ROOM TO READ, THE SANAR INSTITUTE AND APNE AAP,
THREE ORGANIZATIONS SUCCESSFULLY SERVING THE RIGHTS OF GIRLS
THROUGH PREVENTION, ADVOCACY AND RESTORATION SERVICES.
100% OF DIRECT DONATIONS MADE BELOW WILL BE SPLIT BETWEEN ROOM TO READ, THE SANAR INSTITUTE AND
APNE AAP WOMEN WORLDWIDE.
Apne Aap:
Prostitution is not a choice but an absence of choice based on gender, class, caste, ethnic and race inequalities that the sex industry exploits.
Our approach is to help the Last Girl re-gain control of her destiny. The last girl is poor, female, low-caste, and a teenager. She is preyed on by traffickers because of her lack of choices and forms the “supply”. Traffickers and clients/johns who buy and sell these girls form the “demand.” Our approach simultaneously tackles both the “supply side” and the “demand side” of the sex trafficking industry from the grassroots to the tree tops..
We enroll the Last girl in an Apne Aap network and help her gain Ten Assets over a period of 3 to five years. The Ten Assets are:
1. Safe Space
2. Education
3. Self-confidence
4. Political power
5. Government authorized IDs
6. Government subsidies like low-cost food, housing, health care and loans
7. Legal support to file police complaints and testify in court
8.Savings and bank accounts
9. Livelihood linkages like vocational training, markets, jobs
10. Nine friends or membership of a self-empowerment group.
The Assets either reduce her risk to being trafficked or creates an exit strategy from prostitution by reducing her dependency on the brothel system and creating choices other than prostitution. Once a girl gains all ten assets, this has a multiplier effect as she then influences and enrolls other girls to gain the ten assets. Also, as part of the Apne Aap network and of the smaller self-empowerment groups, she scales up the work by campaigning individually and collectively for changes in laws and policies that affect hundreds of thousands of her sisters. 20 % of our work is to create exit strategies among girls and women who are victims of prostitution. 80 % of our work is prevention among daughters of women in prostitution and girls and young women trapped in caste communities suffering from inter-generational prostitution.
Apne Aap Founder:
Ruchira Gupta is the Founder and President of Apne Aap Women Worldwide – a grassroots organization in India working to end sex trafficking by increasing choices for at-risk girls and women. She has striven over her 25 year career to highlight the link between trafficking and prostitution laws, and to lobby policy makers to shift blame from victims to perpetrators.
She testified in the United States Senate before the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000, and she lobbied with other activists at the United Nations during the formulations for the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons — resulting in the first UN instrument to address demand for trafficking in Article 9.
In 2009 Gupta won the Clinton Global Citizen Award and in 2007 , she won the Abolitionist Award at the UK House of Lords. In 2008 and 2009, Gupta addressed the UN General Assembly on human trafficking. She won an Emmy in 1997 for her work on the documentary “The Selling of Innocents,” which inspired the creation of Apne Aap. Her work has been featured in 11 books including Half the Sky by Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof.