It was a wet August night in a distant village of the West Bengal state in India when a WhatsApp message from an nameless quantity appeared on 16-year-old Prodeepa’s smartphone display. Her identify and people of her relations have been modified to make sure anonymity.

“I saw his profile photo and found him really handsome. We began talking, and I immediately fell for him,” the highschool scholar from the East Midnapore district advised VOA.

Three weeks later, the boy requested Prodeepa to return with him to go to his hospitalized mom in a metropolis about an hour away.

Prodeepa advised her mom that she was going to a store within the village.

“We thought she would be back in a few minutes,” mentioned Bidisha, her mom. “But Prodeepa did not return, and the next day I received a call from an unknown number.”

The voice on the opposite finish, which Bidisha didn’t acknowledge, mentioned, “Mother, I am fine. I got married.”

Gone with no hint

The fifth National Family Health Survey report says that just about half the ladies in India’s rural West Bengal state get married earlier than they flip 18.

According to Jibananda Das, chairperson of the East Midnapore Child Welfare Committee, or CWC, social media is the best breeding floor for traffickers who’re on the lookout for little one brides.

“It is especially difficult for us as government authorities to trace child marriage victims, because the majority of these marriages are unregistered. Most such girls are therefore merely reported as kidnapped or missing,” he advised VOA.

‘Dyed hair and Coca-Cola’

With her husband unemployed, Bidisha, the only real incomes member of the household, earns about $26 a month by making cigars.

“All I wanted for my daughter and son were lives marginally better than my own. Now I feel like all my dreams have shattered,” she mentioned.

According to the National Family Health Survey, about half the ladies in West Bengal, India, are married off earlier than they flip 18. (Sarah Aziz/VOA)

New Delhi-based anti-trafficking activist Pallabi Ghosh mentioned that underage women from West Bengal are particularly susceptible to being trafficked and married off due to the acute poverty and deep-rooted tradition of “sheltering” kids within the state.

“The oldest daughter of a poor Bengali household, regardless of being a toddler herself, is compelled to be the first caregiver of all her youthful siblings,” she mentioned.

“Deprived of the attention and love of parents who are out working all day to make ends meet, many girls look for love elsewhere — usually on their phones,” the founder and director of the Impact and Dialogue Foundation, a nongovernmental group that works to forestall human trafficking and rehabilitate survivors, advised VOA.

“I handled the trafficking case of a rural girl who met a boy online and was enamored because he had dyed hair and bought her a cold drink. These girls’ exposure to the outside world is so limited that they end up trusting strangers at the tip of a hat,” Ghosh mentioned.

No cash, no justice

According to a duplicate of the First Information Report, or FIR, filed by Prodeepa’s household three days after she disappeared, the household regarded everywhere in the village a number of instances earlier than lastly reporting her lacking.

Manoj Kumar Sharma, head of an anti-human trafficking unit below the border safety forces in east India, advised VOA that economically challenged households in India are sometimes afraid of even submitting an FIR when their women go lacking.

“As national police forces, we take upon several complicated trafficking and child marriage cases, which the local police do not,” Sharma said. “It is not that they do not have the power or resources; they lack the enthusiasm and will, which is something that must be cultivated.”

VOA reached out to a few police officers in East Midnapore district, together with the sub-inspector who oversaw Prodeepa’s FIR proceedings. All of them refused to remark.

Sitting in a dingy bed room with copies of the FIR and different authorized paperwork concerning her case sprawled throughout the mattress, Prodeepa mentioned softly, “I share everything with my mother, but I did not tell her about the boy. That was my greatest mistake.”

The boy, who got here to select up Prodeepa on a motorbike, refused to take off his helmet with a face protect.

“We rode for a distance before I realized we were headed in the wrong direction,” she said. “I asked him what was going on, but he brushed it off.”

The “boy” was, in reality, a 26-year-old man. He regarded nothing just like the WhatsApp photograph.

Prodeepa was sexually abused, coerced into marriage and held in opposition to her will by the person and his household for per week.

Prodeepa, a toddler marriage survivor, flips by way of a few of the illustrations she made whereas at a government-approved rehabilitation heart. (Sarah Aziz/VOA)

Madhab, Bidisha’s older brother, mentioned that the household delayed reporting Prodeepa as lacking as a result of they had been afraid of rumors.

“People in villages talk. We had to wait until we were sure that she hadn’t married him voluntarily,” he mentioned.

‘She said I was a bad girl’

For Prodeepa and her household, there may be little hope for justice any time quickly.

The perpetrator, who comes from a well-off household, was by no means arrested.

Prodeepa was promised authorized help by a nongovernmental group, however it later backed out.

The CWC’s Das advised VOA that each one the rehabilitation facilities for little one survivors of sexual abuse in East Midnapore, just like the one the place Prodeepa was saved for a month after her rescue, are NGO-operated.

While on the CWC-approved heart, Prodeepa’s household was allowed to go to for under quarter-hour at a time.