Background
To research for Sold, author Patricia McCormick traveled and interviewed people who had experienced the "system" of sexual slavery. This system has "native girls believing they are going to get jobs," when really they end up "in brothels with no way to escape." To observe more about the system and interview the people in it, McCormick traveled to "a shelter in Kathmandu" and a village in the Himalayas. McCormick based the village Lakshmi lives on those she traveled to. She also spoke with girls and women in Calcutta's red-light district, where she learned about the many horrors of the system from two teenage girls who had escaped it. McCormick explained that "part of them became Lakshmi." McCormick also spoke with those who sold the girls into the system for profit. When she interviewed one man who was in prison for selling his fiancee, McCormick says, "He told me, without a trace of embarrassment, he wanted a motorcycle . . . He was utterly unconcerned about his fate; he knew he would get off in court."6
Read more about this topic: Sold (novel)
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