Ending Sex Trafficking in India, One Village at a Time

Sex trafficking in India rarely starts with a stranger and a van. It starts with a promise, a job, a marriage, a way out of poverty, and it ends in captivity. Most victims are girls, and most are trafficked into sexual exploitation.

My Choices Foundation (legal entity: Her Choices Trust) works from the other end of that pipeline: prevention, not rescue. We built relationships with NGOs already working in high-risk communities, listened to where the national response was falling short, and ran landmark research into what actually drives the men who buy and sell girls for sex. That research became the Safe Village Program.

The programme works because it doesn't rely on one intervention. It trains girls, boys, mothers, fathers, teachers, and village custodians together, so the whole community, not just one household, is watching for the warning signs. A comic book, printed in the local language of every area we work in, does much of the teaching, because it works at every literacy level, reaching the people who most need this information and are often the ones least likely to get it any other way.

We operate the Red Alert Helpline (1800 419 8588), India's only national helpline dedicated specifically to trafficking. Villages call in about traffickers, but also child marriages, missing persons, anything that doesn't feel right. We follow every one of them up through our network of partner organisations and police.

To date, we've delivered over 11,000 Safe Village Programs and trained over 8,000 village custodians. Our helpline has handled over 99,000 calls from people reporting risk or seeking help. Partners consistently report the same pattern after these interventions: awareness goes up, and cases go down.

A village doesn't stay safe because outsiders warned it once. It stays safe because the people living there are watching for each other, permanently, long after our team has moved on.