Rick Miles' first Sold blog post

For this week I read up to page 90 in Sold. For Lakshmi her entire life revolves around hard work and responsibility. She is very aware of the financial struggle her family is in, which is mainly caused by her stepfather. She often offers to her mother to go to the city and work as a maid the same way that her best friend Gita did. Her mother always declines. After the situation with her stepfather and his motorcycle, he takes Lakshmi to the city and she is told that she is going to the city to be a maid. The haggling going on between her stepfather and her "aunt" suggested that her stepfather knew all along that she was not going to be working as a maid. The amount of money her stepfather payed confused Lakshmi because she had not even done the work yet and that suggests that her father was selling her as a slave. The discussion about Lakshmi's hips strongly implies that her father knows that she is being sold as a sex slave. From the conversation Lakshmi had with her mother about how to treat the people she is serving and how to be a maid makes you think that her mother thinks that she is going to the city to work as a maid rather than a sex slave. All of this makes me wonder weather or not Lakshmi's friend Gita who went to the city, went to the city to work as a servant or as a sex slave like Lakshmi will become.
According to ABC there are millions of child slaves in India alone and the majority of those are girls sold to work in brothels as sex slaves. ABC estimates that over half of the girls sold into slavery are sold by their own families. The desperation you would have to reach to sell your own child to be sexually abused shows what an impact poverty has on a family and how important it is to fight for families to not have to do this to survive.