In India, numerous castes practice customary prostitution (Dolson, 2014; Jha & Sharma, 2016) that is either religious (e.g., Devadasi) or tribal (e.g., Bacchara, Perna, Nat, Bedia) based. Little is known about tribal-based prostitution. Among the Bedia, sex trafficking has manifested as a customary and intergenerational form of family and community survival. Intended as a “micro-analysis” focused on small regions (e.g., a town) or those with “special, delimited populations,” (Weitzer, 2015, p. 232) two research questions guided this study: First, what are the multiple intersecting social and personal vulnerabilities that put Bedia at risk for trafficking into the commercial sex industry and how do these compare with the HT literature? Second, to what extent does sex trafficking among the Bedia reflect the dominant HT discourse—with particular attention to the “ideal” victim and perpetrator conceptualizations? As a phenomenological investigation, in-depth interview data were collected from 31 sex-trafficked Bedia women and girls residing in seven multi-caste villages in central India. Data were analyzed using MAXQDA. With the exception of poverty, vulnerabilities to sex trafficking among the Bedia do not reflect “risk factors” identified in the HT literature. Similarly, the social and cultural dynamics of sex trafficking among the Bedia defy the dominant HT discourse in multiple ways. This investigation highlights the inherent value of small-scale, micro-studies for revealing the complexity of human trafficking across cultures and geographies. Other members of the research team include Kaitlin Roselius, BS; Sarah Erwin, MS, PhD (c); Jessie Peter, MS, PhD (c); Jhaveri Panshal, PhD; Ranjan Mischra, PhD (c) & Sahu, S., MS.
Dr. Rochelle Dalla is a Professor in the Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For the past two decades, her research has focused on human trafficking in the commercial sex industry, especially as it relates to family-facilitated child sex trafficking in unique contextual settings. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Human Trafficking.