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Fighting Trafficking
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VICTIMS--Addressing codes of conduct of contractors and their workers can curb the demand for child labor and trafficked commercial sex workers.
Fourteen-year-old Bina has twice been a victim of child trafficking. Her nightmare began at the age of 11, when a pimp in Nepal raped her and then sold her to a brothel owner in Mumbai, India.
“My mother died when I was only 2 years old. My father did not care about me, and my stepmother would beat me regularly. I was made to work for a landlord in Nepal, and it was his wife who introduced me to the pimp,” recalled Bina.
According to nongovernment organizations (NGOs) working on the issue, hundreds of thousands of women and girls like Bina are deceived by traffickers and sold into bondage. “These women are sometimes tortured or abused by brothel keepers when they protest,” said Renu Rajpbhandari, Chairperson of Women’s Rehabilitation Centre (WRC) in Kathmandu, Nepal.
She said that although WRC has assisted almost 1,000 women since 1992, the country’s fragile political system is unable to address the issue in a complex and systematic manner. She stressed the urgency of providing women with access to higher education, as trafficking finds fertile ground in inequality, ignorance, and division.
Ms. Rajpbhandari was among the participants who attended the regional workshop on Combating Trafficking of Women and Children in South Asia, hosted by the ADB at its headquarters in Manila recently. She called on ADB to involve more women’s groups in project activities to build their capacity and create employment opportunities.
Trafficking to provide workers for the sex industry or cheap laborers is on the rise in Asia. An estimated 1 million–2 million people are trafficked worldwide annually, including 150,000 from South Asia and 225,000 from Southeast Asia. The United Nations estimates that over the last 30 years, trafficking for sexual exploitation alone has victimized some 30 million people—mostly poor women and children.
In countries such as India, almost half of the victims are between 11 and 18 years old. NGOs such as the Society to Help Rural Empowerment and Education (STHREE) in Andhra Pradesh work with the authorities to compile data, raise awareness, and provide alternative livelihood options for affected women and youth through government aid as well as microcredit. Among other activities, STHREE monitors the interactions between commercial sex workers along highways—the majority of whom have been trafficked—and truck drivers.
“However, there is still much to be done,” said Hema Bedi, STHREE’s President, who advocates that the issue can only be resolved by reaching out to the grass roots. “In addition, changes to the legislation must be made to ensure that traffickers do not get away with light sentence.”
Women like Ms. Bedi and Ms. Rajbhan- dari are among the hundreds of volunteers in South Asia who risk their lives to educate and prevent women from falling prey to this multibillion dollar industry.
“We now hire bodyguards to protect ourselves from the threats of those benefiting from this flourishing industry,” said Ms. Bedi.
With poverty often seen as the primary fuel for human trafficking, ADB is examining ways to help prevent and reduce the trafficking of women and children in Asia through its comprehensive poverty reduction initiatives.
Traffickers target the poor and those in search of better lives and opportunities, said ADB Vice-President (Operations 2) Joseph Eichenberger in his remarks to participants attending the workshop, which was the final event of a 10-month regional technical assistance project.
“When we target the poor in ADB-financed projects, we have the opportunity to ensure that the most vulnerable subgroups among them have their specific needs met, so that they do not feel the need to send away their children, especially girl children, who may end up being trafficked,” he added.
Mr. Eichenberger said that several policies provide ADB with both the mandate and the instruments to engage more effectively in the complex and sensitive issue of human trafficking. Such policy instruments include, for example, the Social Protection Strategy that provides for specific considerations to ensure that vulnerable groups can be protected from factors that cause and sustain their poverty and vulnerability. Good governance, one of the three pillars of ADB’s poverty reduction strategy, presents an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of antitrafficking initiatives. “The challenge is operational,” said Mr. Eichenberger.
“We have to be innovative in developing projects and finding the right partners in gov-ernment, NGOs, and the private sector to tackle this complex problem that harms women and children and undermines the development potential of the entire region,” said Sonomi Tanaka, ADB’s Social Development Specialist. Trafficking in South Asia is a gender issue, explained Ms. Tanaka, who is in charge of the Project.
“Traffickers play on the low status of women and girls by offering marriage opportunities to girls from poor households. Poor access to education and resources to improve livelihood leaves women with very few options for survival, and so they are easily lured,” she said. Boys are also trafficked, she added, but women and girls generally suffer more from social stigma once they have been trafficked, and this makes it almost impossible for them to rejoin society’s mainstream.
Real opportunities exist to address gender gaps in project activities to ensure that those marginalized have greater access to and control over development resources. Projects empowering women in South Asia, for example, can be used as platforms for governments and NGOs to include antitrafficking initiatives.
Construction sites and surrounding communities can often be a venue for recruiting labor for exploitative purposes. Addressing codes of conduct of contractors and their workers can curb the demand for child labor and trafficked commercial sex workers. Close monitoring of core labor standards, facilitated by the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding between ADB and the International Labour Organization, will also be an effective means. Further, community vigilance groups can be mobilized to monitor any irregularities.
“The key issue now is for ADB to partner with and support governments and NGOs already working on addressing this concern through its existing loan and technical assistance projects that lend themselves to the inclusion of antitrafficking initiatives,” said Shireen Lateef, ADB’s Principal Social Development Specialist. “To stop or reduce human trafficking, those most at risk — women and children — need to be empowered, provided with other livelihood options, and given the opportunity to live in dignity.”
Good examples of ADB-supported projects that already include antitrafficking initiatives are the East-West Economic Corridor Project in the Greater Mekong Subregion, which includes linking up with the ministries of women’s affairs of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Viet Nam and NGOs to develop and conduct sensitization programs on the issue for border officials, and the Melamchi Water Supply Development Project in Nepal, which is helping empower women and children in widely known source areas for trafficking in women and children.
“With the increased availability of poverty reduction grant funds, we can pilot and replicate more initiatives to combat trafficking in women and children,” adds Ms. Lateef.
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