City in Focus: Kolkata, India
PRAYER BRIEFING
Kolkata has long been famous as an overcrowded city with its teeming millions living in abject poverty. Mother Theresa gained global recognition for her tireless service in the slums of the “City of Joy,” ministering to the poor, sick, and dying. While malnutrition and disease are obvious derivatives of destitution, poverty also breeds the often-overlooked horrors of human slavery. A combination of factors makes Kolkata a sex slavery hot spot: the vestiges of a devastating caste system that sentences millions to a pitiful standard of living, even while much of the country is making modern economic advancements; the burgeoning population of nearly 8 million people forced to live in overcrowded squalor; and the apathy afforded by the dharma, a pervasive philosophy that insists that everybody is living a life they are destined to live based on eastern notions of reincarnation. For all of these reasons and more, a prostituted woman in Kolkata is a human being who is forced to live as an animal.
Many trafficked women began their lives of bondage in rural India where brothel recruiters routinely harvest young girls by deceiving their parents with false promises of a better life with better job opportunities. Other women were similarly abducted in nearby Nepal or Bangladesh and then easily trafficked across India’s lawless borders. Still others are sold for profit by their husbands who often sell them to a brothel the very night of their wedding. Once in the Red Light district of Kolkata, these young women begin an endless night of forced prostitution. If they resist their plight, their spirits will be quickly broken by severe beatings and gang rapes. Brothel-Madams orchestrate every horror by negotiating prices with buyers based on virginity, time of day, age, and the sexual act. The Indian government initiates feeble efforts of social reform such as encouraging the use of condoms, but buyers often ignore these pleas—and the pleas of the girls—and go without for just a few rupees more. What’s worse, brothel girls are often bred and their children are raised for prostitution, extending this unspeakable life of torture, filth, and disease to another generation. For these girls, women, and children, there is seemingly no hope of escape.
MINISTRY OUTREACH
JaJatiyo Kristiyo Prochar Samity
JKPS is a well-regarded evangelism and church-planting ministry based in Kolkata, West Bengal Province. Workers minister to the poor, plant churches, provide Bible teaching, and minster to the 70,000 sex workers and slaves in the province. www.partnersinternational.ca
House of Revival
This international ministry began in Kolkata in 2002 and ministers to the women and children in bondage. House of Revival provides food, care, and shelter to the victims of sex slavery in Kolkata, as well as the hundreds of nearby villages. By pairing mercy ministries with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they have been effective in transforming lives in this hopeless region.
PRAYER POINTS
- Pray for Revival to hit Kolkata, that God’s power would overcome diseases spread through the sex trade, and the oppressed of the city may become a trophy of God’s justice, righteousness, and mercy.
- Ask the Lord to end legalized prostitution in this city. Ask for the deliverance of all sex slaves.
- Contend that the Lord would change the legislation to provoke state and central governmental law enforcement agents to arrest traffickers across state and national borderlines.
- Ask for truth and light to impact the efforts of current law enforcement.
- Pray that the Lord would protect and guide victims that have been rescued amidst various protection services.
