Human Trafficking - Four voices

Dhading district is one of the source areas from where girls are trafficked to India and Kathmandu. It took us around 2 hours to go there, and here are some of the stories from the volunteers working on preventing human trafficking to continue.

The place
Dhading district is one of Kathmandu's neighboring districts and is supposedly the second largest supplier of girls to the Indian sex marked. The literacy rate is very low (43.48%), the district is hard to reach with car, as the roads are not in a particularly good condition, many people migrate for employment and the majority of the population are farmers working on subsidized land. The food shortage is a problem in the northern parts of the district, bordering to China, and this is also the place where most people are trafficked from.







The problem
Try to put yourself in the position of the mother who is not able to grow or by enough food for her three children and her family in-law. Put yourself in the position of the grandfather taking his grandchild to the marked and putting her up for bidding. Put yourself in the position of being a girl in a poor family, you have not had meat or milk for fourteen days and then your father says you will go to Kathmandu and work as a maid to help support the family. Or even better, being married to a rich and handsome Indian. Fake marriages is not uncommon and often girls get false promises of a decent job and sophisticated life in the city if they agree to go to India. The girls believe and agree to go with the broker to India where they usually are sold to brothels. Mostly the brokers are nearby relatives of the victims. Most of the parents are not informed of the job status of their children.

The people
Luko (20) and Pramila (17) are both Tamang. Meaning that they belong to the ethnic group most exposed to human trafficking in Dhading. We meet them at a training for strengthening the capacity of youth in three village development communities (VDC), where the problem is at highest scale. The two girls are highly motivated to fight human trafficking; -We will focus on anti stigma work, on publicly putting the problem on the agenda and on making the people in our village aware of this as a problem that the whole community has to face and do something with, it is not only the responsibility for the police. Dinesh (20) and Kuron (16), two boys from two other VDCs underlines the importance of both being together with other youths, to get inspiration and knowledge about the complexity of the problem and how they together can contribute in making a change for the people affected; their neighbors, friends and relatives.

The project
Norwegian Red Cross Youth have had a campaign the two last years to fight Human Trafficking and Nepal is one of three countries where we have implemented projects. Three VDCs are in foucus in Dhading, Nepal. Each VDC will form a Youth Action Team Against Trafficking, consisting of five boys and five girls. The action teams will be trained on anti-human trafficking, HIV-prevention, need analysis and street drama performance. My co-delegate Emil visited this street drama training two weeks before we went there to this project proposal workshop. At the workshop they planned their coming work the coming year; peer education, door to door visits, orientations, discussions, street drama shows, folk song competition in their communities. I can nothing but wish them the best of luck in this very important Red Cross work - preventing human suffering!