Children in chains: Part II

By Meg Burd
October 21, 2004

"There's drugs ... and arms... but what's the next most deadly illegal trade?" asks the non-profit Boulder-based organization Free A Child on its Web site.

As examined yesterday in "Children in chains: Part I " it would appear that human trafficking and slavery could be counted in this deadly category. With estimates of those trafficked into slavery ranging from 800,000 (as estimated by the U.S. State Department) to a staggering 4 million (mostly women and children), the problem, while already horrific in its magnitude, is growing annually. While people are globally trafficked into a variety of situations, including domestic and factory work, perhaps one of the most heinous places many of the young women and children smuggled around the world end up is in a brothel or a back room, forced into a life of prostitution and sexual exploitation.

A complex phenomenon, human trafficking is a multi-billion dollar industry (with the United Nations estimating that $7 billion per year is generated by the trafficking of "human cargo"), where economic factors often have a lot to do with how the majority of children end up in such terrible situations.

"Trafficking is generally described according to the 'push' factors that lead a child or adult to leaving one place, and 'pull' factors that decide the place to which the trafficking victims move or are moved," the World Congress Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children stated in a 2001 paper.

"People generally put themselves or their children in the hands of traffickers to escape poverty and/or discrimination or war. They are promised fantastic opportunities such as well-paid jobs, education or marriage. Many imagine that they will be able to send money home to help their families," the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asserts, although kidnappings are also known to contribute to the number of victims. For these victims, many are often "pushed" into border areas, tourist destinations, or other places where prostitution is established and highly profitable for the pimps and traffickers.

For the volunteers and organizers with Free A Child, these pulls into slavery and pushes into brothel-filled area are all too disturbingly visible in places such as Nepal.

"Each year between 7,000 and 10,000 Nepalese children between the ages of 8 and 16 are tricked, bought or kidnapped from their families to work as sex slaves in brothels in India," Free A Child said.

"India is rapidly taking over from Southeast Asia as the centre of the world sex industry, and the incidence of HIV and Aids there is growing with frightening speed," said Lesley Downer in an article in the Sunday Times.

In nearby Nepal, there are many socioeconomic factors that pull particularly young girls into such trafficking schemes: "Sixty-three percent of Nepalese children suffer from malnutrition and 33 percent of boys are illiterate; the figure is much higher on both counts for girls. The annual average per capita income is $210," Downer says.

Such factors make the children of Nepal prime targets for trafficking into India. Families of young girls from this area may sell their daughters to traffickers, sometimes unaware of the horrible situation into which the girls are being pushed, or else young women fall prey to trafficker's promises of a better economic future in Mumbai. Either way, the young girls who are trafficked into the brothels of Mumbai face a sad future.

For Free A Child, programs of prevention and reintroduction of those already effected by this horrible lifestyle are the key to, if not solving the problem of slavery, at least ameliorating some of the damage. Through street dramas and prevention programs designed to truly inform parents and young women of the horrors of being sold to traffickers.

"Right now, we are working with micro-economic programs to get at the root of the problem," said Kenlyn Kollen, Boulder attorney and president of Free A Child.

In places such as Nepal, it would seem, promoting recognition of this terrible crime and its realities, as well as establishing ways in which young women and their families can become more economically sustainable without resorting to trafficking, are essential. If such programs take root around the world, perhaps the numbers of children trafficked into prostitution and exploitation can be lowered.

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Children in chains: Part I
10-20-2004

Children in chains: Part III
10-22-2004
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