Sex Slavery/Traficking

https://www.soroptimist.org/trafficking/faq.html

A $32 billion annual industry, modern day trafficking is a type of slavery that involves the transport or trade of people for the purpose of work. According to the U.N., about 2.5 million people around the world are ensnared in the web of human trafficking at any given time.

Human trafficking impacts people of all backgrounds, and people are trafficked for a variety of purposes. Men are often trafficked into hard labor jobs, while children are trafficked into labor positions in textile, agriculture and fishing industries. Women and girls are typically trafficked into the commercial sex industry, i.e. prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation.

Not all slaves are trafficked, but all trafficking victims are victims of slavery. Human trafficking is a particularly cruel type of slavery because it removes the victim from all that is familiar to her, rendering her completely isolated and alone, often unable to speak the language of her captors or fellow victims.

What is sex slavery/trafficking? 

Sex trafficking or slavery is the exploitation of women and children, within national or across international borders, for the purposes of forced sex work. Commercial sexual exploitation includes pornography, prostitution and sex trafficking of women and girls, and is characterized by the exploitation of a human being in exchange for goods or money. Each year, an estimated 800,000 women and children are trafficked across international borders—though additional numbers of women and girls are trafficked within countries.

Some sex trafficking is highly visible, such as street prostitution. But many trafficking victims remain unseen, operating out of unmarked brothels in unsuspecting—and sometimes suburban—neighborhoods. Sex traffickers may also operate out of a variety of public and private locations, such as massage parlors, spas and strip clubs.

Adult women make up the largest group of sex trafficking victims, followed by girl children, although a small percentage of men and boys are trafficked into the sex industry as well.

Human trafficking migration patterns tend to flow from East to West, but women may be trafficked from any country to another country at any given time and trafficking victims exist everywhere. Many of the poorest and most unstable countries have the highest incidences of human trafficking, and extreme poverty is a common bond among trafficking victims. Where economic alternatives do not exist, women and girls are more vulnerable to being tricked and coerced into sexual servitude. Increased unemployment and the loss of job security have undermined women's incomes and economic position. A stalled gender wage gap, as well as an increase in women's part-time and informal sector work, push women into poorly-paid jobs and long-term and hidden unemployment, which leaves women vulnerable to sex traffickers.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine are among the countries that are the greatest sources of trafficked persons. The UNODC cites Thailand, Japan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the United States as common destination countries of trafficked women and girls.

Who traffics women and girls? 

Organized crime is largely responsible for the spread of international human trafficking. Sex trafficking—along with its correlative elements, kidnapping, rape, prostitution and physical abuse—is illegal in nearly every country in the world. However, widespread corruption and greed make it possible for sex trafficking to quickly and easily proliferate. Though national and international institutions may attempt to regulate and enforce anti-trafficking legislation, local governments and police forces may in fact be participating in sex trafficking rings.

Why do traffickers traffic? Because sex trafficking can be extremely lucrative, especially in areas where opportunities for education and legitimate employment may be limited. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the greatest numbers of traffickers are from Asia, followed by Central and Southeastern Europe, and Western Europe. Crime groups involved in the sex trafficking of women and girls are also often involved in the transnational trafficking of drugs and firearms, and frequently use violence as a means of carrying out their activities.

One overriding factor in the proliferation of trafficking is the fundamental belief that the lives of women and girls are expendable. In societies where women and girls are undervalued or not valued at all, women are at greater risk for being abused, trafficked, and coerced into sex slavery. If women experienced improved economic and social status, trafficking would in large part be eradicated.

How are women trafficked? 

Women and girls are ensnared in sex trafficking in a variety of ways. Some are lured with offers of legitimate and legal work as shop assistants or waitresses. Others are promised marriage, educational opportunities and a better life. Still others are sold into trafficking by boyfriends, friends, neighbors or even parents.

Trafficking victims often pass among multiple traffickers, moving further and further from their home countries. Women often travel through multiple countries before ending at their final destination. For example, a woman from the Ukraine may be sold to a human trafficker in Turkey, who then passes her on to a trafficker in Thailand. Along the way she becomes confused and disoriented.

Typically, once in the custody of traffickers, a victim's passport and official papers are confiscated and held. Victims are told they are in the destination country illegally, which increases victims' dependence on their traffickers. Victims are often kept in captivity and also trapped into debt bondage, whereby they are obliged to pay back large recruitment and transportation fees before being released from their traffickers. Many victims report being charged additional fines or fees while under bondage, requiring them to work longer to pay off their debts.

Human trafficking victims experience various stages of degradation and physical and psychological torture. Victims are often deprived of food and sleep, are unable to move about freely, and are physically tortured. In order to keep women captive, victims are told their families and their children will be harmed or murdered if they (the women) try to escape or tell anyone about their situation. Because victims rarely understand the culture and language of the country into which they have been trafficked, they experience another layer of psychological stress and frustration.

Often, before servicing clients, women are forcibly raped by the traffickers themselves, in order to initiate the cycle of abuse and degradation. Some women are drugged in order to prevent them from escaping. Once “broken in,” sex trafficked victims can service up to 30 men a day, and are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, HIV infection and unwanted pregnancy.

Who purchases trafficked women and girls?

Many believe that sex trafficking is something that occurs “somewhere else.” However, many of the biggest trafficking consumers are developed nations, and men from all sectors of society support the trafficking industry. There is no one profile that encapsulates the “typical” client. Rather, men who purchase trafficked women are both rich and poor, Eastern and Western. Many are married and have children, and in some cases, as was reported in one New York Times article, men have sex with trafficked girls in lieu of abusing their own young children.

One reason for the proliferation of sex trafficking is because in many parts of the world there is little to no perceived stigma to purchasing sexual favors for money, and prostitution is viewed as a victimless crime. Because women are culturally and socially devalued in so many societies, there is little conflict with the purchasing of women and girls for sexual services. Further, few realize the explicit connection between the commercial sex trade, and the trafficking of women and girls and the illegal slave trade. In western society in particular, there is a commonly held perception that women choose to enter into the commercial sex trade. However, for the majority of women in the sex trade, and specifically in the case of trafficked women and girls who are coerced or forced into servitude, this is simply not the case.

In addition, sex tourism—that is, the practice of traveling or vacationing for the purpose of having sex—is a billion dollar industry that further encourages the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Many sex tours explicitly feature young girls. The tours are marketed specifically to pedophiles who prey on young children, and men who believe that having sex with virgins or young girls will cure sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Often, these men spread HIV and other STDs to their young victims, creating localized disease epidemics.

What is the impact of sex trafficking?

Trafficking has a harrowing effect on the mental, emotional and physical well being of the women and girls ensnared in its web. Beyond the physical abuse, trafficked women suffer extreme emotional stress, including shame, grief, fear, distrust and suicidal thoughts. Victims often experience post-traumatic stress disorder, and with that, acute anxiety, depression and insomnia. Many victims turn to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain.

Sex trafficking promotes societal breakdown by removing women and girls from their families and communities. Trafficking fuels organized crime groups that usually participate in many other illegal activities, including drug and weapons trafficking and money laundering. It negatively impacts local and national labor markets, due to the loss of human resources. Sex trafficking burdens public health systems. And trafficking erodes government authority, encourages widespread corruption, and threatens the security of vulnerable populations.

What is Soroptimist doing to stop human trafficking? 

As an organization of business and professional women working to improve the lives of women and girls and local communities throughout the world, Soroptimist undertakes a number of projects that directly and indirectly help potential trafficking victims. In late 2007, the organization launched a major campaign aimed at raising awareness about the devastating practice of sex trafficking. Soroptimist club members place the cards about sex trafficking in highly visible locations including police stations, women's centers, hospitals, legal aid societies, etc. In addition, the organization is calling on the public to do its part to end this heinous practice.

Soroptimist undertakes a number of other projects that directly and indirectly help victims and potential victims. These projects provide direct aid to women and girls—giving women economic tools and skills to achieve financial empowerment and independence:

The Women's Opportunity Awards program—Soroptimist's major project—provides women who are heads of households with the resources they need to improve their education, skills and employment prospects. By helping women to receive skill and resource training, Soroptimist provides trafficking and potential trafficking victims with economic options.

The Soroptimist Club Grants for Women and Girls program provides Soroptimist clubs with cash grants for innovative projects benefiting women and girls. Many clubs undertake projects that directly and indirectly benefit trafficking victims: a Soroptimist club in the Philippines supports a shelter for abused women and girls escaping from sex trafficking; a club in California held a conference in support of the Western Regional Task Force to Stop Human Trafficking and a club in Chicago has held several educational events related to trafficking.

Soroptimist presents Human Trafficking Facts that Making a Difference for Women Award program honors women who work to improve the lives of women and girls. Kathryn Xian is a recent recipient. In 2004, she led a grassroots campaign against a local tour company offering Asian sex tours. She also testified at a Hawaii State House of Representatives hearing on trafficking. The hearings resulted in the passage of Act 82, which makes “promoting travel for prostitution” a Class C felony violation. Act 82 now serves as model legislation for other states. Soroptimist strive to presents Human Trafficking Facts that make a difference in women's lives worldwide.

Soroptimist's Disaster Relief Fund provides financial assistance to regions affected by natural disasters or acts of war, with special attention paid to services benefiting women and girls. Women and girls affected by disasters are often vulnerable to traffickers. 

Girl Power

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-13264301

Something's 

really wrong here and something has to be done to put things right”

Varsha JoshiDelhi census chief

How girls are valued varies widely across India. Over the years, most states in the south and north-east have been kind to their girls, and sex ratios are above the national average.

In the matrilineal societies of Kerala and Karnataka in the south and Meghalaya in the north-east, women have enjoyed high status and commanded respect. But the latest census figures show the good news even in these areas could be turning bad. A minor decline in the number of girls has begun in the three states which, campaigners worry, might be indicative of a trend.

What is seen as most distressing is the steep decline in the number of girls under seven in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and in Sikkim, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura in the north-east. Even though these states have registered numbers much higher than the national average, the decline is too substantial to ignore.

But all is not lost. Some states, such as Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh - which saw the gap between numbers of boys and girls widen in 2001 - have shown an improvement. That is cause for some cheer, campaigners say.

It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/16/it’s-a-girl-the-three-deadliest-words-in-the-world/

• By Ram Mashru
• Notebook
• Last updated: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 at 11:46 am

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughter, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.

For more information about the film, visit here

A version of this article also appeared on The Daily Organ

Tagged in: femicide, Gendercide, It’s a girl

The Gold Stone Girl: It's a Nightmare Prologue

Prologue 

The girl stops running, wild-eyed, hunted, her breathing the rattle of old machines, of gears grinding without grease.  Her head swivels, a bird trapped in the coils of a snake.  In the near stillness she hears the beat of her own heart.  The pounding fills her ribcage, it swells inside her throat, it pulses afterbirth down the tender skin of her inner thighs.  She’s woozy, she sways and then steadies.

It was a sound that startled her, a screech, and it wasn’t human.  There it is again!  Monsters rampaging off the walkways, she thinks, her fear rising.  Phlegm beasts, or hammerheads, those slimy thickskulled creatures seen on the screens, hunting on the public walkways.  

No, be sensible, the girl thinks again, these are different sounds, smaller shrieks, less fearful growls, than the sound of the dogs on her scent, or the creatures who filet their food before eating.  This must be the noise of the hyenas, known to forage at the river’s edge, the girl decides.   

“Don’t cry, please don’t cry,” she murmurs to the bundle clutched in her stiffening arm.  She’s heard that hyenas eat babies.

The girl wears a dirty, ill-fitting, public-herd uniform.  A pink tease of ruffles and sleaze, meant to advertise her, haunch and teat.  She crouches low, preparing to sprint from her hiding place, in the shadows cast by the tall windowless buildings of the city’s Breederhood.  

A negative of moonlight etches the city skyline into a jagged silhouette across the riverbank.  It’s just the look of a creepy snaggletooth grin, as if even the shadows were having a laugh at her feeble attempt to die free.  The girl laughs too.  Why not?  What’s she got to lose but her life.  That end is nigh anyway.    

She takes off, running through shadow, then moonlight, now shadow again.  The smell of sulphur, from off the river, grows stronger.  It’s the smell of escape, from Winkin City.  It’s the only home she’s ever known.

She scrambles low over scrub-brush vegetation, dotted like an obstacle course across the eroded dirt.  She stubs the clubbed toe, of her rag bound foot, hard against a thistle root.  She totters forward, contorting her body, to keep from crushing the struggling yellow bundle, clutched now in both of her arms.  

She stops moving, panting until the baby settles, until the stabbing pain in her right foot ebbs back to the dull ache she considers normal.  She watches the slow seep of red spread across the grungy brown rags where her toes once were.  

She’d tried to escape the city before, when the baby was new inside her.  She’d been caught that time, and sentenced to binding.  

The girl-policeman, the one charged to execute her sentence, had a brown ooze bubbling at the corners of his mouth.  He’d taken her foot in his hand, and fondled it as if it weren’t attached to the rest of her.  Then he folded her foot, just like he was tearing at a loaf of bread, at the joints, where phalanges were connected to metatarsals.  Heedless of her howling, and the cracking of her bones, he repeated the action on her other foot.  He bandaged each mangled appendage up tight, to keep them folded this way.  

       “To make them dainty and petite,” the man muttered, now fondling her flaming stubs.  

Everyone knows that binding is meant to prevent escape from Winkin City, but even now, the girl’s running toward the Bridge of Tears on her government-deformed feet.  She’s ducking the searchlights that scour the Night Mare’s land seeking someone to kill.

She scrambles up the cracked and narrow slats of the rotting ladder to a rickety bridge, cobbled of driftwood, rope, and desperation.  The official seal of Blinkin undulates atop the blue screen at the ladder’s summit.  The seal is an animate coat-of-arms, a frolicsome bas-relief of busily rutting characters.  A demon rear mounts a human, who’s already bent over to fornicate his sow.  It’s the Night Mare’s chain of command, a visual haiku to her world order.  The same image is branded upon the escaping girl, in a tramp stamp of welts and ridges, across her lower back. 

This screen, at the top of the ladder, is the last of the government checkpoints before she gains the bridge.  Red words loop in ominous silence across the blue screen: 

Warning!  You are now leaving Winkin City, followed by, It’s not a good idea, and finally, Good luck.

The girl stares at the rolling words, her eyes vacant, her thoughts already on the thing she must do.  She steps past the glowing blue rectangle, cautiously, fearfully, as if it might explode, and now everything is swaying.  She sprints over wide wooden planks, laid across gaping gaps, to the whitewater below.  The girl hesitates.  She waits for the searchlight to pass over the center of the wavering span.  Then she hurtles forward again, heedless of her numbing feet, of the new blood chafing the old between her childlike thighs.

She stops at the sudden crunch underfoot.  She’d been expecting this path of bones, femurs and coccyx, mandibles crushed into sphenoids, illiums mixed with phalanges, maxillas, patellas, sternums, sacrums -- all that remains of the others who have made this journey before her.  Those who have not made it to the Off-grid, all the world on the other side of the Bridge of Tears. 

Everyone knows this boneyard is here.  Images of it are broadcast routinely upon the screens.  What she hadn’t expected was the sound.  It never occurred to her that it would be so visceral, the rattle and the snap of the brittle bones.  She closes her eyes, using the ossified percussion, she lurches forward, moving now to the rhythm of the clicks and the clacks.  

She stops in the middle of the bridge, faint and unsteady.  She opens her eyes and stumbles the few steps to the rope rail on the downriver side.  

She sees the monolithic buildings of the Night Mare’s Winkin City, glowing blue and breathing, looming like asthmatic giants set to hunt her.  She turns away, her focus on the other end of the wobbling bridge, inky night.  That way is freedom, they say.  

No, not the Off-grid for me.  She decides again.  The middle is the best place for it to end.  She chuckles, liking the play on words, liking that her thoughts are still not owned by the Night Mare’s government-church.  She’s relieved to be dying here, with the wet sulphur wind on her face, and not surrounded by the screens, in the confined squalor that is home.  Where one is always watched, and always watching.  

The girl leans over the frayed rope rail, drawn to the turbulent orange-brown swirl below.  She breathes in the smell of rotting eggs rising off the yellow foam.  She imagines the water reaching up to her with greedy hands.  

Then the twitching starts, heralding the end of her short life’s journey.  The contractions, nascent in her hemorrhaging womb, travel outward, racking her frail frame in a sweat of tremors, as whole clumps of life heave from inside her.  Blood gushes down her inner thighs, just the way the water did before the baby came.  

Maybe that’s what life is, she muses, a burst of warm liquid to come in, and another on the way out.  The girl closes her eyes, ready to welcome the end.

Wait!  She thinks, her eyes gaping wide in panic.  She’s shivering now, the world rigid and then slack.  There’s something left to do.  It’s the reason for coming all this long way.  

The girl casts frantically about the growing shadows of her thoughts, searching for the vital memory.  

Then the bundle, inside the crook of her cramping arm, begins to squirm.  Yes, the baby, she sighs with relief, that’s it, I must get rid of the baby.  

She tugs the bundle from inside her shawl.  It’s swaddled mummy-like, in saffron cloth.  All of its yellow points are kicking.  It makes a sound like a wounded cat.  

She named the baby, Lily, after a flower she once saw.  It was just a fleeting image, on a random screen, instantly stomped under a monster’s claw, but the lily was something to think about, to travel away from the horrors of everyday.

The young mother’s vision blurs.  She brushes her lips across the place she thinks Lily’s soft round cheek might be.  Then she raises the squalling baby overhead.  

The sudden glare of a searchlight traps her in its beam, hollow eyed, in stasis, the yellow bundle flailing.  The wind whips at the girl’s hair, her brown face is wet.  

Then she hurls the wriggling bundle of Lily with all of her might.  

Lily sails out a long way before hitting the whitewater.  Then she arcs and skitters from crest to wave, rushed along on the yellow foam, so that her mother needn’t watch her drown.  

But Lily’s mother is already dead, another lump of cloth up on the Bridge of Tears.  Her body is destined to be picked clean by the carrion eaters, who’ve claimed this span as buffet.  Leaving behind naught but bleached bones, and shards of cloth, mingled in with the others to remember her by.

Some nights, they say, when the wind blows right from the Left lands toward Winkin City, a sound of wailing comes in that wind.  It’s a howl made up of sobbing and shrieking and mournful high pitched cries.  Some say it’s the noise of the hyenas feasting; others are certain it’s the dead mothers shrieking; still others say it’s the colicky cries of the drowned babies.  No matter its cause, this wind chills all Winkins down to the bone, when it comes.

It’s said of those mothers, the ones whose babies vanish in the arms of the white water’s foam, that they believe their girls are rescued.  They imagine them living fruitful lives in the wilds of Off-grid.  If the truth be known, there are those who have survived flight off the Bridge of Tears, and baby Lily is one of them.

You Have To Tell Your Children About Human Trafficking

http://ideaswar.com/you-have-to-tell-your-children-about-human-trafficking-all-about-parenting/

Human trafficking. Image :quarterlifeman

Human Trafficking the biggest threat:

Human trafficking is one of the biggest threat to our generation. Every year thousands of men,women and children fall in the list of human trafficking. No doubt, human trafficking is a crime and one of the fastest growing industry besides drugs and weapon. This industry is fueled by the cheap demand of services (such as labor, sex industry , slavery etc) .

Human trafficking statistics:

Sex industry commonly found in street prostitution, online escort services, residential brothels, and brothels disguised as legitimate massage parlors and is generating profit of $32 billion annually and it is a reality that no country is safe from this crime specially poor countries of the world.

The statistics of human trafficking is very alarming, every minute of the day a woman or child is sold.

According to United Nations, every year nearly 700,000 to 4 million women and children are trafficked around the world for purposes of forced prostitution, labor and other forms of exploitation and nearly 2 million children are exploited in the commercial sex industry only. It is estimated that 27 million people are living the reality of nightmare in nations all over the word.It is estimated that about 100,000 childrenbecome the victim  of sex trade in United States every year only.

In the report, about 5,000 girls under the age of 18 are involved in prostitution just inUK. According to reports, South and South-East Asia (Burma, China, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam), East Europe and Latin America are particularly at greater risk today.

About 200,000 women and girls have been trafficked from Bangladesh and nearly3000 Bangladeshi women are in brothels in Calcutta only.

Every year , about 20,000 girls are being trafficked from poor parts of Nepal in the age of 9 to 11 and it is a bitter reality that girls usually die after two to three years of prostitution due to HIV positive, many girls are unable to reach the age of 20.

In Thailand, according to the local NGO’s about 2 Million women are working as prostitutes; most of them got engaged in this profession through Human trafficking.

On the other hand, Egypt has become a second place for the trading of women. Whereas traffickers have forced thousands of women and girls into prostitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Human trafficking is big business in the Philippines.It is the fourth country with the most number of prostituted children. Government and NGOs estimate the number of women trafficked to range from 300,000 to 400,000 and the number of children trafficked range from 60,000 to 100,000.

tactics

Trafficker’s tactics:

Unveiling the trafficker’s mechanism, there are number of ways through which the traffickers are doing that job properly. One thing I want to mention here, I have noticed as trafficker are not usually outsiders, in this crime the “middle man” is usually a local person(s) and some of the local traffickers don’t kidnap or take victims away from their residence but use them in their local area with the weapon of blackmailing.

Trafficker’s usually offer well paid job, promise bright future, through marriages or take that girl far away for such purpose. On the other hand ,supporting women to cross the border by providing visa or to give finance and make them slaves due to the debts and then force them to adopt the profession of prostitution.However, forcible kidnappingis an other common practice ,later on gang sold the girls or forced to choose prostitution as a profession.

In poor countries, the parents sell their girls and children for money or send their girls as a servant to main cities . Lack of verification mechanism,  unemployment, lack of education, poverty, get indulged incidentally are some of the common factors responsible behind such trafficking .

Child trafficking has increased because of their virginity and they are safe from HIV positive. On the other hand these innocent souls are unaware of traffickers as well as trafficking.

Once I met a victim. She belongs to a well off family and got indulged in this profession through her boyfriend who was (a member of such gang) her class fellow. Her boyfriend used the tactics and later on start doing black mailing. I was in shocked to listen her story. Here I am going to mention her few words; life is worst, no one can ever imagine. Every minute of my life is painful. I die every day, every morning I beg for the freedom and every day I pay the cost of doing trust on boyfriend. I have found men more ruthless in this profession.

Further she added manipulating girls through violence or controlling them with drug is a reality. Some of the girls are being threatened, some of them are being tortured. If someone show resistance then that girl has to bear sever torture (plucking nails, burning sensitive areas of body, beaten with belts or chains) and that severity of torture is a warning for other girls who show resistance for prostitution or ever try to escape from their circle.

Remember:

Human trafficking is one of the hot issue of today and children are at risk. Awareness is very important, parents have to highlight the tactics of traffickers and such gangs operating in the society. Remember, when children remain unaware from threats ,when ineffective law is there to address with that crime, when Govt. and community institute remain silent or untrained  and parents remain unaware about the tactics or from threats of traffickers then the victims will definitely increase.

It is a reality, human trafficking will continue to flourish in such societies where traffickers can reap substantial monetary gains with relatively low risk of getting caught .

Source:en.wikipedia.org,www.teamwmi.org

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