TEAR Fund Christmas Focus: Trafficking in Nepal

The following was submitted by Andrew Dallaston – TEAR Fund Education Officer.

A lot of kiwis have been trekking in Nepal. One notable kiwi trekked all the way to the top of Everest and then spent a fair chunk of his remarkable life helping the Sherpa people build schools and hospitals. But apart from Sir Edmund and the Himalayas most of us don’t know much about Nepal – that little country about the size of the South Island, sitting on top of India.

Nepal’s one of the poorest countries in the world. About 80% of the population (28.6 million) is involved in subsistence farming. 40% of the workforce is unemployed and only a tiny percent has electricity or running water. Most of the people rely on wood fires for heating and cooking, which means they’ve cut down most of their forests, resulting in erosion and terrible floods.

Back in 1996 the smoldering political discontent in Nepal ignited into a civil war with Maoist insurgents fighting the government. Over the next ten years over 12,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes. It cost the country billion of rupees and wrecked the tourist industry which had been one of Nepal’s big earners. An uneasy peace was reached in 2006 but the situation in Nepal is still far from stable and the extreme poverty produces a plethora of problems.

Perhaps the nastiest of these problems is trafficking… a modern term for slavery. Parents who are desperately poor, struggling to feed their families, are vulnerable to exploitation. Sometimes they sell their children into bonded labour (another term for slavery) to pay off debt. Sometimes they are tricked into believing that their children are being offered a better life – a real job, with plenty of food and prospects. The reality is horribly different.

Today in Nepal there are nearly one and a half million children slaving at hard, dangerous jobs in mines, factories and farms – working long hours in conditions which would have us screaming for a trade union. Kids are supposed to grow, learn and play not work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. But what’s even worse than stealing a kid’s childhood is forcing a girl into prostitution.

A high percentage of trafficking in Nepal is for the sex slave trade. Accurate figures are hard to find. Obviously slave traders do all they can to keep their evil business secret but it’s estimated that around 10,000 Nepali girls are sold into the sex trade every year. Most of these girls end up in brothels in India where there may be as many as 250,000 Nepali women working as prostitutes.

But figures like can’t convey the horrible reality. Imagine a little girl, only nine or ten years old, forced to leave her home, her family, everyone and everywhere she’s ever known. She’s transported to another country, frightened, alone, struggling to understand what people are saying to her, examined and sold like an animal.

She’s imprisoned in a seedy brothel in a slum red light district and is forced to join the line of prostitutes who have sex with twenty or more men every day. If she resists she’s beaten, starved, raped… brutalized until she submits. Imagine if this girl were your daughter or your sister having her childhood and her innocence stolen in the worst possible way.

So why don’t the authorities do something? Trafficking is illegal in Nepal and India but it’s also a very lucrative business and when this much money is involved there’s serious corruption. The police, the army, government officials are all being paid to turn a blind eye and thus allowing this wicked trade to thrive and grow.

The outlook for these girls is grim. Having sex with so many men means they’re exposed to all manner of diseases, STDs, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis. There is still a horrific misconception in India and many parts of the majority world that having sex with a virgin is a cure for diseases like AIDS and syphilis. Because of this sick and totally ignorant belief girls as young as 8 are in high demand and at even higher risk.

When the prostitutes become too sick to work they’re kicked out of the brothel, left to survive or die. Some make it back to Nepal where often they’re met with condemnation and rejection rather than compassion. People blame them for working as prostitutes – as if they had a choice – and are scared of catching AIDS from them.

There is some hope in this depressing story. Many aid organizations are doing excellent work in Nepal. TEAR Fund is partnering with a particularly dynamic NGO called Care and Share. TEAR Fund always works with local partners. It’s a whole lot more cost effective and sensible to support people who know the language, the culture and the needs better than an outsider ever could.

Share and Care fights trafficking in many ways – direct and indirect. S&C does lobby the Nepali Government to enforce the anti trafficking laws but they also are helping rebuild local government infrastructure which was shattered by the civil war, so that the laws can be properly enforced.

S&C offers counseling, medical treatment and retraining for former prostitutes. It also offers them acceptance and the compassion of Jesus in very practical ways. But S&C also tackles the route causes of slavery – poverty and ignorance. Working in the poorest areas of Nepal, S&C runs job training programmes and helps farmers with new techniques and technologies. It organizes coops so that the farmers can produce more and get fairer prices.

Poor people in Nepal can’t afford much education, especially for girls; so S&C runs literacy courses for women and at the same time teaches them about women’s rights countering the traditional view of women as property.

Community building, peace making, encouraging the local churches into more social action… a lot of these little steps may eventually create a society where slavery cannot continue.

A very important question – what can we do to help wipe out this vile trade in human lives?

Obviously we can give financial support to organizations like Share and Care through TEAR Fund. We can increase our awareness of the problems and share that awareness with others. We can lobby our leaders to pressure politicians in Nepal, India and other countries where slavery thrives to fight corruption and enforce the law. We can buy fair trade goods as a step towards relieving the poverty which allows slavery to increase.

On a more personal level, those of us who are male can review our own attitudes to women and make sure we are not guilty of exploitation. We could also be slower to judge and quicker to be kind to those in need. It doesn’t seem like much in the face of a ghastly and growing problem but every little something we do is better than inaction, apathy or despair.

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