2015 South Asia MA alumna Jessica Bachman is studying Bengali in Calcutta this summer, and recently provided photographs for The Guardian on new public art highlighting the crisis “the missing girls in India” who are forced in prostitution.
Each year in India tens of thousands of girls go missing in a country where an estimated 1.2 million children work in the sex industry. Many are abducted by commercial sex traffickers and forced into prostitution. Missing, a nationwide public art project launched by the artist Leena Kejriwal as a memorial to victims of sexual slavery, now has hundreds of participants in cities across India.
View the rest of the photo essay here.