Aims to trace the journey of the Child for the parents and for the employer. Parents have no idea what happens to the child once he/she goes missing or taken to city with a promised dream of life changing employment. Employers have no knowledge of how did the child reach from his/her household to theirs. Sons and daughters aim of Sons and Daughters is to take the urban viewer through the journey of the child from her home to when they are placed as domestic workers in private homes in the city. Child labour for domestic servitude is rampant in major cities in India, and a growing demand in the country’s burgeoning urban middle-class. The film highlights the unimaginably organised trade of trafficked children from the depths of rural India.
The film distinguishes child trafficking for domestic servitude from child labour. Often a working child in a home is a trafficked child. The film explores how trafficking has been seamlessly integrated into the market; the market of domestic labour, the market of the easy dial-a-home-delivery.
The unsuspecting employer often hires domestic help from a “placement agency”. More often than not, the “agent” is actually a trafficker and the children have been tricked, kidnapped or forced into work. Salaries are deposited directly to the agent who pockets the money, leaving the child an operational slave. The employer is unaware of the whole process while the child remains invisible - missing from home, missing from any legitimate traceable record and living their concealed childhoods within the walls of strange homes.
This system is repeatedly justified by employers to be a form of charity to the underprivileged - that they provide food and shelter to an impoverished child. That they do not abuse their employee and that she is better off with them than with her hand-to-mouth family. The film warns that this justification is a state of denial that we live in - a convenient lie to ourselves about feeding into the trafficking system believing it is for the greater good. Not only is the employed child denied her right to education, her labour is bonded - she is a slave with no gain whatsoever for her work, no chance for a better future.
Almost every trafficked child undergoes physical/sexual torture and abuse right from her kidnapping/allurement to being delivered to the doorstep of her employer - who is also chosen by the trafficker.
Within the Indian Constitution, trafficking in children is a bailable offense unless the trafficker has been proven to have kidnapped and raped the child. This means he can torture and molest the child without having to bear consequences if he’s caught. Besides, most of these children are so young that they don’t remember where they come from and even once (if) they are rescued, it becomes immensely difficult to restore them with their families.
One child goes missing in India every 8 minutes, and 7 children in an hour on an average.
The targeted audience of this film will be the urban employer of domestic labour.