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This city, home to both great wealth and terrible poverty, has been in the public spotlight because it served as the setting for the Academy Award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire. As great as it is, that film offered only brief glimpses into the horrors of Mumbai's slums and the sexual slave trade that flourishes in a city dominated by Hindus and Muslims, with only a small population of Christians.
It's estimated that more than half a million people are forced to sell their bodies in Mumbai. Most are kidnapped from small villages in Nepal, Bangladesh, and other rural areas. Many of the women are devadasi, worshippers of a Hindu goddess who were forced into prostitution by their "priests." Some of the prostitutes are male hijras, castrated men. They are packed into filthy tenement houses and forced to have sex with at least four men a night. They have spread the AIDS virus rapidly, and millions have died.
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