Sasmita's Story - A Life Transformed

“No one ever loved me”

Sasmita* has been forcibly married to three men

The first when she was a child:  just 12-years-old

By the time Sasmita was rescued by our human-trafficking response team, she was 22-years-old.  At an age when most of us are only beginning to think of marriage, Sasmita had endured three forced marriages.

When The Freedom Project rescued Sasmita, she was recovering from a terrifying attack by a stranger.  As you are about to read, violence has been a recurring theme in her young life.

On our most recent trip to India in October, Sasmita wept in the arms of our staff. We were confronted with two starkly different realities: firstly, the level of trauma that Sasmita had endured and secondly, how safe she now felt. Indeed, this shy but proud woman felt safe enough to share with us a glimpse of the horror she had suffered. 

Sasmita was born and raised in a village in West Bengal. She has wonderful memories of her early childhood with a mother she adored, but when her mother was tragically killed, Sasmita’s life began to spiral downward.

Sasmita was forced into work at the age of 12, toiling for many hours each day in a garment factory. Not long after she began working there, she was abducted by a middle-aged man, a manager in the factory. He drugged her and forcibly married her. When she escaped rather than being welcomed home by her family she was shunned.

This led to a sequence of unimaginable horrors. Sasmita was sold into an abusive marriage, later sold to a pimp, and when she thought she had finally found a man who genuinely cared for her, her third husband, he abandoned her.

As Sasmita was returning home from work one night in an auto rickshaw, she was robbed, beaten and thrown in a forest area. Once she regained consciousness, she went to a nearby house where the
owners called the police.  It was during the police medical investigation that it was discovered that Sasmita was pregnant. When the police contacted her husband refused to take care of her.

With nowhere else to turn, Sasmita was taken to a government shelter where she delivered a baby girl in December 2016. Thankfully she was soon transferred to our safe house, Azadi.

Sasmita beamed with pride as she told us about her love of baking. Since March 2019, Sasmita has been leaning how to bake at our Heart of Baking initiative. The Heart of Baking is our in-house social enterprise where the survivors in our safe house are provided with training in the commercial baking of bread and cakes. The goods are then sold to local schools.

We are growing our capacity on the ground in India to rescue and restore more lives like Sasmita. Your support for The Freedom Project truly has the power to transform the lives of the vulnerable.  

Sasmita* pictured with fellow survivors in the Heart of Baking kitchen, October 2019.