Summary Of The Film Born Into Bothels

3. Keeping in mind the criticisms of the film Born into Brothels, was it necessary to remove the children from Sonagachi in order to save them? What does the film, overall, say about the politics of saving children from other cultures (10 marks)?

The concept of child saving has hit the world as a new phenomenon, everyone wants to be a saviour and take a child out of poverty and struggle, but who puts these visions into our thoughts? Commercials like World Vision and Save the children paint a picture into our minds that make it seem as though third world children are begging for our help to take them out of their horrible situation. Although some situations may be heinous, a lot of the time these organizations make it seem like the child is isolated and alone. They have a child look directly into the camera lens as though he or she is making eye connect with you, then they show the surroundings as garbage filled, and most importantly more so than not they never show the child’s family or guardians. As mentioned before there are obvious cases were this may be true but these organizations over exaggerate the condition in most. Sponsoring a child and giving monthly donations is helpful, although how the donations are being spent may be controversial, but the issue being brought forth now is removing children from their original life.

Cultural relativism is the idea that individual behaviour must be understood by others in terms of the individual’s own cultures values and practices; cultural relativist argue against child saving. Wells (2009) argues that child saving efforts based on a liberal conception of what it means to be human, but who gets to decide that. We as a first world nation impose our beliefs onto third world countr...

... middle of paper ...

...n over family.

The situation these children were in is different from what we as westerners are use to so obviously we will feel the need to help, but it must be understood that not every culture has the same values and beliefs as the next one so forcing education onto them may not be the best way to go. Avajit and Kochi were privileged enough to experience new things but in a follow up video found online Avajit expressed how much he missed his home; he felt blessed to have this opportunity to go to university in New York City, but nonetheless he still missed Sonagachi. From the commercials on television and the posters we see of children that should be rescued but you assume that they are happy to leave but that is not always true. Born into Brothels was an great film in terms of awareness to such situation but how it was documented was manipulated by Briski.