Adidas's World Cup T-shirts blunder exacerbated a wider problem of how Brazilian women are perceived

"Do you go to the beach topless?" This is a question that Brazilian women find themselves being asked when interacting with people (mostly men) who are not Brazilian. I am sorry to disappoint, but I have never once in my life gone to the beach with no top on – nor should anyone be asking me that.

The hypersexualisation of my nationality is something that I have lived with my whole life. Whenever I travelled, my mother warned me about the stereotypes of Brazilian women abroad and told me to be careful, worrying that I would not be taken seriously because of this.

Sexualised images of women have been used for decades, reeling in visitors to Brazil with its sex tourism reputation and the lure of the Girl from Ipanema.

This was presumably what Adidas was alluding to this week when they unveiled their 2014 World Cup T-shirts featuring sexual images. One of the T-shirts had a picture of a woman in a bikini with the phrase "Lookin' to Score"; the other appeared to be of a woman's behind. To many this will sound incredibly funny, but it's hard to laugh when you live in a society that is as sexist as Brazil.

Almost immediately the backlash erupted, with even President Dilma Rousseff taking to Twitter to criticise the Fifa sponsor's callous act – and the retraction of the shirts followed. However, it seems too easy to blame the ignorant designers at Adidas.

Considering that the most popular kind of entertainment for foreign visitors in Brazil is watching a woman dancing in revealing carnival gear, it is understandable how this sexualisation is perpetuated. In 2012 the Ministry of Tourism asked 2,100 websites linking prostitution and pornography to Brazil to remove official travel branding, but given Adidas's T-shirts blunder it seems this reputation is still very much alive. How can we protect women from foreign visitors if we are capitalising on this myth ourselves?

With this imagery being spread around the world, its effects are being felt at home. Last year a study by the website Olga, surveying almost 8,000 Brazilian women, found that 99% had been harassed on the street. The report also revealed that 90% of Brazilian women have changed their outfit to go outside for fear of being harassed, and that eight in 10 women had decided against going somewhere for fear of being assaulted. In 2012, there was an 18% rise in rape in Brazil.

Whereas the Brazilian government's reaction to Adidas was commendable, it is shameful that a Fifa sponsor has taken such a serious, known issue so lightheartedly. At least they backtracked and apologised. The internal problem of misogyny and sexism might be more difficult to tackle, but perhaps the condemnation of sexualisation by a corporation as big as Adidas might nudge some people towards progress. Reported by guardian.co.uk 21 hours ago.

Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan's 'amoral' story of a schoolgirl's summer romance, scandalised French society and made its 18-year-old author famous. But this early success led to a life of drink, drugs and unhappy relationships, writes Richard Williams

She took the title from a poem by Paul Éluard and her nom de plume from Proust. Years later, Brigid Brophy would declare that she wrote with "a pen saturated in French literature". But 60 years ago , the publication of a first novel by an 18-year-old author had France's literary establishment in uproar. As a slender volume called Bonjour Tristesse flew off the shelves, Françoise Sagan became a scandalous success, the echoes of which would prove impossible to silence.

Over the course of a long and eventful career, Sagan would go on to produce 20 novels, three volumes of short stories, nine plays, two biographies and several collections of non-fiction pieces on places, things and people she loved. But so powerful was the impact made by Bonjour Tristesse, and so profound the disturbance it provoked in French society, that it remains easily her best-known work.

This short novel of barely 30,000 words is a story told by Cécile, a 17-year-old girl holidaying on the Côte d'Azur with her widowed father, a roué who has brought along his young girlfriend. The daughter is exploring her own first sentimental adventure, a swiftly consummated romance with a handsome law student, when the unexpected arrival of an older woman, a friend of her late mother, disrupts the self-indulgent haze of high summer. First the newcomer takes charge, ordering Cécile to terminate her romance in order to stay indoors and do her homework. Then she and the father fall in love. To prevent their marriage the daughter devises an ill-fated plot in which the pretence of an affair between her boyfriend and the father's dumped girlfriend is intended to provoke jealousy and restore the status quo ante.

The seemingly amoral tone brought celebrity and notoriety to Sagan, who was born Françoise Quoirez in Cajarc, a town in the Lot valley, to bourgeois parents who also kept an apartment in Paris. The youngest of three children, she was a habitual rule-breaker at her Catholic school. In the view of her friend Juliette Gréco, she never really grew up: "She was always 12. She did what she wanted."

A voracious reader since infancy, she adored Proust, Stendhal, Gide and Camus. But in the summer of 1953 she had to forego the usual family summer holiday by the sea in order to attend a crammer in Paris to prepare for a retake of her baccalaureat. Not much studying was done, although she passed the exam that October and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She had acquired the habit of spending several hours a day in a nearby cafe, writing in a blue exercise book. In the evenings she would go to Saint Germain-des-Prés to meet her friend Florence, daughter of the writer and future culture minister André Malraux, and to spend her pocket money listening to the great American jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.

"I had a strong desire to write and some free time," she told Blair Fuller and Robert Silvers, who interviewed her for the Paris Review shortly after she became famous. "Instead of leaving for Chile with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That seems to me a great adventure."

The test, she said, was not to produce a great work of literature but to see if she had the willpower to finish a novel at all. After two or three months her manuscript was complete, and on 4 January 1954 she dropped it off at the offices of a publisher, René Julliard, in the Rue de l'Université. Beneath the title and her name, she typed her date of birth: 21 June 1935. Within a few days a telegram was delivered to the young Quoirez at the family apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes: "Prière de rappeler maison Julliard urgent."

The contract, negotiated with parental approval, authorised an advance of 50,000 francs: a doubling of the first offer, amended by hand. So, at her parents' request, was the author's name. Given a few minutes to chose, she remembered A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and renamed herself after Proust's Princesse de Sagan.

In discussions with Julliard, several alternative endings were attempted. One of them omitted the fatal accident that brings the tainted summer idyll to an end and propels the protagonists into the next phase of their lives, foreshadowed in the final version by a short concluding chapter suffused with a youthful acceptance of melancholy more reminiscent of F Scott Fitzgerald than of her French literary heroes.

Success was immediate and immoderate. In the month of publication, Paris-Match called her "an 18-year-old Colette". Within weeks she had won the important Prix des Critiques, and acclaim was arriving from surprising quarters. The 68-year-old François Mauriac, the reigning Nobel laureate, wrote about her on the front page of Le Figaro. "The literary merit explodes from the very first page and is beyond dispute," he exclaimed. Fanning the flames from the other side of the bonfire, the chief literary critic of Le Monde, the poet and novelist Émile Henriot, dismissed Sagan's effort as "immoral". A dissenting member of the critics' prize jury fretted that Bonjour Tristesse would "deal a fatal blow to the image of young French women in the eyes of foreigners".

In Sagan's view, the disapproval could be explained in terms of the codes of a still predominantly Catholic country. "It was inconceivable that a young girl of 17 or 18 should make love, without being in love, with a boy of her own age, and not be punished for it," she wrote 30 years later. "People couldn't tolerate the idea that the girl should not fall madly in love with the boy, and not be pregnant by the end of the summer. It was unacceptable, too, that a young girl should have the right to use her body as she will, and derive pleasure from it without incurring a penalty." The scandal's lure proved irresistible; within the first two years, according to the publisher, more than 350,000 copies were sold in France alone.

Sagan had much to learn, and she learned fast. Soon she would come to detest the predictable nature of the articles that flooded the pages of newspapers and magazines, and the inevitable suggestion that Cécile was, in fact, herself. "I don't search for exactitude in portraying people," she would tell the Paris Review. "I try to give imaginary people a kind of veracity." Other critics suggested that so knowing and polished a book must have been written by a much older writer, probably a man, and had been published under the name of a teenaged girl simply to create a stir.

She was now a celebrity. Heads turned and conversation stopped when she entered a restaurant. Elle magazine sent her to write pieces from New York and Capri. And as the money rolled in, so it spilled through her fingers. She took a Left Bank apartment and bought a powerful Jaguar XK140 convertible. Her old friends were joined by new ones, and when the bill arrived it was invariably she who paid. "She fed and watered everyone," Gréco remembered.

Her studies abandoned, she took two years to produce a follow-up. Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile) depicted a 20-year-old Sorbonne student – once again, a year younger than the author's actual age – drawn into an affair with her boyfriend's uncle. The assurance of the third-person narrative demonstrated that its predecessor had been no fluke.

By that time Britain and the US had caught up with the phenomenon. An English edition of Bonjour Tristesse, translated by Irene Ash, was published by John Murray in 1955, followed by a Penguin paperback. Last year Penguin's current editors saw fit to commission a new translation from a former lecturer in French literature at Glasgow University, who had noticed Ash's omission of more than 100 lines of Sagan's text, including passages dealing with physical intimacy, and wanted to restore them, as well as to spare us such archaisms as "cad", "cavil" and the now almost obsolete usage of "gay" (a word Sagan made clear, writing late in her life about her friendship with Tennessee Williams, that she preferred to employ for its original meaning).

Readers can judge for themselves whether the short opening sentence of the book's second paragraph – "Cet été-là, j'avais dix-sept ans et j'étais parfaitement heureuse"– is better rendered by Ash's "That summer I was seventeen and perfectly happy" or the version that supercedes it: "In the summer in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy." The new translator is already working hard to take some of the spring out of the teenage author's step.

Sagan was at work on her fourth novel, the superlative Aimez-vous Brahms, in which the subtle portrayal of a 39-year-old woman made it seem that the author had gathered 20 years' worth of emotional experience in five years as a published writer, when Otto Preminger's film of Bonjour Tristesse was released in 1958. With David Niven and Deborah Kerr as the adult leads and the 19-year-old Jean Seberg as Cécile, all of them acting away furiously, the result is devoid of the novel's emotional shading. Today we can only wonder regretfully what the young Louis Malle or François Truffaut, with a French cast, might have made of it.

By that time, too, Sagan had survived near-fatal injuries from a crash in her new Aston Martin. This was perhaps the first public sign that her life would not be one of uncomplicated happiness. Soon after her recovery she married the first of her two husbands, an editor 20 years her senior. They were divorced within two years. The second marriage, to an American artist, lasted only 11 months but produced a son, Denis, now in his 50s. Later there would be several significant affairs with both men and women, including a 10-year relationship with Peggy Roche, a fashion stylist. François Mitterrand, then president, was a regular dinner guest at their Paris apartment.

Whisky, cocaine and a gambling addiction had been her companions in success, eventually joined during her personal and professional decline by heroin, yet another drain on rapidly diminishing resources. The flicker of a revival came in 1984 when she published Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir (With Fondest Regards), a collection of beautifully evocative profiles and essays. But Roche's death from pancreatic cancer in 1991 appeared to mark the end of a period of genuine contentment; soon Sagan's occasional television appearances presented a disturbing figure, emaciated and distrait. Eventually she shut herself away in the country house at Equemauville, near Honfleur, where she had first hosted parties in the 1960s.

All her money had gone. Her friends, watching helplessly as she destroyed herself, found their attempts to reach her on the telephone deflected by a housekeeper. When she died of a pulmonary embolism in a Honfleur hospital on 24 September 2004, aged 69, she left debts of around €1m.

Many years earlier she had given the blue exercise book in which Bonjour Tristesse had been written to a friend for safe-keeping. When that friend predeceased her, she discovered that it had disappeared. The incident received a mention in Derrière l'Epaule, the (sadly untranslated) collection of autobiographical fragments that became the last of her books to be published during her lifetime. "Another good thing gone," she wrote. Reported by guardian.co.uk 19 hours ago.

'The greatest love of my life? Oh please. This is not a therapy session'

Geoffrey Rush, 62, was born in Australia. After completing an English degree at the University of Queensland, he went to Paris to study acting at the Jacques Lecoq school, before returning to Australia to work in theatre. His role in the 1996 film Shine won him worldwide recognition, and he became the first Australian-born actor to win an Oscar; he has since had Academy Award nominations for his performances in Shakespeare In Love, Quills and The King's Speech, for which he won a Bafta. His latest film is The Book Thief. He is married with two children and lives in Melbourne.

*When were you happiest? *
During my Queensland childhood, on the days when I avoided the chlorine-infused shower gauntlet and being corralled into the deep end of the school pool.

*What is your greatest fear? *
Being alone in a room with a tiger: a recurring dream, never reality, fortunately.

*What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?*
Yielding to the wrong sort of melancholia.

*Property aside, what's the most expensive thing you've bought? *
A painting of the late actor Bille Brown by Australian artist Ben Quilty, to commemorate decades of fraternal and professional bonds.

*What is your most treasured possession?*
Two signed Chuck Jones Warner Bros celluloids of Bugs and Daffy.

*What would your super power be?*
Oh, flying! Another recurring dream.

*What do you most dislike about your appearance?*
Inherited, slightly bulbous Teutonic nose and bony bumps on my shoulders that look as if I was pegged out to dry.

*If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?*
Music hall comedian Dan Leno – he spun hilarious gold out of life's most banal contradictions.

*Who would play you in the film of your life?*
Anyone who could capture the most romantic cliches of the biopic – with substandard prosthetics.

*What is your most unappealing habit?*
Selective hearing.

*What is your favourite word?*
I have synaesthesia, where language sparks with colours and shape. "Pom-pom", off the top of my head.

*Is it better to give or to receive?*
"The love you take is equal to the love you make"– Lennon/McCartney.

*What do you owe your parents?*
My mum beautifully embraced and encouraged the unpredictability of my wayward career.

*What or who is the greatest love of your life?*
Oh, please. This is not a therapy session.

*What was the best kiss of your life?*
Early teens, spin-the-bottle, the girl you hoped for.

*If you could go back in time, where would you go?*
Elizabethan London (with a surgical mask, antibiotics and bottled water).

*When did you last cry, and why?*
When Adèle walked down the road at the end of the film Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

*What is the closest you've ever come to death?*
A panic attack on stage during The Importance Of Being Earnest. Well, it felt like death.

*What single thing would improve the quality of your life?*
Absence of lower back pain.

*What keeps you awake at night?*
My own snoring. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.

'This book was very funny and very hard to put down'

Boys Don't Knit by Tom Easton is about a boy named Ben Fletcher. He is not a very troublesome boy until he steals a bottle of Martini Rosso for a party. After he steals it he and his friends try to get away. At first everything seems ok, but when Ben crashes his bike the bottle rolls out of the bag and spills everywhere, and he is sent to court for stealing.

After he is sent home he is told he has to keep a journal of his daily activities. When he has to choose an activity while he is on probation he chooses knitting. The reason he chose knitting is because the teacher that teaches knitting is a girl he fancies. When he goes to the first knitting meeting he is disappointed to find out it is not taught by the girl he likes, but by his friend Megan's mom. At the end of the book he wins the knitting championship and gets the girl of his dreams.

This book was very funny and very hard to put down. At first the book wasn't very interesting, because it was very slow in the beginning, but as I got on it became very good. I hope to read more books like this.

*Want to tell the world about a book you've read? Join the site and send us your review!* Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.

One day Somila was living on an Assam plantation. The next, she had been sold into slavery hundreds of miles from home. Gethin Chamberlain joins the race to save her – and uncovers a flourishing slave trade that begins with the cost of tea

A car, speeding through the crowded streets of Delhi. Inside, a phone is ringing. The voice on the line is that of a ghost, a girl who vanished into thin air three years ago.

Somila was 16 when the traffickers lured her from the poverty of her home on the tea plantation in Assam with promises of a better life. Now she is a slave, trapped and terrified, lost in a city of 16 million people.

Crammed into the car are people determined to find her and set her free. They crane to hear her voice on the tinny speaker. Help me, she says. Her owners are threatening to sell her into prostitution in Mumbai. She is afraid she will be lost for ever.

Help me. Find me. There is not a second to lose.

This is the world of modern slavery, a world in which something as apparently innocuous as the price of a cup of tea can drive an ancient trade that many assume has been consigned to history.

Somila was born on the vast Nahorani tea plantation in the northeast Indian state of Assam, owned by a consortium that includes Tata Global Beverages – which uses leaves from the estate in its best-selling Tetley brand – and the World Bank's investment arm, the International Finance Corporation. While the owners count their fortunes in billions of pounds, the Nahorani tea workers – and every other tea worker in Assam, including all those picking for Tetley and the other big brands – earn a basic wage of just 94 rupees a day (91p). If that seems a small amount, it is. The legal minimum wage for Assam is 169 rupees for an unskilled worker. But tea is big business in India and Assam in particular, and a cartel of owners have persuaded the state that they cannot afford to pay the legal minimum. In doing so, they have created a fertile breeding ground for the 21st century slave trade.

Twelve hundred miles away in Delhi, a booming middle class demands staff to tackle the domestic chores they now consider beneath them. To meet demand, thousands of placement agencies have sprung up to supply girls as maids. They source the girls from places where families cannot afford to keep their children. And this is what makes the tea estates of Assam, with their poverty pay, so very attractive to the traffickers.

Inside the car, the phone is ringing again. It is Somila, frightened and confused. She says she does not know where she is. The tall, well-groomed figure in the front seat turns and speaks urgently to one of the others. "She is frightened of the trafficker," he says. "She is frightened that they will kill her family."

The man's name is Kailash Satyarthi. It is 34 years since he founded the group that is now on Somila's trail, the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA – Save the Childhood Movement). He has lost count of the children he has rescued in the intervening years. "Her world view is so limited that she believes the slave master is the super boss, the centre of power, that he can do anything," he says. "And they have threatened her that if the police come, they will take her and her father to jail. Poor people do not trust the police – they believe the police are for the masters and not the poor people."

The phone is handed to Ramesh, Somila's father, crouching in the back of the car. He tells her that her mother is sick, that it is urgent, that he needs to take her back home. Still she hesitates. The only clue the team have is that they know the trafficker's office is in the Tagore Gardens district in west Delhi. The car plunges back into the traffic, leading the rest of the rescue convoy west.

Somila Tanti was 16 when a trafficker came calling. She was one of the brighter girls in her class and her father, Ramesh, had scrimped and saved to pay for her to take computer lessons. "My whole life I kept on plucking, doing the plantation work," he says. "But I didn't want that my daughter should do it, so I thought that if she studies well, she can have a decent future. I was very concerned about her future." But the trafficker was persuasive. He filled Somila's head with stories of Delhi and the better life she could have there.

"Two days before my daughter was kidnapped this agent, the trafficker, came and gave her a lot of tempting ideas that if you go with me, you will be happy, things like that. I remember the day, it was a Saturday. She was not behaving normally. She was wearing different clothes, a dress she had made herself. I wondered where she was going, but she often stayed with a friend, so I did not worry about it."

It was only when the girl failed to return the next day that her parents started to panic. "When I enquired with some people they told me that there was a trafficker, he used to come to your home and they had noticed that this man has taken her," says Ramesh. "We cried and cried like anything, we wept and my wife and my mother, all of us kept on crying and we were helpless."

That was three years ago. Since then, there have been a few brief phone calls, promises that Somila will be allowed home, but nothing has come of them. "My heart has been burning, it got broken many a time, but being a man I tried to keep my tears inside," says Ramesh.

The family are not alone. At least 13 other girls are missing from the plantation. Shiboti Tanti's mother, Rajanti, was picking tea when word reached her that people were taking her 12-year-old away. She dropped everything and ran to the road. There were two people there, putting her daughter into a car. "Stop!" she screamed, but they told her not to worry. "We will look after her," they said. That was a year ago.

Laxmi Munda was 12 when she disappeared. The local trafficker, Deepak, had been to the family's home the day before to talk to her parents, Mangoal and Susena, but they did not really understand what was happening. The next day she was gone, along with several other girls from the area.

"She was a trusting person. Maybe he promised her a better job so that's why she believed him and she went with the other girls," says Susena. Deepak lives on the estate, she says. "This is his job, to get girls from here to supply to Delhi."

Susena is on her own in the house. Desperate to get Laxmi back, Mangoal went to Delhi six months ago to try to find her. Susena has not seen him since. Occasionally there has been a call from one or the other, holding out hope of a return, but nothing has come of it. "People say things, but they don't act. My daughter is not here, my husband is not here. I have only my pain: I live with my pain only," she says.

The list goes on. Rekha Munda was taken when she was just 11. No one has seen her since. Sisters Sunita Tanti, 17, and Anita, 13, were picked off by the traffickers two years ago. "If I saw them, I would say they are pimps; they are not men, they are pimps," says their grandfather, Sadan Tanti, bitterly.

Inside the car, the phone is ringing again. This time Somila has the name of an area, but it matches nothing in the city. A neighbour is trying to help her. The address is BC9GF, she says. Satyarthi scribbles it down, and stares at it. It takes an iPhone and Google Maps to crack it. Nearby is an area called Mianwali Nagar; could that be the name she's been trying to pronounce? Still, BC9GF. What does it mean?

"Building complex 9?" suggests Satyarthi. No, look, here is an AB road. Could there be… yes… there it is, BC Road. She's at 9BC Road, Ground Floor. That's it. It is barely a mile away. The car turns north and stops outside the nearest police station. A couple of officers climb into the vehicles behind.

The turning is barely a couple of hundred yards further down the road. It is a typical middle-class Delhi street. The salmon-pink house, three storeys high with ornate balustrades, sits behind a large metal gate. A woman on the first floor is hanging out clothes on the balcony.

Out of the cars, hammering on the gate, then into the house. The owner stands in the middle of the room, looking bewildered. Does she have a maid? Yes. Then call her. Time stops. And then there she is, a small figure, emerging from the darkness of the back room through silver curtains draped across an archway, taking off her apron, a smile spreading across her face.

"Are you Somila Tanti from Sonitpur?"

She nods.

"Then you are free."

Somila takes off her apron and steps forward. She is led outside to where her father is waiting.

He throws his arms around her, wails his joy. There is what seems like an eternity of tears, the pair clinging together. He is so overcome it seems he might collapse. Satyarthi forces him to take water from a plastic bottle and he gulps at it hungrily, head tilted back, rivulets running down his face.

A little while later, everyone is back inside the house. The police have called Sanjay, the trafficker, and told him to come. He arrives on a motorbike, a worried man. They sit him on the sofa, take away his phone and his bike keys and start to ask him questions. The couple who bought Somila from him for £250 look on, baffled, unable to understand what they have done wrong. They paid him 4,000 rupees a month in wages for Somila, they say, though she never saw a penny.

Sanjay is led away. Later he will confess to taking 18 girls and will be charged with trafficking and abduction. He will not be granted bail.

On the pavement outside the house, Shomna Tanti watches him go. He is happy for his friend, but there is no mistaking the pain in his eyes. There is no word on Shiboti.

Somila sits on the hard concrete step of the police station, waiting to make her statement. "I had a deep feeling in my heart that one day my father would come to search for me. But I could not expect this thing today," she says. The traffickers had tricked her into leaving, she says. "I was tempted with a decent job and I was told that since I am a little bit educated I will find a good job in an office or at a shop, so come with us and you will earn good money and we were poor so I thought it would be good."

Instead, she found herself unable to escape. Her first owner was a doctor, who did not mistreat her, but would not let her go home. After 11 months, she was moved on to a different place, before being moved again. "I was abused badly at that second place. That man was very bad: he used to touch me in my private parts and try to rape me. I was very angry, but I had nowhere to go and I did not want to stay there," she says.

Nowhere did she have a room of her own. She describes sleeping on the floor, cold in the winter, with no covers. "I cried and I missed my parents. If I was at home it would never happen with me that I was shivering in the cold."

She wants to return to her studies, to be a nurse, she says. And she wants the people who took her to be punished.

In the past two years, the BBA has rescued 2,600 children, but two of their members have been killed and most of the others have tales to tell of beatings. "In my own case I have my broken leg and my broken head and my broken back and my broken shoulder," says Satyarthi. He shrugs. "These people are like the mafia, they are very, very powerful." Yet he is determined to press on. "I cannot tolerate the loss of freedom of any single child in my own country," he says.

More than 100,000 young people are believed to be in domestic slavery in Delhi. "I don't think these people who engage them as domestic slaves ever think of it. They have a different mindset: they think they were born to take work from the poor people, and sometimes the poor people think they were born to work for them."

But he is angry, too, with the tea companies who pay so little that the girls are vulnerable to the slave traders. "The owners of these international tea estates don't care for these people. They don't pay them minimum wages. Forget about the decent wages: they don't even pay survival wages." The companies make their profits, he says, and the poor are left hoping that the traffickers' promises of a better life somewhere else are true. But they never are. "The reality is slavery, the reality is abuse, the reality is sexual exploitation, the reality is endless slavery."

A little after 9am, the cars move out for a raid on a placement agency in the Shivaji Park area of Delhi. They pull up outside a three-storey building in a busy, down-at-heel street. On the roof terrace a group of girls start to run in panic as the police and rescuers enter the building.

BBA officer Rakesh Senger leads the way, with the parents following behind, hoping to find their daughters. Rakesh is shouting for Ranjit, the trafficker, but he is not there. They find some girls in an office with mattresses on the floor and locked filing cabinets containing false documents. More documents are found inside a bed, with books and false papers.

In the south of the city, another team has gone after Laxmi Munda, whose mother Susena is alone in Assam since her father Mangoal went looking for her. The trafficker, Jacob, says he has no idea where she has gone. There are several men in the room. "I am Mangoal, from Sonitpur, here seeking my daughter," says one. He had tracked Laxmi down to the agency, only to be imprisoned himself. "He kept me here for the last two months and didn't give me any money or my daughter. Jacob took all my money so I could not leave."

Fifteen days earlier, he had finally been reunited with Laxmi. He mimes hugging her. But he does not know where she is now. She is lost again.

The Nahorani estate is owned by Amalgamated Plantations, a joint venture between Tata Global Beverages and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of the World Bank. Tata is worth $60bn and Tetley – which it bought for £271m in 2000 – is its best-selling brand in the UK. Tata holds a 49.66% stake in Amalgamated Plantations; the IFC, which manages billions of pounds of funds and is committed to eradicating extreme poverty, holds a 15.6% stake. Yet Amalgamated, in common with other tea companies in Assam, is permitted by the state to pay workers just 94 rupees a day – topping it up to the legal limit, they claim, with benefits in kind. The average tea worker earns 2p for every box of 80 tea bags sold for £2 in UK supermarkets.

Six months ago, when the Observer first exposed the trade in slaves from the tea estates, the world's major producers pledged to act. Certifying bodies, including the Ethical Tea Partnership, expressed their sympathy for the victims, and claim never to have encountered trafficking on their members' estates, but are working with various groups to try to prevent it. Since then, the only change has been a 5-rupee-a-day wage rise – an annual rise which had already been agreed. The poverty in which the workers live remains. Last year the IFC's own watchdog, the Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, launched an investigation into the Amalgamated project following complaints from three local NGOs.

A week after Somila is freed, the BBA team springs Shiboti from the house where she is working. They arrive at night and there is a protracted argument with her owner before the girl is handed over.

As she bundles up her few possessions, she shows them where she sleeps, on the floor in a stairwell. She had been tempted by the idea of earning more money, she says. She was sent first to Punjab, then Delhi. The agency kept her wages and refused to let her go home. "My employer's wife used to taunt me by saying: 'I've bought you for 30,000 rupees, so do as I say,'" she says. "She used to beat me for every small mistake I made or even without any mistake. I used to work for longer hours and she would make me wash the whole premises every day. She always used to criticise my family and even threatened me that she'll send me to jail by making false complaints." She glances at her relieved father, Shomna. "I still can't believe that I am with my family and have escaped from that hell."

Three days later, Rekha Munda is freed. It is the final raid. In total 20 girls and boys are free as a result of the Nahorani investigation. Yet there are tens of thousands like them unable to escape. Between 2008 and 2012, 452,679 cases of child trafficking for domestic labour were reported in India. Just 3,394 – 0.6% – of those reports led to convictions. The tea companies still insist that they cannot pay another rupee more. In the last quarter Tata Global Beverages posted profits of £11m.

Laxmi Munda and Sunita and Anita Tanti are still out there, lost somewhere in this vast megacity, living proof that slavery thrives in the second decade of the 21st century. For thousands like them, the price of a cup of tea has proved to be very high indeed.

To see Gethin Chamberlain's extraordinary film of the reunion between a slave girl and her father, go to theguardian.com/india Reported by guardian.co.uk 14 hours ago.

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As a barrister and judge, I made my living by speaking. How do I cope now that such an integral part of myself has been taken away from me?

"An entire room full of people with nothing to do but listen to me speak," is how I described my motive for becoming a barrister; even more so as a judge. I must admit the judicial art of keeping one's mouth shut was definitely best described for me as a work in progress – until I lost my speech altogether. What use is a judge who can't shout? What use is a mother who can't nag?

It's no accident I went into the senior branch of the profession. My three favourite activities were talking, drinking and eating … and in that order. So what happens when you lose the ability to do any of that? I haven't gone mad. I haven't lost my mind. I have lost 40kg, though. It turns out Dorothy Parker was wrong. You can be too thin.

For more than 20 years, I have earned my living by means of the spoken word. I started to lose the ability to speak back in February 2012, although of course at the time I didn't know what was happening. It began with a sneaking suspicion on my part that I was slurring the occasional word, particularly when I was smiling. No one else noticed. In fact no one noticed for a very long time – although one friend did say to his wife one night when I rang, "What was wrong with Jo? Was she pissed?"

My speech progressed through the drunken-sounding slurring via virtually unintelligible into silence. From suspicion to silence took just over a year. I was diagnosed with pseudo bulbar palsy, a form of motor neurone disease, 10 months after the onset of symptoms. So now that I am silent when I've spent my life loving the sound of my own voice, how do I manage?

Well. I give thanks for the genius of Steve Jobs most days. Without a tablet, a smartphone, a mini tablet for going out and emails, emails, emails, my life would be hell.

I have also lost about 50 IQ points. Well, that may not be literally the case but it feels that way because that's how I'm treated. My son asked me if I missed work and I replied that I missed the respect. I cannot put into words how much I hate the constantly patronising, moronic twits who tell me to calm down when I was perfectly calm until that point.

Of course it isn't true of everyone. Young shop assistants are great. The girl in Clark's who shouted over to her workmate, "Oh, it's so cool. This customer can't speak so she's using her iPad to tell me what she wants." The assistant in Apple who declared, as I started typing what I needed and why I was typing, that I was "his coolest customer ever" and the girl in Sports Direct (until then my most hated shop) who just treated me as normal. There was a point, when I could still speak, that I sounded as though I was deaf, and so was treated as though I was deaf. I intended to get cards printed saying, "I'm not deaf.""I'm not stupid." and "Tea, milk no sugar."

I'm now, though, a non-person. A stupid person. A person with no point of view worth taking account of. I'm cut off by so many organisations because I can't ring them and they won't let me email. I had a virtual stand-up fight with the practice manager at my GP over their refusal to buy a mobile phone so I could text them. I've had to put third-party authorisations on various accounts.

But why can't I communicate myself by email to tell them what I want and don't want? Why does it have to be done for me. Because I am a stupid, disabled person that's why.

I miss chatting with my children. I miss nagging my children although they'd probably say I do a pretty good impersonation of it. I miss my job. I miss dinner parties. I miss sharing a bottle of wine with a friend. I miss spontaneity. I still can see the late John Diamond standing against a wall with his arms and legs crossed, watching, but not participating in, his then wife, Nigella Lawson's dinner party. It's an image from a documentary from years ago. I wonder why that image stuck with me. It was very powerful, but maybe it was something else for me. A harbinger of doom.

Parties are different. I do find that I sit down and people come to me like I'm a grande dame. It has to be one to one though, so I can type and they can talk and chat. After half a dozen or so I'm shattered.

Putting everything you think, feel and want/need to say through the typed word is tough. I wish there was a way of communicating my thoughts to the outside world. Of course there is; it's speaking. Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 minutes ago.

The winners on the red carpet this year knew that personality trumps aloof glamour

The key to this year's red-carpet fashion was when Jennifer Lawrence fell over again. Because the smartest players, the ones who have the world at their feet – Lawrence, Lupita Nyong'o, Pharrell Williams – know that looking good on the red carpet is no longer enough. To win the red carpet in 2014, you need to upstage your outfit. After all, the photograph that these Oscars will be remembered for is not a red-carpet pose, but that mass selfie with Ellen, Bradley, Kevin and the gang. Aloof glamour just isn't box office.

Last year, Lawrence wore a grand, regal Dior gown, and everyone cooed a bit, and then she fell over in it and the J Law brand – the Gorgeous But Goofy Movie Star Who Could Be Your Real-life Bestie – was born. Lawrence has a contract with Dior, so she gets paid serious money to wear those pretty dresses, which is kind of lacking in charm. But she fell over, and her red-carpet story became adorable.

Then, she gets to the Oscars this year, and what's the first thing she does on the red carpet? Stumbles over. Now, I'm not saying she did it on purpose this time. She's a good actress, but I think that's really hard to fake. No, what I'm saying is that the girl is a natural-born modern movie star, and she has an instinct for how to win over an audience.

This year's red-carpet winners triumphed by making the story a personal one. When Nyong'o first appeared in her baby-blue Prada gown, I admit I was a tiny bit disappointed. I was hoping for a bit of fierce fashion action; something structured and bold by Alexander McQueen or Givenchy. Instead, here was this pale gown, which emphasised the fragility of her tiny frame, made her look young and vulnerable. But by the time the red-carpet interviews had finished, Nyong'o had done a neat job of communicating to the world's media how she had picked the colour she called "Nairobi blue" to remind her of that city, and how the tiny gold frog ring on her little finger was her family motif. Even before she stood up for her winning speech, she had sold Lupita Nyong'o The Hollywood Sweetheart to everyone watching.

And what was the best-dressed, most swooned-over man in the room wearing? A perfectly tailored, Bond-slick suit, as per usual? No. Pharrell Williams showed off his tattooed calves in a pair of shorts. Meanwhile, Emma Watson played down the va-va-voom and played up the cool young ingenue in a T-shirt neckline and subtle colours.

The rest of them? Well, they looked very glamorous. But those juiced-down glamazons – knees bent at the perfect angle, smouldering at the camera – look increasingly outdated. They have missed a crucial memo. Because the red carpet is less about the catwalk-ready pose and more about the photobomb (Anne Hathaway hijacking Jessica Biel's backstage selfie) or the cute gif (Lawrence falling, Williams and Nyong'o dancing). The days when the perfectly tailored dress could clinch the deal are over. A winning personal brand is what it takes to floor them. Even if you have to hit the deck to do it. Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 minutes ago.

The boy will be placed on the sex offenders register for two and a half years, and work with social workers to return to the family home

A 12-year-old schoolboy who raped his seven-year-old sister after he watched hardcore pornography on the internet has walked free from court.

Social workers will now work with the boy to return him to the family home in the coming months.

Blackburn youth court heard the boy had viewed pornography in the company of his friends before he gained "a desire to try it out".

He committed a number of sexual offences against his sister between March and May last year but these came to light only last autumn.

The boy, now 13, pleaded guilty to one count of rape, two counts of indecent assault and one count of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

In a statement, the offender said he was "disgusted" with his actions, which he promised would not happen again.

Sentencing him, district judge James Prowse said he thought it "highly improbable" that the boy would reoffend in this way. Prowse followed the recommendations of a youth offending team and imposed a 12-month referral order.

Detaining the boy would "tear the family apart" and would expose him to "hardened and sophisticated" youth offenders, he added.

In a victim impact statement, the girl said she was "sad" at what her brother had done, but she wanted him to come home because she loved him and missed playing games with him.

Prowse said the referral order would be "intense" and was specifically tailored to deal with last year's events.

He said it would be "a tough haul" for his parents, who were also confronting the abuse of their daughter, but he said he felt they were "going to get there".

It is understood the boy had viewed pornography on an Xbox games console at a friend's house.

The content had led to "sexual conversation" between the group of friends, the court heard.

Addressing the boy and his father, Prowse said: "Some of the others were telling you about what they had been doing, probably imaginary rather than real. Because of your immaturity, you were not able to recognise it. That made you feel further behind the scene.

"When you started watching pornography, you had a desire to try it out, having watched what adults were doing.

"Society's view on pornography covers a wide spectrum, from complete condemnation on the one side to being laissez-faire on the other. But even the most liberal minded share society's profound unease that children of your age can and do access the internet and watch graphic images of sexual intercourse."

He added that technological change had been "enormous" in the last 10 years, with online access now readily available on mobile phones and games consoles.

He said many people would ask whether there was a link between the increase in ease of access to porn and the number of sexual offences being committed by children against children.

The boy attended the court with his father and a social worker.

Parveen Akhtar, prosecuting, told the court the girl had struggled to remember the sequence of events but she recalled on one occasion that her brother came into her room at night and led her by the arm into his bedroom.

He took her pyjama bottoms off and then undressed himself before he lay on top of her, she said.

She said she thought her brother had touched her on six separate occasions.

The boy is currently living away from the family home but in a victim impact statement his sister said she wanted him to return.

"I feel sad what [the defendant] did," she said. "I want him to go to our house so I can play games with him. I love [the defendant]."

Graeme Parkinson, defending, said the boy had no previous convictions and had not shown any indication of offending.

He was interviewed by police without a solicitor present last October and went on to make full and frank admissions before he eventually pleaded guilty at the first available opportunity, "bearing in mind the trauma it has caused him and members of his family", the solicitor said.

He said two lengthy pre-sentence reports had been completed ahead of Monday's appearance.

"The intention for the long term is to return the family unit as one, on a gradual basis," he said.

He said he had not met the boy's mother but he said his father was "very much a caring and hands-on parent".

"He assures me he will ensure nothing like this will happen again," he said. "I am sure with the appropriate help [the defendant] will grow up to be a very responsible member of the community."

Prowse said there had been "considerable" and "legitimate" public interest in the case to understand why it had happened.

He told the boy: "The realisation of what you had done brought you to your senses long before any adult became aware of it, and on your own volition you stopped."

He said there were no aggravating features such as violence and coercion, and ejaculation had not taken place.

The pre-sentence reports had established he had been brought up in "a stable and secure home".

"The conundrum is why should you have done what you did," he said. "Adolescence can be a troubling time with confused feelings about sex and feelings of insecurity."

He said his parents had discovered on one occasion that he had accessed pornography on his mobile phone while on a sleepover.

They had confiscated his phone and put an immediate stop to it but they were unaware of what was going on with their daughter, the judge said.

His parents had monitored his internet use at home and could not be criticised in that regard, he added.

Prowse told the boy: "I think it is highly improbable that you will do anything like this again. You do not represent a danger to society.He said the alternative sentence of a detention and training order would put the "unsophisticated, immature" boy in company with "hardened" youth offenders. That risked sending him in the opposite direction than the judge intended.

"If I lock you up it is going to tear the family apart," he said.

He told the boy and his father that the youngster would also be placed on the sex offenders register for two and a half years. Reported by guardian.co.uk 23 hours ago.

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Judge Robert Bartfield attracts criticism after 15-year-old girl was held in custody for 20 hours to secure attendance at court

A judge's decision to order the arrest and detention of a child victim of sex abuse to compel her to give evidence against her attacker has been condemned as "utterly shameful" and "Dickensian".

The 15-year-old girl, who had committed no crime, was held for 20 hours in police cells overnight on the orders of the judge Robert Bartfield, sitting at Bradford crown court. When she finally appeared, her evidence lasted just 22 minutes.

The man who groomed her was more than twice her age and had made the girl pregnant at 14, but she did not want to give evidence because she still had strong feelings for him, the court was told.

The judge's decision to order her to be detained, at the request of police and prosecutors, attracted severe criticism from victim and child welfare organisations, and has prompted an immediate review into proceedings at Bradford crown court.

After her arrest and overnight detention last week, the girl was held in cells at the court for a further four and a half hours before giving evidence, the Times reported.

A jury on Tuesday took less than two hours to return a unanimous guilty verdict against the girl's abuser for sexual activity with a child. Abid Miskeen, 32, was remanded in custody and is due to be sentenced later on Wednesday.

The judge made the ruling after the start of the case was delayed by more than five hours, and the child left the building, saying she did not want to give evidence.

A spokesperson for the judiciary said on Wednesday: "It is a very unusual and exceptional step for young witnesses to be made subject to a witness warrant and held in custody in order to secure attendance at court. In this case, there was evidence called by the prosecution which the judge ruled justified the exceptional course of making such an order.

"While best practice dictates, and every effort is made to list cases involving vulnerable witnesses at the start of the day, in busy court centres the volume of these types of cases makes it impossible for all of them to start at 10am.

"While each case is different, following initial inquiries we intend to take some immediate steps to address the issues this case raises.

"Listing processes at Bradford crown court will be reviewed and amended to avoid the situation happening again where a vulnerable witness has to wait a long time at court prior to giving evidence.

"Processes will be revisited to ensure that where there is a genuine need to compel young witnesses to attend court, every effort is made to find a solution which ensures they are not detained in police cells overnight.

"For several years judges have been provided with training on the management of vulnerable witnesses, which is kept constantly under review and this year the Judicial College is launching a new course devoted to the subject."

Adam Pemberton, assistant chief executive of Victim Support, said: "It is utterly shameful that any vulnerable witness, let alone a child who has been the victim of sustained sexual exploitation, could be treated in such a grotesque and frankly degrading manner by those who are supposed to be protecting her.

"The spectacle of a child spending the hours before she gives evidence against her abuser locked up in cells at a police station and at court is nothing short of Dickensian and must never be allowed to happen again.

"This victim needed to be supported not criminalised and her treatment underlines how critical it is that the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts understand and prioritise the needs of vulnerable victims and witnesses."

The child witness in the latest case, who cannot be named, arrived at court at 10am on Wednesday of last week for the trial's scheduled opening but was said to have become bored and frustrated during a delay of more than five hours. There was initially no courtroom in which the trial could be heard, said the newspaper.

The case was finally called at 2.30pm but by then the girl had left the building, stating that she did not want to give evidence. Gerald Hendron, for the prosecution, made a successful application to Bartfield for an arrest warrant against the child, who was detained and held overnight at Halifax police station. Arrest warrants were also issued for a further three witnesses.

In a statement made in court at the end of evidence, Bartfield said he believed the "interests of justice" had been served.

He said: "Some concern has been expressed about this but there needs to be a fuller understanding of what took place."

He said the girl was an essential witness without whose evidence the trial would have collapsed.

She absconded after being allowed to leave the building to have a cigarette, as did other witnesses, he said. The prosecution believed she was seeking to influence other witnesses and that the absconding was "orchestrated".

"The police and CPS, both of whom are under a duty of care to their witnesses, felt that there was no alternative but to apply for warrants of arrest for all of them," the judge said.

He said he had wished to avoid overnight detention of the girl, but police did not believe other ways of dealing with it would "procure" her attendance. He agreed to the warrants because there was "strong public interest in proceeding to trial in such a case and I was not prepared to have it subverted".

He said he had explained to the girl the reason for her detention "and my regret that there had been no alternative".

He added: "I believe that the interests of justice have been served despite the 'cost' to which I have referred." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.