Beating the Rhetoric
An estimated 700,000 to 4 million people around the world are being trafficked for labour and sexual exploitation each year. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing source of profit for organized crime. Trafficking is a lucrative industry. It has been identified as the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. It is second only to drug trafficking as the most profitable illegal industry in the world.
Victims of human trafficking are not permitted to leave upon arrival at their destination. They are held against their will through acts of coercion and forced to work or provide services to the trafficker or others. The work or services may include anything from bonded or forced labour to commercialized sexual exploitation. The arrangement may be structured as a work contract, but with no or low payment or on terms which are highly exploitative. Sometimes the arrangement is structured as debt bondage, with the victim not being permitted or able to pay off the debt.
Bonded labour, or debt bondage, is probably the least known form of labour trafficking today, and yet it is the most widely used method of enslaving people. Victims become bonded labourers when their labour is demanded as a means of repayment for a loan or service in which its terms and conditions have not been defined or in which the value of the victims’ services as reasonably assessed is not applied toward the liquidation of the debt. The value of their work is greater than the original sum of money “borrowed.”
Sex trafficking victims are generally found in dire circumstances and easily targeted by traffickers. Individuals, circumstances, and situations vulnerable to traffickers include homeless individuals, runaway teens, displaced homemakers, refugees, and drug addicts. While it may seem like trafficked people are the most vulnerable and powerless minorities in a region, victims are consistently exploited from any ethnic and social background.
Child labour is a form of work that is likely to be hazardous to the physical, mental, spiritual, moral, or social development of children and can interfere with their education. The International Labour Organization estimates worldwide that there are 246 million exploited children aged between 5 and 17 involved in debt bondage, forced recruitment for armed conflict, prostitution, pornography, the illegal drug trade, the illegal arms trade, and other illicit activities around the world.
The issue of trafficking in India is almost multidimensional. When analysed it is found that the human trafficking industry in India has certain “supply” and “demand” factors. The “supply” factors include- poverty, child marriage, non preference for a girl child among others. The “demand” factors include migration sex tourism among others.
Victims of trafficking very often are subjected to particularly detrimental forms of physical and/or psychological violence. Human trafficking is a risk to the right to life, liberty and security of person, as victims face physical and psychological violence, are kept against will, being held in slavery and servitude, being subject to torture cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, etc. To summarize, when each of the above control mechanisms are considered together, the outcome is a regime of actual and psychological imprisonment and torture.
Victims of forced prostitution are often subjected to psychological and/or physical torture (threats, humiliation and degradation, beatings and rape) by their traffickers. In many cases the women blame themselves for having become involved in trafficking and prostitution. They later feel ashamed to have given in to the demands of their tormentors. When forced to return home, the victims are faced with disappointment from their families and friends, having fallen short of everyone’s expectations to make a new start.
Victims are very often regarded as offenders and accomplices instead of victims of crime. Hence they are – instead of receiving assistance and protection – accused of offences such as illegal entry and stay, illicit employment, illegal prostitution, impermissible begging, dealing in illicit drugs, and other petty crimes.
Victims moreover face secondary victimization. Child victims involved in human trafficking cases in addition face the risk that the law enforcement and judicial authorities do not use the child friendly instruments for sexual abused children. Trafficking in human beings is often called a “low risk high profit” crime. This term refers to the prevalent situation that traffickers hardly face criminal proceedings, as the risk of detection, arrest and adequate punishment remains low. Yet, the profit of trafficking in person tends to surpass that made in the trafficking in drugs and arms.
Reasons for the lack of prosecution and convictions are the underground nature of the crime, the lack of testifying victims (in many European systems the investigations into trafficking cases are based on victims’ complaints) be it due to fear or due to the fact that many victims are even detained/deported as illegal immigrants/criminals, the lack of adequate anti-trafficking legislation.
In India human trafficking is rampant across the border areas on the Eastern side. On the eastern side India is chiefly bordered by Bangladesh and Nepal. And these two regions pose the largest threat to the Indian security scenario. Every year large number of people crosses over to the Indian side from Nepal and Bangladesh. Uttarakhand, Assam and Meghalaya act as the chief entry points from this illegal immigration. The illegal immigration overlaps human trafficking in some cases especially in the case of women since sometimes women are forcibly pushed across the border.
These persons often suffer from abject poverty. Usually the conditions which force them to illegally immigrate to other countries remain the same when they cross over to the other side. This is aptly demonstrated by the fact that many ghettos or colonies of the doubtful residents in Delhi, Coimbatore, Chennai, and Guwahati etc are worse. The people in such colonies usually live in abject poverty. Such colonies often can be equated to the slum areas of any region of the country. Thus, living in abject poverty in inhuman conditions, force people to take to the path of crime.
Prevention of human trafficking requires several types of interventions. Prevention as a strategy to combat trafficking has to focus on areas of sensitization and awareness among the public, especially those vulnerable pockets of trafficking at source areas as well as convergence of development services to forestall conditions responsible for it.
Human trafficking is indeed a modern form of slavery. It includes the most inhuman of practises which go against the very ideals of life of dignity of a free man as envisaged in the UN charter. It is also seen as a threat to the security and integrity of a country. Hence every measure must be taken along the lines of a multi-sectoral approach by successive governments to wipe out this menace from the face of this planet. (Views expressed are personal)