WUNRN
NEPAL:
Traffickers Exploit Increased Mobility of Underage Girls
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Traffickers target Nepalese girls from poor families in
the villages. |
BANKE, 22 August 2007 (IRIN) - Sixteen-year-old
Sushma does not want to reveal her true identity for fear that the traffickers
who sold her into the notorious brothel area of Kamathipura in Mumbai, India,
could track her down and kill her.
"I should have listened to my village schoolteacher
who told me not to be taken in by false promises of a job abroad," she
told IRIN, expressing regret that she had left her village in Banke, nearly
600km southwest of Kathmandu, without even informing her parents.
"There are so many innocent village girls who have
been lured by traffickers with false promises of earning a lot of money in a
foreign country," said Sushma.
Anti girl-trafficking activists have asked the local
police authorities, especially those stationed near the open Nepal-Indian
border, to be on the lookout for any young underage girls leaving the country.
In the last week alone a prominent local
non-governmental organisation (NGO), Maiti Nepal, intercepted around 15 girls,
half of whom were underage. "They were all carrying fake passports and
didn't even know where they were travelling to," said activist Keshab
Koirala from Maiti Nepal in Banke.
Maiti Nepal and other NGOs like the Women's
Rehabilitation Centre are actively raising awareness of the dangers of
trafficking but the traffickers can be persuasive: "I trusted the man who
came to help me but I didn't know he was tricking me," said Fudoma Sherpa,
a 15-year-old girl who was saved by Maiti Nepal at the border near Nepalgunj in
Banke District. The alleged trafficker is in hiding, according to activists.
Despite measures by the government and NGOs to protect
girls from being trafficked, the situation has barely changed, according to
activists, who said hundreds of Nepalese girls still get trafficked to India
every year where they are forced into prostitution.
NGOs suspect that one of the reasons for the steady
number of trafficked girls is that mobility restrictions imposed by the recent
armed conflict in Nepal now no longer exist. During that period young girls
could not easily leave the villages due to the Maoist rebels who controlled the
movement of people. The traffickers are able to exploit this situation, they
say.
Particularly vulnerable are girls who have become
internally displaced persons (IDPs) due to growing political violence in
southern Nepal's densely populated Terai region.
How the traffickers operate
According to Maiti Nepal, traffickers have been luring
girls into prostitution by offering them fake jobs in Gulf countries and
southeast Asia. The NGO says most of the vulnerable girls are under 16.
Investigations by the NGO have revealed that the
Nepalese brothel owners in India use their strong networks at village and city
level in Nepal to ensure a steady supply of girls. The local traffickers get a
cut from the brothel owners.
Young Nepalese girls are sold at a high price to the
biggest brothel owners. One of the most notorious brothel owners was released a
few years ago due to her political connections, which proved that traffickers
get political protection, according to Maiti Nepal.
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