Who could be more motivated to battle the huge problem of child prostitution than former victims? By giving them an education and helping these young women through law school, India’s School for Justice wants to educate the girls and change the system. As one of them says: ‘I want to take action and fight back.’
Instead of creating just another awareness campaign, J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam developed the idea for a School for Justice in collaboration with the Dutch NGO Free a Girl. The school opened its doors in the spring of 2017 with the aim of preparing its’ students to enter law school, give them a first-rate education to eventually become prosecutors and lawyers. Director Juliette Stevens spent a week in India to interview the students on camera and create the campaign film.
She recounts her trip as an intense and confronting experience, but also warm and loving. Her all-female crew listened to the girls’ often heartbreaking stories and recorded enough footage to—maybe, at a later stage—produce a longer documentary on the subject in addition to the current two-minute film. Because perpetrators of child prostitution are seldom punished in India and the girls’ exploiters still walk around free, Juliette was not able to show the actual School for Justice, whose location remains undisclosed. The students’ determination is as real as anything, however.
