About Rani
Rani was born and raised in Southern India. Her parents loved her very much, but they were concerned that they would not always be able to provide for her. At the age of seven, Rani was given to a social worker who promised her mother that she would provide her with good food, clothes, and an excellent education. In realty, this social worker was recruiting children for the human trafficking industry. Instead of providing little Rani with the things her mother wished so much for her, she sold her to a child broker. Her mother didn't even know she was gone until it was too late. She went to visit Rani one day to find that her little girl was gone.
Between the age of seven and eight, all Rani remembers was crying day and night for her mother. The trafficker who bought Rani was running a brokerage firm for children under the guise of an orphanage. When he would come in possession of children he would sell them to his clients. Rani was imprisoned in what was being called a homeless shelter. She was forced to do things she did not want to do and was severely beaten and abused by these child traffickers. Due to her battering and trauma, she appeared physically and mentally ill. Her broker decided that the best use for here was to sell her into the black-market. This was a blessing in disguise, as there were much worse fates for other little girls that are bought and sold in this vile industry. In 1979, Rani was given freedom through adoption into the United States. Although she was eight years old at the time, Rani remembers very little of her past, but through research, she now knows that victims of child trafficking are many times held captive in cages, beaten, starved, raped, tortured by foreign objects, forced to be in child pornography, and forced into a slave-like existence.
In 1999 Rani visited India for the first time in twenty-one years. She investigated her past and was able to discover what had happened to her that brought her out of a loving family into the life of being a commodity. She was told that her mother had died. Miraculously, out of billions of people in India, Rani found her birth mother in a tourist hotel. Rani discovered that her mother had searched for her for years, but had been told, as Rani had, that she was dead.
A year later she returned to India. On that trip Rani's heart was changed forever. There was an experience, a single moment, from this trip that put her on the road to what she does today. While walking down the street, she saw a very frail young woman standing on the corner of the street. When Rani looked into her eyes she saw a world of despair. Those eyes were empty of any hope, aspirations, or dreams. Her eyes were silently screaming for someone to reach out and help her be free of slavery. Rani knew in that moment, as tears that she could not help were streaming down her face, that someday, she would help this helpless woman's voice be heard all around the world.
Now, Rani goes back to her homeland often, encouraging other children who have been trafficked. She has walked through the street of Mumbai and seen cages where human beings are held hostage. She has even walked on the land that was purchased because of the profit from her sale. She knows the reality of child trafficking because she has touched the reality of her own past.
Copyright © 2006 The Tronie Foundation