Phil@Stop the Traffik

If you've ever visited Mumbai as a tourist, you'll probably have been to Colaba. It's where you can see the gateway of India, and where the famous Taj Hotel is. The Taj is a wonderful old building, where the rich and famous stay whilst in Mumbai and has boasted many world leaders, kings and Bollywood stars amongst its guests. Sadly it became briefly famous last year as the scene of a terrorist attack, with pictures beamed around the world of smoke billowing from its roof and guests hiding in the basement. I'm happy to say that it soon bounced back to it's former glory with typical Indian resilience.
We certainly never had enough money to stay at the hotel, but it did have a good bookshop,which was free to visit, so we went down there now and again.
There was something disturbing about the area around the Taj, though. The guys selling flutes to the tourists were ok, and the children begging were sad, but we could chat with them as we were working with street kids just like them at the other end of the city. What was disturbing was what was going on in the streets behind the hotel. If we walked down there, we would be offered young girls for sex. When I say young, I mean seven, eight and nine years old. Amongst the street kids we worked with, we saw the average age of the prostitutes get less and less, as men thought this was the way to avoid contracting HIV. There was even a rumour that if a man who was HIV positive had sex with a virgin, then he would lose the infection. The effect on the lives of children was devastating.
When it came to hotels such as the Taj and the other major hotels, often these children were being marketed to business people staying there. The money attracted the traffickers. Often the hotels had no links with this, yet still it happened in the area around them. In other places in the world the staff of major hotels do know what is going on and profit from it.
So, we started to research and eventually decided to launch Business Travellers against Human Traffiking. It was based on the simple realisation that most business travellers hate the fact of the exploitation that their money can attract, and want to do something about it. Via the website www.businesstravellers.org we give an easy place to report what you might have seen, so we can take it to the police. The project has seen women rescued and helped around the world, and I'll tell some of those stories in later posts. Do check out the website, it could lead to a life being changed for ever.