Girls as young as five are being sold into the multi-billion dollar sex trafficking industry, said Ruchira Gupta, founder and president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, at a talk here May 24. “The numbers of trafficked girls are going up, while their ages are coming down. This is the most urgent human rights crisis of our time,” stated Gupta, noting the youngest girl she had met in the course of her work in Mumbai brothels was seven years old, and had not yet begun to menstruate. “Sex trafficking is a demand-driven industry,” said Gupta. The U.S. State Department noted in its annual “Trafficking in Persons” report for 2016 that millions of women and children are victims of sex trafficking in India. Traffickers increasingly use websites, mobile applications, and online money transfers to facilitate prostitution, and children continue to be subjected to sex trafficking in religious pilgrimage centers and tourist destinations, noted the State Department.

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