Face to face encounter with sex trade was life-changing moment

As an 18-year-old David Skivington did the same thing lots of young people his age do when they are hungry for adventure.

He took a year out before going off to York University to explore the world. The son of a vicar who grew up in a sleepy Norfolk village, he suspected there was more to life than he had already seen. He also already had a streak of altruism running through him, so he knew wherever he went travelling, he wanted to do something that would make a difference. India seemed the perfect place for him to discover the disparities between the privileged life he led in England and that endured by people on the other side of the world.

Little could have prepared him for the rude awakening he discovered once he arrived in Calcutta.

“I was told by people that it was a place that got under your skin and into your heart. I didn’t know how true that was before I went there,” says Skivington, 30.

On his first night in Calcutta he was walking down a street in the middle of the busy city, home at the time to 16 million people.

“A man came up to me and the friend I was with and asked if we were looking for young girls,” says Skivington. “He then showed us a load of polaroids of young girls who were for sale. We were horrified and I realised how naive I had been about the world.

“It was the first time I was directly faced by human trafficking and the sex trade and it just really shook me up.

“Seeing something like that made me open my eyes and ask questions. It also made me want to tell people about this horrific thing that was happening in the world.”

It was a key point in the young man’s life and set him on a path to today where he has written his debut novel, a story set in India that faces head-on the awful story of human sex slaves.

“It was one of those moments that define you as a person. It makes you think that once you know something like that is happening in the world, you can’t just stand by and let it happen. I just thought that I had to do something to challenge what was going on.”

The first thing Skivington decided to do was educate himself. He returned to the UK and headed to York University to take a degree in Theology. Although he was one of only three Christians on his course, the attraction for him following his India experience was to discover more about the religions that govern the country.

“I was really interested in finding out more about my own faith, but I also wanted to learn about other faiths and find out what it meant to other people. It was great to study the Bible, but it was also interesting to learn about the history of other religions.”

After his degree, Skivington took an MA in Development Studies, which meant examining countries in the developing world. It lead to more travelling and he spent time in South America. While completing his MA, he also met an inspirational teacher.

“He was a lecturer who used to actually start crying when he talked about working with AIDS sufferers in Glasgow. He was the only person I had been taught by who ever cried and it made me realise it wasn’t just a subject to him, it was something much more real,” says Skivington.

“That’s when I realised the importance of what I was studying in people’s lives.”

After completing his MA, he started teaching religious studies in a school where many of the young people knew little about their own country, let alone the rest of the world.

“It helped that I knew about places like India and South America, it meant it wasn’t just showing them pictures in a textbook, I could actually talk about real experiences.”

Those real experiences, the ones he’d come face to face with in India, continued to plague him and he still wanted to do something, anything, about the horror of being offered a young girl for sale. He decided to channel his experiences into writing a novel.

Scar Tissue tells the story of Rachel, an English woman who travels to India where she is faced with the same horrors that Skivington experienced.

His book talks about not just human trafficking, but also the intricacies of the Indian caste system, and how that has an effect. When a system continues to keep some people unequal, Skivington believes, vast injustices will occur. His book has taken three years to realise, but he’s delighted that it is finally out, not least because he uses it as a platform to promote not only awareness, but also highlights some of the charities that work to help people in the situations he experienced.

The book is dedicated to his wife Bee, who he met while at York University. While he is proud of the book and the fact that he hopes it will raise awareness, it was not an easy road for him.

“I did a lot of research into the facts and figures about human trafficking, it was important that I got it right,” he says. “Some of the facts and figures were horrendous and while I was writing the book I had to often stop and take a moment – it really affects you when you face some of this stuff.”

Skivington and his wife also contribute to tackling the problem by going out to India regularly, where they work for a charity called Life Association in Andhra Pradesh, teaching in an orphanage school.

After the book was published, the couple went to India and had an experience which reinforced why he had written it.

“We were in Calcutta and my wife was ill, so I went out to get some food. I was on the same street where I had been 12 years earlier and a man approached me again, offering to sell some young girls. Exactly the same thing and it was just so sad and upsetting.

“It made me really glad that I had written the book. But it also made me realise that there is so much work still to be done.”

Book will support charity efforts

SCAR Tissue, as well as telling the story of human trafficking, promotes several charities that deal with the issue, including:

Life Association: Provides homes and schools for people from the slums of Mumbai. www.lifeassociation.org.uk

Dalit Freedom Network: Human rights and development charity working to end human trafficking and slavery in modern day India. www.dfn.org.uk

Stop The Traffik: A global movement that campaigns against human trafficking. www.stopthetraffik.org

Nvader: international human rights organisation that rescues victims. www.nvader.org

Scar Tissue is available now. All sales through dfn.org.uk raise money for the charity.