Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Second Post Sam Martin - Mind Control
There are 1.2 million child prostitutes currently being abused and cheated in India, according to Fox News. Most of these girls have no idea about what is going to happen to them before it is too late. When Lakshmi goes to the city, she thinks she is going to be a maid for a rich woman with a roof of gold. She is tricked into believing that she is going to be sending home money to her family every month, so that her brother may have a sweater, so that her mother may have cloth, and her step father a vest. When she comes to the Happiness House, and isn't working as a maid, she is scared and confused. "'There is a mistake,' I tell her. "'I'm here to work as a maid for a rich lady'" (chapter Sold - page 105). Lakshmi had no idea what she was facing until she was literally in bed with a man. The amount of girls forced into this brutality is astoundingly tragic. Here, in Marin, we constantly take our own free will for granted. Imagine if here, young girls grew up in the shadow of their father, forced into whatever he said. Imagine if our own fathers, or step fathers, sold us into sex slavery without us even knowing it.
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This was a subject I was also very interested in. Where we live, nothing even close to this ever happens to anyone. We should all consider ourselves very lucky. In an article by CNN, it stats that many patents who sell their children into sex slavery are very poor. They usually come from very poverty-stricken areas with few job opportunities. Most parents who sell their daughters into the sex trade are extremely desperate, and do it as a last resort. Other parents however, are tricked into selling their daughters by wealthy "businessmen" who offer the girls a life full of luxury working in a big city. Almost all of the girls go thinking that they will make enough money for the whole family and that they will begin to have a better life. Mind control is one of the biggest problems of sex slavery. In the brothel where Lakshmi is kept, the headmistress is aware that there are organizations that are working to shut down all brothels, so she tells the girls that all Americans who come in are evil and never to trust them. The girls believe her, as there is no one there to say otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this post Sam, thank you. I also found some evidence of mind control in the second third of the book. It was upsetting to me that the girls came into Lakshmi's room and gave her lassi, a yummy yogurt drink that I have tasted myself. She isnt expecting that there are drugs in the lassi that make her more submissive. Im not quite sure what sort of drugs they were, but it was certainly enough to force her into losing her virginity. Although all of the things that Mumtaz tells the prostitutes are a type of mind control, I see it more as manipulation. The drugging of the prostitutes is a more literal form of mind control, because if they use a certain kind of drug, why not use drugs such as rufilin or LSD? These are more extreme but much more effective when it comes to the job of forcing people to do things. Scary, yes, but very possible. Here's an example of the lassi incident that horrified me so much: "After a few minutes, I feel odd. And soon her image is fading in and out like lantern light".
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