Two women who escaped prostitution rackets have cleared the state higher secondary exam this year.
Their scores do not matter. That they showed the gumption to leave behind a traumatic past and return to the classroom makes them real heroes.
The first survivor cleared HS five years late but is the first in her family to do so.
After a cumbersome legal battle she was awarded a victim compensation of Rs 8 lakh in December 2022.
As recently as January 2020, the other survivor was in a brothel in Bharuch in Gujarat, raped multiple times a day by unknown men.
She is yet to get any compensation.
A 23-year-old survivor from Joynagar, South 24-Parganas, scored 212 out of 500.
“I know the score is not good. But I want to continue studies and make it up ingraduation,” said the woman, who wants to pursue a career in social work.
In January 2015, when she was 15, a call from an “unknown number” triggered a chain of events that led her to a brothel in Mumbai. She was rescued after three months.
At that time, poverty had already forced her out of school, said a social worker. Her father collects discarded plastic bottles and other scraps and sells them to a dealer. He has four other children, two of them boys.
She was rescued in April 2015. After spending over a year at shelter homes in Maharashtra and Bengal, she made it back home in December 2016.
The first few of years after rescue were difficult.
“She was taunted by her neighbours. Her old friends looked the other way. She was in a very bad shape for a couple of years,” said Pompa Ghosh of Goranbose Gram Bikas Kendra, an NGO that works with trafficking survivors.
Supported by her family, she decided to restart studies. The journey was not smooth. Taunts from classmates forced her to skip school for weeks. Her father and social workers visited the homes of the students and talked to their parents.
“There were two options — to keep being haunted by the past or try and build my own future. I chose the second,” she told Metro on Tuesday.
“The local police had not pressed trafficking charges at first. They were added and the case transferred to the anti human trafficking unit after the court intervened. The survivor has been steadfast in her resolve to see the guilty punished,” said Ghosh.
The survivor got married six months ago to a tailor who knows of her past, Ghosh said.
A 19-year-old survivor from Basirhat in North 24-Parganas scored 220 out of 500.
A graduation course is her immediate target and the job of a police officer her ultimate goal. She has persisted with studies despite repeated taunts from her neighbours and classmates.
“My father is finding it very tough to bear the expenses of college admission and private tuition,” the survivor told Metro earlier in the week. Her father is a daily wage earner in a brick kiln.
She has her plan sorted, though. “I want to finish my graduation and try to become a police officer. But if I can’t, I want to do a BEd course and become a teacher,” she said.
She is looking to earn some money as a private tutor.
On a rainy evening in January 2020, she and a friend were on their way home from private tuition when they were allegedly stopped by a bunch of local youths.
“They were literally abducted. Their families filed a police complaint after they did not return. They were eventually traced after a customer at a brothel in Gujarat took to them kindly and called to inform their family members of their location,” said Bikash Das, a social worker with the Teghoria Institute of Social Movement, the NGO that has been supporting the survivor.
The survivor had to undergo several counselling sessions before she started talking to people. “She was shattered, physically and mentally,” said Das.
She was readmitted to her old school. But the mental harassment continued. “Her classmates refused to sit with her,” said Das, who, along with social workers sat with the teachers and villagers to sensitise them.
Two accused in the case are out on bail, said Das.