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This Article is From Oct 14, 2012

How Kate Middleton's dress helps Indian sex trafficking victims

How Kate Middleton's dress helps Indian sex trafficking victims
Kate turned heads in Kuala Lumpur when she visited the Assyakirin Mosque wearing a chic chiffon off-white dress and matching headscarf
London: By wearing a chic chiffon off-whitedress while visiting a mosque in Malaysia last month, KateMiddleton has helped victims of alleged sex trafficking inIndia, her designer has claimed.

Kate turned heads in Kuala Lumpur when she visited theAssyakirin Mosque wearing a chic chiffon off-white dress andmatching headscarf from Beulah London.

However, it has been revealed that by wearing the dress,the Duchess was supporting not just her friend - Beulah'sfounder Lady Natasha Rufus Isaacs - but also victims of sextrafficking in India, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

Natasha's great-great grandfather, Rufus Isaacs, was 1stMarquess of Reading, and a Viceroy of India in 1921.

Natasha and her childhood friend Lavinia Brennan made adecision, in 2009, to swap parties at Club H - Princes Harryand William's private basement at Highgrove - for a stintteaching needlework and English to victims of sex traffickingin India.

"I had been talking to a friend about human traffickingand I was determined to do something to help," the paperquoted Natasha, fiancee of Kate Middleton's ex-boyfriendRupert Finch, as saying.

"I met women who had been abused and a girl who wastrafficked from the school where I was teaching. She fell inlove with a man who promised her a new life and whisked heraway, and she didn't return. It was heartbreaking, but ithelped me to understand slavery and how traffickers work.

"It also taught me the importance of education becausetraffickers prey on the uneducated, the ones who have nooptions. I realised that providing skills could preventtrafficking," she said.

Natasha, who has a history of art degree from OxfordBrookes University, spent two months at a workshop teachingvulnerable girls who had been rescued from brothels and slums.

It was there that Beulah London was conceived. Natasha andLavinia's idea was to create an ethical fashion label thatwould pay a living wage to rescued women and save them fromthe economic necessity of returning to the streets.

Each Beulah garment comes with a canvas bag produced byvictims of trafficking in India through a Calcutta-basedproject called Freeset.

Some items in the collection are made via a project inDelhi called Open Hand, by women who have escaped traffickingand the sex trade, including some who are HIV-positive andwidowed.

Natasha, who was named by Daily Mail in 2011 as one of"Britain's 50 Most Powerful Posh People Under 30" returns toIndia every six months to see the women she is helping.

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