Caution: educated women easy to traffic

Pratik Rimal/TNP
Kathmandu, April 10

(Image courtesy: Getty Images)

While women residing in rural areas are more prone to trafficking and continue to be at a high risk because of low literacy and awareness, it is not just them. Any person is vulnerable to trafficking, and those most at risk are girls below 24 years. Moreover, media has also reported cases where educated urban women including college girls are also trafficked, and the trend seems to climb steadily, Achyut Kumar Nepal, Information Officer at Maiti Nepal said.

Citing his research with 128 traffickers imprisoned in Kathmandu, Shyam Kumar Pokhrel, Managing Director at Samrakshak Samuha Nepal (SASANE), an NGO supporting trafficked victims cites said, "Traffickers have often shared with me that it was easier for them to sell educated girls because they would seldom slip and the chances of being cordoned at checkpoints were slim. However, with rural girls, things were worse because despite repeated guidance, they'd slip somewhere, and there was high probability of being caught."

"As parents continually try to fulfill their child's wish, increased love to technological and other modern products in city areas too work to result in urban human trafficking," Achyut said, adding, since the definition of human trafficking has broadened, the gaps too have grown bigger. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime defines: "Human Trafficking is a crime against humanity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them."

Although Nepal is one of the leading countries from where many people are trafficked every year, no data regarding the country's rising or falling trafficking trend is recorded after 2001 AD. The 2001 AD's research showed that every year, around 12,000 women and girls were trafficked from the country to India as sex workers alone while around 8000 girls worked in various cabin restaurants, bars and massage parlors within the valley.

As the number of people opting foreign employment continually increases, (last year, around 250,000 had gone legally, and around the same number illegally), Pokhrel said trafficking was at rise in the form of 'foreign employment'. "Last year's foreign employment record showed that around 250,000 people legally went abroad for foreign employment and around the same numbers left the country illegally. 90 per cent of those who had gone illegally are vulnerable to trafficking," Pokhrel said adding that newer destinations for the human trade were South Africa, Cyprus, European countries and Gulf countries. For this reason, the country has no concrete data regarding trafficking at present.

As a result, things look grey and opinions sway regarding the country's trafficking rate. With so many non-governmental and international non-governmental organizations working in human trafficking, some argue of reduced trafficking rate.
However, others, on the other hand, argue that the numbers have climbed. Citing increasing access to the West and foreign employment, Pokhrel said that trafficking was undoubtedly on rise. "Trafficking is on rise. We cannot furnish complete data, but I firmly believe that the trade is increasing." However, Achyut said, "At the moment, we can only assume and even if research were to be done, it was difficult because trafficking is illegal."