Human trafficking is a heinous crime. Its victims face an extreme level of mental, physical, emotional tormenting and experience grave fear and pain due to it. In our society, there are many gender orientated psychological structures prevailing and this leads to many crimes . Poverty is one of the major reasons for widespread inequality and an increasing number of crimes. Mostly poor and uneducated women and girls are prone to get exploited by the hands of cruel, evil , criminal minded elements in the society.
There are millions of young girls and women who are subjected to human trafficking and still live in its shadows. They are trafficked by force, coercion deception, abduction etc and are made to suffer through the traumatic and fearful experience and have to survive in that pain. As per the United Nations records, in a year nearly 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders as well as within nations and out of which 80% are women and girls below the age of 15years and 50% are minors.
Since these illegal activities take place in a shallow, secret manner thus the exact figures about the number of abducted and trafficked people is not always correct. But in majority, the victims are identified as women, girls, minor children. As per the UNITED NATIONS REPORTS, it’s estimated that, out of every four trafficked women, three are mostly for sexual exploitation. This simply clears that women are majorly trafficked for serving sexual purposes and as bonded sex slaves in the international market, across borders.
Trafficked people are made to work forcefully and under threat. Such women are made to work as slaved labour, sex slaves, and prostitutes and often used for organ selling as mode to earn living. Its main purpose as identified by many trafficking survivors is for sex. Many young women are deceived by offering employment and jobs overseas and within different states in a country , following which they are snapped in various poses and often nude. Such pictures are used in pornography and sent for prostitution or sex slaves to many clients and in the same manner they are auctioned.
The whole business is handled by various persons, who have developed a vast network of dealers, nightclubs, pubs, hotels etc. The networkers are most called dealers (normally). They are also named ‘pimps’ in the United States and similarly names vary from palace to place. In the name of getting jobs or hired at some good place, many girls and women are fraudulently dragged into this huge dirty circle. The nude pics of women are circulated around to gather clients and earn loads of money by such means. The selected one’s are then auctioned, either in person or online and even shipped to other nations.
How inhumane all this cycle sounds? How can they treat a woman as a mere commodity and not even consider her as a basic human being? Don’t they fear anyone or anything while doing such jobs? Why the administration and the police can’t get hints of such instances? Why still many unreported missing cases taken seriously?
There are many unanswered questions relating to it but answers to these are given by none.
Trafficked women are kept as sex slaves and have to perform as their masters or owners ask them to do. They are sold out to rich men and made to work at many strip clubs, night pubs, bars etc for money, and that too forcefully. The business of trafficking women is expanding at a large scale but who can be held responsible for such a flourished business? Is it the negligence of people, about the evil in their society or its negligence on the part of administrative officials who can’t trace the origin, means and ends of this vicious cycle.
Not only young girls, with big dreams and desires and no means to achieve them, fell into the trap of pimps but also many young teenage boys, who run away from homes are also easily trapped in this system. Since teenagers are stubborn and still childish, though strive at proving themselves as mature persons, they still can’t have the intellectual capacity to be rational and wise at decision making. Many kids try to escape their problems or after fighting with their parents on the runway from their family homes and wander the streets. Such kids are very vulnerable and are at a high risk of getting trafficked.
They can be easily convinced on being offered some kind of help or bait and later they can’t even escape from the clutches of traffickers easily, at all. Even if they try to escape, they are either starved to death, thrashed or beaten up and often killed by subjecting them to other cruelest forms of tortures, on not agreeing to their demands.
There is an urgent need for prosecuting the culprits, perpetrators. It’s also very essential to support and encourage the survivors of trafficking in their journey to restore backup to a good, dignified, healthy, happy life. In order to prevent trafficking of women and girls at large , it’s needed to be informed about the signs and symptoms to identify a person who is being trafficked and worked as a slave. Also it’s required to establish such surveillance checks and measures which help in identifying and revealing the numerous undercover trafficking networks and its brokers or pimps.
It’s a very complex mechanism and often these brokers have connections with influential persons in society and thus even on arrest or conviction, they get released and bailed out easily. To eradicate this problem and save the victims from the reoccurring trafficking, we have got to stand up and step in because if we won’t, then possibly nobody else will. We need to raise voice against these and unleash such people openly, who are operating trafficking systems. It can be anybody. It can be your neighbour, your school bus driver, your close friend, your boyfriend or even your own family member. So never trust anyone completely, within prior checks.
Many NGOS are working at establishing a root to tip system , to identify, trace, save and stop this trafficking at various stages. But these organisations get little or no assistance by local or other authorities and thus this hinders the scale of progress in their work. A good parent-child, parent- teacher relationship is must to make one aware about any such kind of misshapen which may take place to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Such topics need to be discussed at large, on famous media platforms along with necessary measures that can be taken to avoid getting involved in any such circles.
“The views of the authors are personal“
References:
a. Stories of trafficking survivors published under Medium.com/@UN-Women
