The stories are heartbreakingly familiar, the patterns horrifyingly routine. Young girls, uneducated and living idly at home are easy prey for traffickers who approach their families on the pretext of getting them work in a different country, whether India, the Middle East or even Pakistan. Naïve families acquiesce, and soon, girls as young as six find themselves being exploited and sexually tortured in a flesh trade that flourishes all over the world. “They tell the family they will help the girl earn money to pay for her dowry,” Koirala says. “I ask, don’t men need to earn to pay for their own weddings too? This is why I say trafficking is not due to poverty. It is due to systemic gender inequality. Women are not valued enough to be educated and raised.” The stories come thick and fast. Koirala recounts how just the other day, on a flight, she met a 17-year-old girl who was escaping back to Nepal after being trafficked into Oman. It’s always the same story – a thriving black market for passports (“I know girls who have travelled on a Nepali passport when they are from Meghalaya; even the passport photos don’t match,” Koirala says); the prospect of foreign employment; the porous India-Nepal border and the sheer negligence and complicity of those in power destroys young lives every day. The horrors recounted by the lucky few who manage to return read like a manifesto of human bestiality. There’s Bimla, who was trafficked to India at the age of six, and given hormone injections, which meant she looked like a 13-year-old. “When we rescued her, she wanted to go to school. She looked older, but she was still a child,” Koirala says. Monica and Anita still have trouble walking – beatings, torture with electric wires and sexual violence have ensured that their hips have been displaced.
0 comments
प्रतिकृया दिनुहोस