South Asia is a unique geographical area. It is one of the world’s most populous regions with one-quarter of the world’s population. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) comprises Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives, while Burma and Afghanistan are sometimes included.
Burma was part of India prior to 1937, as were East and West Pakistan prior to 1947. Nepal and Bhutan are land-locked Himalayan kingdoms. Due to geographical proximity and relatively open borders, trafficking of women is more pronounced in South-Asian countries. India stands out, being on the receiving end of the trade.
Trafficking of women, to which prostitution is directly related, is considered a social crime and not tolerated by South-Asian society. Major routes are known to exist between Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and different parts of India, from where women are transported to Bombay. Trafficking also takes place to the Gulf states from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Maldives, and Nepalese girls might also find their way to Hong Kong, Thailand, United States, Australia and Europe.
The larger number of migrant women workers from South Asia find themselves trapped in a labour market that operates clandestinely and outside the law. Human trafficking is a well-established conduit of labour supply in the region, with an entrenched and effective system of providing women and child workers not only to the sex trade, but also to other over-ground sectors of the economy which exploit their extreme vulnerability to ensure that wages are kept at the barest minimum. Globally, human trafficking has increased with an annual turnover of USD7-13 billion. Indeed, human trafficking is now the third largest trade around the world after drugs and weapons.
Traffickers acquire their victims in a number of ways. Sometimes women are kidnapped outright in one country and taken forcibly to another. In other cases, victims are lured with job offers. In yet other cases, victims are enticed to migrate voluntarily with false promises of well-paying jobs in foreign countries as au pairs, models, dancers, domestic workers and so on. There are also numerous cases of women who are trapped into servitude through the promise of more lucrative marriage opportunities abroad. Information about these job and marriage opportunities is often advertised through local newspapers in the “catchment areas” of such labour. In the case of recruitment for the sex trade, women are generally deceived into joining with offers of jobs such as child-care, housekeeping or restaurant work.
In South Asia, major trafficking routes are known to exist between Pakistan and Bangladesh via India, Nepal and India and Sri Lanka, and different parts of India. There are said to be nearly 160,000 Nepali women in Indian brothels. As many as 200,000 Bangladeshi women nave been trafficked to Pakistan in the last 10 years. Between 100-150 women are estimated to enter Pakistan illegally every day according to the Karachi-based Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA), which supports victims of trafficking who cannot afford the expenses of litigation.
Bangladeshi and Burmese women are kidnapped, married off to agents by unsuspecting parents, trafficked under false pretences, or otherwise enticed by prospects of a better life into brothels in Pakistan. A Bengali or Burmese woman will be sold in Pakistan for USD1,500-2,500, depending on age, looks, docility and virginity. Bangladeshis are estimated to make up 80 per cent and Burmese 14 per cent of Karachi’s undocumented immigrants. There are about 1,500 Bengali women in jails and about 200,000 women and children who have been sold into the slave trade, according to LHRLA.
This is a grey market that Karachi’s police use as a source for earning money. For each “sold” woman or child, the police claim a 16-20 per cent commission. Border police and other law enforcement agencies are well aware of the trafficking through entry points into Pakistan such as Lahore, Kasur, Bahawalpur, Chhor and Badin. On arrival in Pakistan, the girls are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The auctions are arranged primarily for three kinds of buyers: rich visiting Arabs (Sheikhs, businessmen, visitors, state-financed medical and university students), the rich local gentry and rural farmers. According to the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women-Asia Pacific (CATW-AP), orphaned girls are sold as “wives” to men who may resell them. Some Arabs stationed in Pakistan for short periods take “temporary wives.”
In the last 26 years, the Government of Pakistan has established three commissions of inquiry into the sexual exploitation of women. However, successive regimes have failed to implement the recommendations of these commissions. With the passage of time, trafficking has become a more and more entrenched and institutionalized fact of life that is carried on with such impunity that there are few countervailing forces to restrain the exploitation of the victims. The police and the legal system only compound the victimization of trafficked women by treating them as criminals. When they are caught, the women are booked under Pakistan’s controversial Hudood Ordinance, which criminalizes Zina, defined by law as extra-marital sex.
For the arrested women and children, the process of getting justice is long and arduous. While in jail the victims do not have access to lawyers, while the brokers, with the aid of jail authorities, manage to see them regularly, harassing and directing threats at them. Confined in deplorable jail conditions where they are frequently abused and with no access to any other source of help, the women submit to the brokers offers to get them released. Under duress and in sheer desperation, the women agree to the terms and conditions set by them. Once released, they are forced to comply with these conditions, since noncompliance will mean further encounters with law-enforcement authorities because of the broker’s threat to revoke bail. Further, social shame, fear and poverty force them to remain trapped by the tentacles of this trade, preventing them from returning to their country of origin.
The issue of migration, trafficking and women’s condition of work has received a great deal of attention in the South Asia seminar circuit, as manifested in the number of conferences and workshops that have been conducted and the reports that have been put out. While all this is no doubt very useful, all these activities have merely reduced the problem to the status of an abstract problem to be dealt with in ritualistic ways. It is imperative that governments of countries from where mass trafficking takes place, the recipient countries as well as the transit countries should, in conjunction with international, national and regional organizations, take up the issue in more concrete ways than they have done so far.
Trafficked women and children must be recognized as victims of trafficking and not as criminals. The provisions of the law must be changed to provide protection to them for offering testimony. This is the primary requirement for ensuring that the agents of trafficking are prosecuted. Most importantly, pending these long-term changes to prevent trafficking, governments may as well accept the reality of the situation and formulate clear guidelines on job-related contracts to prevent abuse and unfair practice against labour. In particular, it is necessary to declare illegal the current contracting practice of businesses and to support an increase in the social wage or non-wage benefits of workers. These should include social security, hospitalization, pension plans, and so on. The need to ensure compliance with minimum labour standards and working conditions in special industrial zones (where the overwhelming majority of the workers are women) is also important. Laws and codes to monitor sexual harassment at the workplace and stricter sanctions for noncompliance need to be strictly put in place and where they already exist, it should be overhauled for quick and time bound relief.
The situation will remain the same unless we create awareness among the masses and advocate government authorities to take appropriate measures to stop this inhuman business. Media can play an important role in this regard.
