Horrific abuse of Women - Trafficking and conflict

Kamala Sarup

"I got acquainted with a boy who was 30 who said he loved me and promised to marry me. He convinced me to go to India for a better life.   I went with him. The same night one of the men told us that we had to work in prostitution. I told him that I didn't want to work in prostitution, but he threatened me severely. I had several clients a day and was forced to hand over all the money they paid me. I was heavily guarded by those people and beaten up on several occasions. They often threatened to kill me if I wouldn't comply. I was afraid of them as I knew they carried guns".  Says Rita Kumari.  "We are forced to work as prostitutes if we want to eat. And 38 women sleep in the same room". said Rita Kumari.

 "My Uncle sold me for Rs. 55,000 to the brothel owner in exchange for food" says Radha  who received 10 to 12 clients a day until being rescued and brought to Nepal.  Radha says " As soon as we arrived to Bombay we met some other girls that were there for the same reasons. We all had to work as prostitutes in the streets. For sure I refused to work, but you would never believe what kind of persons they are and what methods they use to keep you feeling as a prisoner, as a victim.  They took all the money I used to earn. I used to work every night in the streets and used to earn enough money for them. But they were never satisfied".  Rita Kumari and Radha Kumari are one of hundreds of thousands of Nepali women who are abducted or persuaded to go with brokers by their parents, husbands, relatives and friends?.  Young women often from rural, poverty stricken  areas  are sold by their parents and sent to larger cities to be kept in slave-like conditions in huge and highly profitable brothels.

Political instability and the Maoist insurgency have hindered Nepal’s efforts in fighting women trafficking.  Now Nepalese women in droves are leaving their homes due to the bad security situation. As it is difficult to survive the deteriorating conditions in the villages, large number of women tend to leave their villages looking for better opportunities.  More and more women, particularly from the very poor rural West and North of the country, are pouring into the cities. The social and economic conditions here make a good atmosphere to work for these traffickers. The ongoing insurgency and internal migration have fueled trafficking.

The trafficking of women for forced prostitution into Nepal is a serious problem and a grave human rights abuse. Women unemployment in the cities is twice as high as male unemployment. Jobs as domestic worker are so badly paid that it is impossible to live on them. Thus the high number of women who are forced to turn to prostitution is not surprising.  The Nepal government does nothing to prevent trafficking in women.  In addition to exploiting economic need, traffickers exploit the vulnerability of women who have fled their homes because of violence or have been displaced by armed conflict.

In Nepal, for example, traffickers preyed on young girls raped in the course of armed conflict. Maoist insurgency activities have led to the withdrawal of police from most rural areas, and the number of reported investigations of trafficking decreased. Poverty, unemployment, internal migration and persistent political conflict have increased the vulnerability of women in many fields. Nepal's extreme poverty and its economic and political relationship with India have facilitated the trafficking of Nepali women and girls to brothels in India.

Many Nepalese women trafficked to India many return to Nepal with the HIV virus.  The Nepal government does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. Nepal’s law enforcement efforts against trafficking are limited due to continuing political instability and a severe lack of resources.  Forcing the poor even to consider questionable means of earning a livelihood, including prostitution, is downright condemnable. 

Girl-trafficking is considered hardly an issue these days due to the conflict and its impact.  Even on the other side the concept of girl being trafficked is gradually changing as large numbers of women are being displaced due to the conflict.   In Nepal where poverty has already limited people’s choices, discrimination against women in education, employment and wages can leave them with very few options for supporting themselves.

 Social worker Dr. Jamaika, while speaking with the Telegraph, not only made these queries but also said, " By disrupting normal economic activity and destroying bases of economic support, armed conflict also  puts women at risk for trafficking and at greater risk for having to engage in survival sex or sexual bartering, through which many women are becoming infected with HIV. Corrupt leaders, and a profound lack of political will coalesced to guarantee impunity for traffickers and to exacerbate the suffering of their victims. In addition, women faced rampant violence and discrimination in conflict lives. Rape and sexual assault against women are all too common in conflict situations".

The business of trafficking women is growing. Traffickers recruit women and children through deceptive means including falsified employment advertisements for domestic workers, waitresses and other low-skilled work. Traffickers include those involved in highly sophisticated networks of organized crime and may be as close to home as a relative to the victim. In the context of the above there has been a growing feeling within governments, and civil society organizations, that there is an urgent need to work closely with the travel and tourism industry and draw-up a collective agenda to address the issues of sex tourism. 

 Elisabeth Rehn, who has served as Finland's Defense Minister, an undersecretary general for the UN said "The real problem is in the fact that the traffickers are not only trafficking women and girls. They are also in the organized crime, and unfortunately, the corruption in many, many of these conflict countries. So those who are in political power also are dependent on the organized crime for financing. The trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation is a high-profit, low-risk trade for those who organize it, but it is detrimental to the thousands of women and children exploited in slavery-like conditions in the global sex industry".

She further said "Yet because human trafficking is intensely secretive and kept underground, it's not easy to identify victims or bring traffickers to justice. The traffickers also exploit lack of political will by governments to tackle trafficking and its root causes. Corruption, weak inter-agency coordination, and low funding levels for ministries tasked with prosecuting traffickers, preventing trafficking, and protecting victims also enable traffickers to continue their operations".

Trafficking in women is becoming an increasingly national procedure. Our laws are lacking or insufficient. The trafficking of women for sexual exploitation is accompanied by potentially lifelong and/or life-threatening health consequences.  Corruption contributes heavily to traffickers. Even, the success of traffickers’ business relies on their ability to keep activities hidden from law enforcement agencies.  

(Kamala Sarup recently wrote a book on Prevention of trafficking in women and girls for prostitution through media. B.P. Koirala Foundation, New Delhi, India.)

Conflict: Geographical, Economical, Social,Cultural, Religious perspectives

Prof. Dr Guna Nidhi Sharma, TU

Geographically, Nepal is divided into three different climatic zones with varying altitudes. Its landscape covers alpine, temperate, subtropical and tropical zones. High altitude zones are rocky and are less fertile and not fit for cultivation. This area, moreover, is economically suitable for tourism. However it covers large area and is thinly populated, its attribute in terms of resource efficiency is substantially low, except that it attracts foreign tourists. As a result, the area encompasses a higher proportion of more than 70% of the population living below the poverty line. However, there are some pockets and trekking routes which enjoy economic affluence through contacts with foreigners.

The green hills and plains, moreover, are rich in many respects and are suitable for gainful settlement. These areas have high economic viability in many forms like energetic people, soil fertility, diversity in vegetation and habitat etc. However, because of the urban centric policies and programs of HMG, the age old legal setup favoring inherited property and privileges, influential role of rural wealthy and urban elite in state and community affairs, absence of easy access to education, health, and other social opportunities and higher fertility rates of poor families, more than 50% of the population here fall below the poverty line. The hardship of life is furthered by the reduction of community land on which poor families overwhelmingly depend for their livelihood. The tarai plains, which is best in the economic sense, is also experiencing not less poverty caused by inequality and discrimination. The urban poverty is also of sizable magnitude.

Of course, a tradition bound Nepalese economy historically experiences inequality in income and wealth distribution when, in a situation of the low pace of industrialization and economic diversification, 50% of the cultivated land is owned by some 10% households. Even at the start of the 21st century the country has a sizable number of absentee landlords. Tenancy rights are not guaranteed and the credit system in the main is landed property biased. There is still the bonded labor system and the most deprived group in the country is the Dalit, whose literacy rate is only 18% and the life expectancy below 10 of the national average - around 51 years.

This implies that many poor Nepalese are deprived of productive assets and social opportunities and are living under absolute poverty. Consequently, they are unable to cope with misfortune, crowded family (as poor have higher fertility), landlessness (for whatever land is available to them is distributed to many family members as per the law of property right), low credit worthiness (since credit system is collateral based), high probability of losing productive assets (when they are deficient of surplus income), etc. Recent policies, in the name of economic growth, are biased towards capital intensity and technological sophistication, which rarely seem poor but uneducated, and low skilled mass friendly whose number is sizable - more than 50 % of the population. Policies, instead, are focused on macroeconomic perspectives of economic stability expressed in terms of national level indicators like budget deficit, foreign debt, money supply growth, rate of inflation, foreign exchange reserve, savings, investment, public expenditure and revenue and trade performance, and are less concerned with allocative efficiency, distributive justice and local self. The State, instead of becoming poor friendly and of the marginalized, is thus the facilitator of private sector working for the maximization of profit. The incentive is not for labor which has been the asset of a common Nepali whose number is substantial in families all over the country. As the government is present in selective commercialized pockets, which enjoy profitable activities, more than 80% of the rural areas are underdeveloped. Its reflection is underlined in the differences in per capita income, which is significant. Latest survey by CBS upholds that when Kathmandu and central development region enjoy Rs 24084.0 and Rs 9366.0 respectively, in per capita income, the far west registers only Rs.5928.0. The constancy in land productivity and the declining tendency in crop intensity too justify the reasoning that majority of people in Nepal fall outside the market net which deliberately enjoys policy focus. The high leakage of income indicated by greater (more than 30%) proportion of imports in GDP is also one of the major causes of rising unemployment (around 15% of the labor force), and under employment (50% of the labor force), when some 300 thousand youngsters are entering the labor market annually. All of them are responsible for the growing tendency of social and economic inequality (in a decade after 1990 the Gini coefficient has increased from 0.3 to 0.7), which, undoubtedly, serve as the fertile land for growing resentment and conflict breeding.

The present day Nepal, not only in the territorial sense, is not the outcome of one, two or three decades. It has centuries of history. Its life style is shaped by ancient philosophies with their roots in Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim religions that prevailed in central, south, southeast and East Asia. The society governed primarily by Hindu and Muslim principles are most hierarchical, caste ridden, complex and discriminatory. Most of the cultural milieu in Nepal is determined within these religious fundamentals the manifestation of which is a society with many layers of socially privileged and under privileged. There are also the cases of underprivileged within under privileged groups. Although these groups lived in functional harmony for centuries, they sentimentally disliked each other. People were of the hope that democracy introduced in 1951 would complete the liberation movement with its residue as an egalitarian society. The situation, however, was different in that not only the traditional base of social management was continued by means of keeping all institutional setups including legal institutions, centralized bureaucracy and the educational and social feedback from British rule in India in tact, but also social engineers, designers and the policy makers were chosen mostly from privileged groups who deliberately undermined the historically derived social suppression which could multiply differences between have and have nots and cause more damage in future. What appears today are the accumulated and cumulative effect of those suppressions and discriminations between gender, castes, ethnicities, diversities and nationalities. Had the country thought timely of the right process of inclusion, participatory development, education and access to social opportunities, the country could have entered the take off stage as attained by South Korea, China and India. (NEFAS/FES)

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