Missing: The story behind the Indian game tackling sex trafficking

“In empathy for the millions of girls who disappear from the face of the earth.”

Leena Kejriwal is an acclaimed Indian photographer and installation artist with a passion for city life. “I love what shapes space, what shapes people, their history, their geography, their socio-economic structure,” she says in a video call with me. It’s a passion which took her into the heart of Indian cities with her camera time and time again. And it was on one such expedition, she found herself in a situation she would never forget.

She found herself in a red light district, looking at girls too young to have any idea what they were doing. ‘Why were they here? How did they get here?’ she asked herself. And why was this being allowed to happen?

These are questions Kejriwal would spend the next 20 years trying to answer, repeatedly revisiting red light districts all over Kolkata, talking to the girls there and trying to understand the challenges they faced.

This work culminated in The Missing Art Project in 2014, at the India Art Fair, where her now iconic Missing silhouette was born. It’s a lifesize silhouette of a young girl designed to represent the millions of girls lost to the black hole of sex trafficking every day. India alone has more than 98 million sex trafficking victims, according to the Missing Link Trust website. 98 percent of them are female, and half of them girls.