Noted anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta, the founder president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide--a grassroots Indian organization--of women and children involved in the flesh trade, told a White House conference on October 28 that thousands of young girls continue to languish as slaves and prostitutes in India but that her organization offers hope for these children through a model that can serve as a template for other cultures as well.

Gupta speaking at the conference titled 'Success against Slavery: Strategies for the Future and Promising Practices in International Programming', said, "Today is Diwali, the festival that celebrates the goddess of wealth and prosperity Laxmi, while one goddess is being celebrated, there are hundreds of thousands of young girls in our country who are in situations of captivity as bonded workers and child prostitutes.It is time for us to celebrate and protect our daughters who are each goddesses in their own right," she said, while conveying to the more than 100 delegates at the conference which also included senior Congressional aides, Administration officials and representatives of leading nongovernmental organizations Diwali greetings and urging them "to take a pledge in your hearts to think of each girl at risk as a goddess to be celebrated not violated."

Gupta won an Emmy for her documentary on human trafficking The Selling of Innocents, and has worked with several United Nations agencies in various capacities to develop international standards to combat trafficking and assist countries to develop national action plans against trafficking.

Gupta argued that Gandhian community based initiatives were the most promising and sustainable strategy to protect survivors, victims and those at risk to human trafficking and slavery, combined with a concerted effort to curb the demand for sex trafficking by increased convictions of profiteers from human trafficking.

She noted that the Indian government had an amendment to the Indian anti-trafficking law pending in Parliament, which if passed would penalize buyers and severely punish traffickers, and predicted "This would make a big dent in the sex-trafficking trade."

She acknowledged that "we understand that change does not happen from the top down in the lives of nations or women. We help women organize and imagine the change that they thought could not be achieved. Apne Aap Women worldwide has been organizing these women and girls into small cooperatives known as self help groups all over India and these are linked simultaneously with livelihood, learning and legal protection by our team members."

Gupta said that "the options that we create for trafficked women and girls are more sustainable because the livelihood options are based in the local economies and are braced with legal protection and the small group structure that allows women to support and rescue each other.As with every example of profound transformation from Gandhi's experiments in living to the civil rights movement in the United States and Alcoholics Anonymous internationally, we help prostituted women to create their own small and continuing groups, and do the same for their children."

Gupta asserted that "our groups seek not to mitigate the circumstances of sex-trafficking but to end sex-trafficking�we seek complete transformation, not simply reform."

"We have been able to bring out the link between caste and prostitution and are currently working on recommendations to reduce the same for the National Commission for Women," she noted.