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Amy Turner, 27, of Polo Fields, was riding through the red light district of Calcutta, India, two years ago when a young girl tried to hand her a baby through the window of a taxi cab. Translating, the driver said the girl was pleading for her to take the baby and give it a better life.
Turner had been exposed before to issues like human trafficking, prostitution and poverty there while working with several nonprofit organizations.
But that was the moment that really changed her.
“That was the moment I realized I had to do something,” Turner said.
Last year, Turner began a locally based effort called RescYou to help women and children who have been victims of human trafficking in India. So far, she's raised $2,000 through the sale of T-shirts specially designed for the cause. The money will sponsor children born in brothels to go to school.
“We want to provide them with education so they can come back and rebuild their communities,” Turner said.
RescYou is made up of Turner, two friends and five board members. Turner is putting an application together for a 501(C) 3 status so the group can become an official nonprofit organization.
T-shirt sales are just the beginning, group members say. They want to create other ways to raise money and awareness for an issue they care deeply about. The group's mission statement is “turning off the lights in the red light districts around the world.”
The U.S. State Department's 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, citing United Nations figures, estimated there were nearly 1.4 million victims of “commercial sexual servitude” worldwide.
Turner, a graduate student in art therapy at the University of Louisville, has seen the problem firsthand.
In 2008, she went on her first trip to India with Faceless International, a nonprofit group that organizes trips for people to learn about social justice issues. Turner was one of 25 who visited smaller villages and the larger cities of Visakhapatnam and Kurnool. While there, they met missionaries and others who were working on issues such as poverty, HIV/AIDS and human trafficking.
In the summer of 2009, she returned and spent six weeks at the Destiny Center in Calcutta, where women rescued from the sex industry live while they receive job training and independent living skills. She also spent time at another shelter for children of sex workers in the heart of the city's red light district, where Turner said there are thousands of girls working, some young as 9 years old.
She learned the vast majority of women and children had been sold into prostitution by poverty-stricken families or stolen from their homes. The women make little to no money and are punished severely by their pimps and brothel owners if they try to escape, Turner said. She said organized crime lords are often involved, and the police are often complacent.
When she got home, she contacted Abigail Stoutimore of New Hampshire and Kris Byerly of Florida, two participants from the Faceless International trip, and asked them to help her start RescYou.
“How could I resist?” Byerly said. “Once you've seen what real poverty, what real anguish, looks like, it changes you.”
Byerly, a graphic artist, designed a T-shirt logo, a woman's face that appears to be disappearing. Spend Yourself, an apparel company in Middletown that sells T-shirts to raise money for selected nonprofits, produced and sold the shirt. They've sold 100 for about $20 each. Turner said she's giving the money to the shelter in Calcutta, which will use it to sponsor children's education. She said it will pay for about seven children to go to school for a year.
The group is planning a return to India in October. They'll visit the shelter and re-establish contact with the missionaries and others they've met. They are now brainstorming ways to expand their mission.
“I feel personally responsible. I've met someone who had been trafficked. I know their name,” she said. “If I can help in some shape or form, then RescYou has accomplished what it set out to do,” she said.
Reporter Niki King can be reached at (502) 582-4248.
RescYou
Polo Fields woman fights human trafficking | courier-journal.com | The Courier-Journal
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