SOLD the Movie: Behind the Scenes
Christopher Buck: It’s hard to wrap your head around, but you did answer a question I was just getting ready to ask was there a real Hope House?
Jeffrey Dean Brown: There is, and it’s still being constructed. And interesting, Hope House was…on Mother Teresa’s death bed, she asked this woman to bequeath the land to this school so that this could be created for the children of sex workers in Sonagachi.
Christopher Buck: Was there a real Lakshmi?
Jeffrey Dean Brown: There was. Her name was Shahana, and she was interviewed by Patricia McCormick, the author of the novel that we optioned and adapted. There are in India, every year, there are many Lakshmi’s, trafficked from the Nepali side into India, there are about 15 to 20,000 girls every year that are trafficked. But there’s also a lot of girls trafficked within Nepal that are being sold to tourists, climbing tourists. And, within the US.
Jane Charles: But, the stories are very similar because it’s an economic issue in Nepal. So, when you talk about India and Nepal and the story that happens in Sold because Patricia McCormick made that trip through Nepal and India and talked to many of the NGOs. Jeffrey and I made the same trip and talked to the same NGOs, met many of the survivors and heard the stories. This is usually, in that part of the world, about wanting a better life, about sending a child to have work in another country hoping that they’ll send money home, and unfortunately, that’s not usually the case.
Jeffrey Dean Brown: There’s only, two or three variations, uh, to how it works. The girls are offered a job, the parents are given some money, and they are told that they’re going to work as a domestic servant or they’re going to go train at a beauty school or work in a factory. There are different things that are told to them. But, the money that’s given to their parents is then used as if they owe a debt. So, say they get, $100 or $150 or $200 from the trafficker to the parents, then the child supposedly has to work off that debt. But, they never can because they’re also paying for their room and board, they’re paying for medical services, they’re paying for their clothes. So, it’s basically, a whole mental way of entrapping the children in what they think is real. But, it’s just a way to manipulate them, and it’s called debt bondage. And it’s the same thing in labor slavery. Say, you’re a poor family. You have to borrow money for the medical expenses of one of your children. For $18, your whole family might be enslaved in labor slavery for several generations. This is how it works. This is what the traffickers do. And in the US, they use other methods of coercion, but it’s always coercion. So, if a kid is a runaway in the US, and she runs away from being molested at home by her mother’s boyfriend, she’s found on the street at a bus station, the pimp/trafficker, takes care of her and finds out everything about her, then he knows how to manipulate her, he knows where she lives, and he threatens the rest of her family. If she doesn’t cooperate, he’ll kill someone in her family. So these are the methods of coercion. But, there’s also physical brutality that’s often used. And this is why most of the kids have, PTSD because they’ve been physically brutalized, often, broken with multiple raping by the traffickers themselves.
