SHOUKAT LOHAR

Illegal human trafficking is a global issue that involves the forced transportation of people across borders, often through deceitful means and with the intention of exploiting them.

This heinous crime is a violation of human rights and affects individuals of all ages, genders, and nationalities. Recently, a tragic incident occurred near Greece where a boat carrying illegal immigrants sank. The majority of the passengers were Pakistani citizens who were seeking a better life in Europe.

The term “blue dreams” refers to the desire of individuals to migrate to Europe in search of a better future.

Unfortunately, this journey often involves illegal means of transportation, such as human trafficking, which puts the lives of migrants at risk. In the case of the sunken boat near Greece, the passengers were likely victims of human trafficking, lured by false promises of a brighter future in Europe.

The sinking of the boat near Greece has sparked outrage and mass protests in the country, with locals expressing their solidarity with the victims and their families. However, the response in Pakistan has been mostly limited to condemnation.

This disparity in reactions highlights the need for greater awareness and action against human trafficking, both in Pakistan and around the world.

It is crucial to identify the agents and merchants of death who are responsible for human trafficking and bring them to justice. These individuals often take advantage of vulnerable people who are desperate for a better life, and exploit them for their own financial gain. Governments and law enforcement agencies must work together to dismantle these criminal networks and hold those responsible accountable for their actions.

This disparity in reactions highlights the need for greater awareness and action against human trafficking, both in Pakistan and around the world.

In addition, it is essential to address the root causes of human trafficking, such as poverty, lack of education, and limited economic opportunities. In many cases, people turn to human trafficking as a means of survival, as they see no other way to improve their living conditions. Therefore, governments must invest in creating jobs, providing education, and improving living standards to reduce the demand for illegal migration.

Furthermore, it is important to provide support and protection to victims of human trafficking. Many individuals who are trafficked experience physical and psychological trauma, and it is crucial to provide them with the necessary resources to recover and rebuild their lives. This includes access to healthcare, legal assistance, and social services.

In conclusion, the recent sinking of a boat carrying Pakistani citizens near Greece is a tragic reminder of the dangers of human trafficking. It is essential to take action to stop this heinous crime and support the victims of trafficking. Governments must work together to dismantle criminal networks, address the root causes of human trafficking, and provide support to victims. Only then can we hope to create a world where all individuals are treated with dignity and respect, and their human rights are protected.

______________

Shoukat Lohar is Assistant professor in English at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology Jamshoro. He can be reached at Shoukat.ali@faculty.muet.edu.pk

The post Human Traffickers – The Merchants of Death first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Aamir Latif 

KARACHI, Sindh Pakistan

The state flag flew half-mast, and special prayers were held across Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Sunday to remember dozens of youths from the region who have been killed or gone missing in a boat wreck off the coast of Greece on Wednesday.

The government announced Sunday as a “mourning day” as grief and sorrow gripped the region following the shocking news which fell like a bombshell on the victims’ families back home.

At least 78 migrants drowned off southwestern Greece on Wednesday after the fishing boat they were in capsized.

A total of 104 migrants were rescued, but the number of deaths is feared to rise as survivors said the vessel was carrying more than 600 migrants, mostly from Pakistan, Egypt, and Syria.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that 12 of the survivors are Pakistani nationals.

The scenic Khoe Ratta town of Kotli district remained in the grip of shock as some 27 youths from the area who were on the ill-fated boat have gone missing.

Thousands of people, including local politicians and government officials, thronged the victims’ homes to offer condolences to the bereaved families.

Shocked town shut

“The whole town is in deep shock. Shops and markets are closed as special prayers are being held in different parts of the district,” Ameer Mughal, a local resident, told Anadolu over the phone.

Assistant Commissioner Sardar Mushtaq Ahmad told Anadolu that 27 youths belonged to different parts of the district, whereas further data is being collected. The victims’ number may soar, he added.

A spectacle played out by local broadcaster Geo News showed a family wailing as people offered condolences. A dejected father broke into tears as another mourner hugged him, another footage showed.

Hundreds of unemployment-stricken Pakistani youths risk their lives to reach Europe by sea and road for a better future after paying huge amounts to human smugglers, despite frequent accidents. Many of them are even shot by border guards.

In March this year, a famous Pakistani woman athlete Shahid Raza, and several others were killed after a boat carrying more than 150 others from Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan crashed into the rocks trying to reach the shores in Crotone, Italy.

Action against human traffickers

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday ordered a crackdown against human traffickers across the country.

In a statement issued from his office, Sharif also ordered an inquiry into the fresh incident, besides expressing grief over the loss of “precious” lives.

The government agencies are often accused of forging a nexus with or turning a blind eye to human smuggling.

The federal investigation agency has arrested 10 suspected human traffickers from different parts of the Islamabad-controlled part of Kashmir – also known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir –, and another from Karachi airport, who was trying to flee abroad, Geo News reported.

The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, in a statement, said that Pakistan’s Embassy in Greece remains in contact with the Greek authorities to identify the 78 recovered bodies.

“At this stage, we are unable to verify the number and identity of Pakistani nationals among the deceased,” she said, adding that the identification process will take place through DNA-matching with close family members (parents and children only).

________________

Aamir Latif is a Karachi-based senior journalist, representing Anadolu, a Turkish news agency

Courtesy: Anadolu Agency (Posted on 18.06.2023)  

The post Pakistan moves against human traffickers first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Karachi, Sindh

Provincial Minister for Local Government and Public Health Engineering Syed Nasir Hussain Shah has said that there is dire need to frame by-laws on child labor and bonded labor not only in Sindh but in the entire country.

He said this today while addressing an event organized in a local hotel in Karachi on Thursday.

Nasir Shah said that child labor, forced labor and human trafficking are unpardonable crimes and are a scourge on society, so it is necessary to have strict legislation to eradicate them.

He added that the incidents of violence against children are increasing day by day in the society, which needs to be combated. “Therefore, we all have to work together, it is not only the responsibility of the government, but the responsibility of every member of the society and this responsibility is also imposed on non-governmental social organizations working in this regard.”

Nasir Shah praised the Sustainable Social Development Organization for its initiatives in this regard and said that its recommendations will be considered to incorporate in the next budget.

He said that abuses against children are a scourge of society and cause of shame and infamy. He added that more responsibility lies on the federal government in the legislation on human trafficking.

Other officials also addressed the event. (PR)

_____________

The post Sindh Minister admits violence against children is on the rise first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Law-and-order imbalance, poverty and illiteracy make trafficking in persons easier – Sindh Women Development Minister’s speech at International Conference on Combating Trafficking in Persons in Pakistan

 Islamabad

The 2-day conference began here Monday to discuss reducing the trafficking in persons (TIP) and increasing the direct referrals of victims for services or rehabilitation and advocating for prevention and prosecution of Trafficking in Persons.

The conference has been organized by Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO) in collaboration with US Embassy and Pakistan US Alumni Network (PUAN). The conference’s objective is to strengthen institutional capacity and collaboration of various stakeholders primarily for the implementation of legal frameworks.

The conference opened with speeches and was attended by government, private and development sector institutions from both Pakistan and the United States. Participants included senior officials from federal and provincial government departments, Parliamentarians, senior police and FIA representatives, ambassadors, national and international NGOs, and media.

Mr. Donald Blome, US Ambassador to Pakistan reminded that trafficking in persons is a centuries old problem that requires everyone to play a role and create innovative approaches to combat perpetrators who remain a threat due to continuous development of new trafficking techniques.

His message was further addressed by Ms. Shehla Raza, Sindh Women Development Minister, by adding that human trafficking is a disaster of its own kind which severely impacts women and children in particular. There is a law-and-order imbalance, alongside poverty and illiteracy, which makes trafficking in persons easier to execute. Ms. Raza stated that her ministry is working on legal aid and provision of rehabilitation for victims.

Syed Kausar Abbas, Executive Director SSDO emphasized the necessity of judiciary training to sensitize towards and mainstream the issue of trafficking in persons. Pakistan’s geographic location makes it as a destination, transit, and source country for trafficking in persons (TIP). Since 2015, Pakistan appeared five times in the Tier II Watch-list countries in the US Department of State’s annual report on TIP. The reason for Pakistan getting moved up to Tier II in the 2022 US report, is attributed to the development of trafficking prevention legislation, particularly the “Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018” and the increased efforts of the government and coordination between stakeholders. Sahibzada Aamir Khalil, President of PUAN, suggested that a victim-centric legislation will achieve the welfare and support needed by survivors of trafficking of persons.

Following the speeches were panel discussions where TIP experts from Pakistan and USA highlighted the issues of trafficking, its relevancy to Pakistan, deliberated the existing legal framework, implementation status and policy gaps to combat human trafficking and stressed the international best practices to combat trafficking in persons in Pakistan.

Latter sessions included breakout working groups for relevant stakeholders to collectively prepare recommendations for parliamentarians, policy makers, law enforcement agencies and judiciary to effective control on internal and external human trafficking.

Sustainable Social Development Organization is implementing a project with the support of US Mission, and contributing in capacity building, strengthening coordination, and spreading awareness about human trafficking among all relevant stakeholders. This conference was one of the initiatives for this cause where participants and panelists alike developed an in-depth understanding of trafficking of persons in Pakistan. (PR)

___________________

The post Pakistan is destination, transit, and source country for human trafficking first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Rifat Fareed

Indian-administered Kashmir – Twenty-nine-year-old Nazima Begum* sits cross-legged on the floor of her dark room, the windows covered with tarpaulin. On her lap is her youngest son, five-month-old Taufiq*, who plays with his mother’s face as she talks. Occasionally, she stops to plant a kiss on his head.

Nazima lives in this single room in Srinagar with Taufiq and her two older children, aged seven and 10. Her husband died from heart disease four months ago and although there is sadness in her voice, she says she tries to appear strong for her children.

Hers was neither a love marriage nor an arranged one. Nazima was kidnapped from her home state of West Bengal and transported 1,600km (1,000 miles) to Kashmir, where she was forced to marry a man 20 years her senior who had paid her traffickers $250 for a bride.

With his death, Nazima has been left to support her children alone as she contemplates an uncertain future.

‘We were all terrified’

The daughter of an agricultural laborer who had three other children, Nazima grew up in poverty.

So when, in the summer of 2012, a friend from Nazima’s village told her she’d heard that an NGO was looking to offer women and girls from poor backgrounds jobs in West Bengal’s capital, Kolkata, she decided to take the six-hour train journey to the city.

It was a sweltering afternoon when she arrived at her destination – a large glass building. There were a few men and many women – some her age, others older – she recalls.

One of the men served her tea. All these years later, she still remembers how it smelled of cardamom. And how, soon after drinking it, she found she could no longer talk. Unable to protest, she was led by two men to a car that was waiting outside.

There had been no NGO, no jobs for poor women and girls, no route out of the crippling poverty that had defined Nazima’s life – only traffickers waiting to exploit her.

She was driven to a railway station, where four men waited with four other women. On the train, the women were not allowed to make eye contact with each other, use the bathroom or eat.

“The men looked scary,” Nazima says. “I did not understand what was happening.”

After 20 hours on the train, they reached Delhi. But their journey wasn’t over. The women were put on another train for the 13-hour journey to Jammu, a city in the south of Indian-administered Kashmir.

There, the traffickers handed them over to two Kashmiri men.

“We were all terrified,” she says. “We could not do anything as we were frightened that we might be harmed.”

Hungry and tired, the women were put in a cab and driven through treacherous mountain passes and along unpaved roads in the dark.

“In Jammu, I felt in a completely strange place, the language was completely different,” she says. “It looked like a different world.”

‘An overwhelming fear’

It was 6am when they finally reached Pattan, a picturesque village surrounded by apple orchards and paddy fields, in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district, 274km (170 miles) from Jammu.

They were taken to the home of one of the traffickers, where they were made to change out of the clothes they had by now been wearing for days.

Nazima says the new outfits they were told to wear “were not very nice”.

“It seemed they were not even new,” she adds.

As they changed, the women were able to talk to each other for the first time. But they didn’t have long. They would soon be taken one by one and handed over to the men they were to marry.

When Nazima’s turn came, she cried. But she says nobody cared.

“There was an old man who kept a hand on my head and I was introduced to my husband,” she says. “I was not able to understand what they were saying. There was an overwhelming fear in me.”

Then the old man announced that she was married.

‘The traffickers ruined my life’

Nazima’s husband took her back to the single-room home he had shared with his 10-year-old son since his first wife’s death in an accident.

In those first weeks, she cried often. “The night was the most difficult time. I missed my people. I missed the food, the rice did not taste as it did at home. I felt like I belonged to nowhere.” She tried to escape many times, but would only get as far as the cab station before returning.

“I did not want to live here but I was not able to understand what to do,” she says. “The language was the biggest barrier. I was only able to speak Bengali.”

Nazima says her husband treated her well. “He promised me that he would allow me to visit my home because he saw that I was miserable,” she says.

For seven months, she had no contact with her family, who had searched nearby villages for her before eventually concluding that she must have been killed.

So when her husband took her to visit them in West Bengal, they were overjoyed but confused. “They did not know the man accompanying me was my husband,” Nazima explains.

She desperately wanted to stay with her family but was already pregnant with her first child so reluctantly returned to Kashmir with her husband.

Since his death, she has considered returning to West Bengal but says: “I have three children. I don’t know what to do, where to go.”

She is worried that she will add to her family’s financial woes – worsened by her father’s death three months ago – if she returns.

“The traffickers ruined my life. I cannot think of going back,” she concludes, tearfully.

‘Trafficking camouflaged as marriage’

India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded more than 1,700 cases of human trafficking in 2020. This includes adults and children trafficked into marriage, slavery and prostitution. But experts say this is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Trafficking is gravely underreported in India,” explains Tarushika Sarvesh, an assistant professor of sociology at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

There are multiple reasons for this.

“Sometimes the families of women and children who are recovered and brought back don’t want to acknowledge the fact that they were trafficked, as trafficking in popular perception is mostly understood as sexual exploitation,” she says, adding that there is a huge stigma attached to this.

Sarvesh explains that trafficking is difficult to detect and report and that “many of its forms don’t attract attention or raise suspicion”.

It is, she says, “visible and invisible at the same time”.

“Adults and children are visible as workers all around us in abysmal conditions, but the backstory of their entrapment is not known.”

Sunita Krishnan is the founder of Hyderabad-based Prajwala, a non-governmental organization that works to eradicate human trafficking in India. She explains that many people do not recognize bride trafficking for what it is because it is “camouflaged as marriage”.

“When marriage happens all the previous experiences are nullified and marriage is seen as a pious thing and not as a crime,” she says. “People think ‘how can marriage be tantamount to trafficking?’”

West Bengal, Nazima’s home state, is considered one of the hubs of human trafficking in India. There have been more than 350 cases recorded there in the last three years, according to official figures. But experts say the true number is likely to be much higher, as families often find it extremely difficult to prove that their missing members have been trafficked.

Anti-trafficking activists believe sex-selective abortions have contributed to the prevalence of bride trafficking. According to the most recent census, in 2011, India’s sex ratio was 943 females to every 1,000 males. There are more men but fewer women for them to marry.

“[In northern India] it is easy to bring women from other parts [of the country] because people won’t know their background,” Sarvesh explains, adding that this is much harder in parts of southern India where marriages between cousins are more common. “In northern India, people are not interested in knowing the bloodline of the bride or how she landed there.”

In conflict zones like Kashmir, Sarvesh says the issue of bride trafficking becomes more complicated as public institutions do not function as they should and many individual stories are lost among the “meta-narratives of politics”.

‘$35’ for a bride

Abdul Rashid Hanjura is a Kashmir-based lawyer and activist who has worked on human trafficking cases for the past 20 years. He tells Al Jazeera that there is “a full-fledged business for the brokers involved in bride trafficking” in the region. The brokers are the middlemen who connect Kashmiri men looking for a bride with the women trafficked from other parts of the country.

“This happens because of poverty,” he explains. “Many poor men are not able to afford marriage in Kashmir because we have many expensive rituals in which an average marriage costs more than $1,000.”

Trafficked brides – many of whom are underage – can cost as little as $80, he says. Sometimes, they are sold to the agents by their families.

“I saw one case where the agents paid just $35 [to a family],” he adds.

Hanjura believes there are thousands of trafficked brides in Kashmir, with cases dating back to the early 1990s, but says that without proper data the true number is impossible to know.

Al Jazeera spoke to an “agent” in Pattan who did not want to give his name but said he had been involved in arranging dozens of marriages, working as a middleman between those looking to buy a bride and the traffickers. He says the cost of buying a bride ranges from $250 to $500 but denies that the women are forced into marriage.

“Some families who are poor willingly send their daughters for marriage; they also charge some money. Some women willingly come and then don’t like it here and want to escape, then they blame others. But here they have food and everything, in their home states there is more poverty,” he insists.

Hanjura disputes this. He says women and girls are often forced into marriages with much older men.

Nisar Ahmad is in charge of the Kashmiri police’s Anti-Human Trafficking Unit (AHTU) and says his department has rescued a number of women and girls forced into marriage over the years. “But we are only able to act when we receive formal complaints,” he adds.

In January, the local government began strengthening anti-trafficking units in Kashmir. But the more than one dozen victims Al Jazeera spoke to say they have little hope that the situation will improve for them or others.

‘The loneliness is most difficult’

Forty-five-year-old Farooq Ahmad married a woman from Kolkata a decade ago. He says his family tried to look for a local bride, but it involved expenses like buying gold, throwing a feast and paying mehr – a sum of money paid by a groom to a bride in Islam. The simplest marriage would have cost him $1,500, he says, but to get a bride from outside cost less than $300.

“We are poor,” he says, adding that more than a dozen men in his village have paid to marry women from other states.

Farooq’s 30-year-old wife, Sabeena*, says she was lured to Kashmir with the promise of a good life, but that it never materialized.

“I was told the man has enough money and has apple orchards. But there is nothing,” she laments. “I experienced a lot of hardships.”

Now Sabeena, Farooq and their eight children live in a mud house that belonged to Farooq’s uncle before his death last year.

“We have no one here, no parents, no siblings. Even if we are beaten we don’t have a parent’s home to go to,” Sabeena says. “The loneliness is most difficult.”

‘If I raise my voice, she will kill me’

Arsheeda Jan* speaks fluent Kashmiri with an accent that suggests it is not her first language. The 43-year-old is originally from Kolkata but now lives in a two-room wooden home on the banks of the river Jhelum on the outskirts of Srinagar city. Her eyes fill with tears as she describes how she arrived in Kashmir more than two decades ago.

Her parents died when she was a child, she explains, and she and her four siblings were sent to live with relatives. “We were very poor,” she says.

When she met a middle-aged Bengali woman who promised her a job in a shawl factory in Kashmir, Arsheeda saw an opportunity to earn some money. She was 13 years old.

“She told me that will provide me with a job in Kashmir and we have to do embroidery on shawls. I had no idea where Kashmir is,” Arsheeda recalls.

She didn’t tell her siblings about her plan.

When she reached Kashmir, the woman, who was herself married to a Kashmiri man, kept Arsheeda in her home for a week. During that time, Arsheeda says she did all of the household chores in the belief that the woman was going to help her build a better life for herself.

“I kept on asking her ‘where is the job?’ Then one day a man and his father arrived with a bearded man who was supposed to do my nikah (marriage contract).”

When Arsheeda cried, the cleric explained that he could not marry her against her will and left. But the family found someone else who was willing to do it.

“The agent threatened me that if I raise my voice she will kill me. I was very scared,” she says.

Still just 13, Arsheeda was married to a labourer nine years her senior.

“When my husband entered my room for the first time, I was shivering. I tried to flee many times but failed. Then I became pregnant. I gave up on the idea that I can ever leave this life,” she says.

Arsheeda, who now has four children, has had no contact with her family in Kolkata since she left.

“When there is a fight with my husband he asks me to leave and pay the money for which he bought me,” she says.

Pointing to a scar on her forehead, Arsheeda explains: “My husband beats me sometimes and he taunts me.”

When her husband is violent, she says she tries to take shelter in her neighbors’ house but that they are unwelcoming. “[They] inform my husband,” she explains. “Some neighbors assume I have slept with many men, that’s how they think I landed here. They don’t understand …”

“Everyone looks at me differently. I still feel alien.”

While Arsheeda has reluctantly adapted to life in Kashmir, she says her childhood memories of her siblings are etched into her heart. She misses the warmth of Kolkata during the harsh Kashmiri winters and the feeling of belonging to a place and a family.

“The hole in my heart will never heal,” she reflects.

*Names of the women and their children have been changed to protect their identities.

___________________

Courtesy: Al Jazeera (Published on 15 Jan 2023)

The post The women and girls sold as brides in Kashmir first appeared on Sindh Courier.

From Our Correspondent

HYDERABAD, Sindh

Sustainable Social Development Organization (SSDO) held a session with local journalists on Trafficking in Person (TIP) and Migrants Law-2018 in a hotel of Hyderabad on Monday.

Journalists were sensitized on improved reporting on Human Trafficking as well as Human Smuggling.

Syed Kausar Abbas Executive Director of SSDO highlighted the background of Smuggling of Migrants, Woman Trafficking, bonded Labor and Human Smuggling.

Waqar Hyder Awan, Consultant of SSDO said that there was a lot of difference between the human trafficking and human smuggling and said that these are the different terms.

According to him the recruitment agencies, consultant agencies and the individuals are the main suspects to perpetrate taking advantage of the poverty and unemployment by cheating the vulnerable community through the false claims of providing Jobs in foreign countries.

He said that migrant smuggling is a kind of the illegal entry of a person into a state of which the person is not a national or resident. He said that this mess reflect upon the resources, besides the population rate and crime.

He elaborated that the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) is a serious crime. TIP involves an act committed for the purpose of exploiting someone’s labor or services.  Victims are compelled to provide their labor or services under circumstances which would be reasonably expected to cause them to fear for their own safety.

He said that human trafficking takes place in every region of the world and the human beings are sold, bought and traded much like objects.

Zaigam Abbas, a columnist and anthropologist told the session that Trafficking is a modern form of slavery. He said that journalists can play a vital role to prevent the vulnerable community from a trafficking through information in context.

He said that journalists should have to promote the Public Interests and said that survivor cannot be treated as object.

He advised to focus on investigating reporting as well as research-based reporting. He said that reporting should be based on one’s initiative and importance of matter. He advised journalists to use appropriate data in reporting and refrain from hiding the truth.

________________

The post Recruiting agencies accused of Trafficking and Smuggling of Humans first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nazarul Islam

Human trafficking is not only an injustice to the victim, but it is an injustice unto the families and friends of that victim. There is one absolute commonality amongst the victims of human trafficking; the loss of personal freedom.

In the year 2000, countries around the world, welcomed the new millennium, by signing on to the Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, a landmark agreement that defined the crime of human trafficking and required states to criminalize it.

That same year, the United States passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, a groundbreaking law that provided the U.S. government with a new arsenal of tools to tackle human trafficking; governments all over the world soon followed suit and adopted similar laws.

However, two decades later, the scourge of human trafficking persists. An estimated 25 million people worldwide are victims of forced labor and forced sexual exploitation. The majority of victims are women and girls. Human trafficking is a truly global phenomenon; it occurs in almost every country, including the United States, fueled by poverty, social marginalization, and weak criminal justice systems.

The scale of the problem is only growing, exacerbated by the upheavals of migration and conflict and by the economic desperation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Policymakers often overlook human trafficking as ancillary to major challenges. But trafficking is more than a mere crime. Moreover, it is not just an effect of significant global problems but also a cause: it bolsters abusive regimes and criminal, terrorist, and armed groups; weakens global supply chains; fuels corruption; and undermines good governance.

The United States needs to see trafficking for the systemic threat that it is and act accordingly.

Human trafficking threatens U.S. national security in myriad ways. Trafficking helps bankroll the operations of transnational syndicates and extremist groups. (The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and Boko Haram in West Africa, for example, used human trafficking not just to make money and seize forced labor but also as a strategic tool to subjugate civilians and even coerce them into perpetrating suicide attacks)

The practice earns its perpetrators an estimated $150 billion annually, making it one of the world’s most lucrative crimes. Traffickers consider their trade to be a low-risk and high-profit enterprise, with cheap labor and sex work constantly in demand and law enforcement efforts in many countries, including the United States, insufficient.

Some repressive governments use human trafficking to circumvent sanctions; in 2019, for example, the United States estimated that the North Korean government was generating more than $500 million each year by sending almost 100,000 forced laborers to work abroad, primarily in China and Russia—and thereby undermining the effects of economic sanctions imposed on Pyongyang.

Human trafficking also hurts global economic growth by undervaluing labor and erodes financial systems by buttressing illegal and unregulated markets. In 2009, the International Labor Organization estimated that the global economy lost as much as $21 billion through the coercion of workers, including more than $19 billion in lost income due to unpaid wages—figures that do not include sex-trafficking victims, who are routinely robbed of their earnings.

States suffer, too, since they can’t collect taxes on unpaid work. The challenge is immense: as of 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor listed 155 goods from 77 countries that it suspected were produced with the use of child or forced labor.

The profits of human trafficking are privatized, but the costs are spread across society: one study has shown that every human-trafficking case in the United Kingdom costs around 330,000 pounds ($467,000) in health-care, law enforcement, and other expenses. The pervasiveness of human trafficking disincentives enterprises from combating it when so many of their rivals gain a competitive advantage by ignoring labor standards.

In middle- and low-income countries, trafficking impedes sustainable development by destabilizing communities and vitiating human potential. Trafficking can impoverish the families of its victims, compounding illiteracy and poor health and nutrition and perpetuating poverty across generations.

Fear of trafficking fuels displacement; migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle region, for instance, have frequently reported that gang violence—including violence related to human trafficking—contributed to their decisions to leave. In addition, human traffickers encourage the erosion of democratic institutions, notably by buying the assistance of corrupt police officers, customs officials, and prosecutors.

Policymakers must start seeing human trafficking as more than a crime against a particular individual. In truth, it is a systemic challenge to U.S. national security, economic, and development interests. Washington should place this issue higher on its international agenda—and pursue necessary reforms to curb this scourge once and for all.

What freedom are we to find

When our restless minds

Are enslaved under the chains

Of human trafficking?

What freedom do we preach?

When our females breathe

Through enraged wounds

They are used and abused,

Left in caves alienated and bruised.

What is this language we speak of?

When we talk about the law,

Since the human right clause

Is ignored and flawed?

Whom is it protecting?

Because here we are protesting!

Isn’t this law ought to save

The bodies of young females

Isn’t this law ought to be brave

And remove females from sex frames?

Instead, it chooses for women and children to die

Leaving their loved ones with no goodbyes!

Human trafficking, I say,

Has made enough money for the day

(End of Part One)

Research/Credit: NI/JB/RV

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

The post Traffic…. Part One first appeared on Sindh Courier.