The Record - An unending tide of trafficking in Nepal. The year was 1996. I was living in Bombay, the Indian city of dreams, studying to be a social worker. Not far from my college there were as many as 200,000 other Nepali girls, who had been trafficked and sold into prostitution. There – in those infamous brothels of Kamatipura and Falkland Road – I was sent on a fact-finding mission. I was 21. Walking around the narrow allies I met girls who looked vaguely like me, standing outside the brothel doors, each with a tight blouse, a dirty petticoat and sad make up, waiting to find customers.
Some looked petrified, some resigned and some had that hardened look – one that comes after years of rejection, torture, and mistrust. Back in Nepal, a short while later, I visited the district of Sindhupalchowk. Over the past two decades, strict vigilance on the border crossings between Nepal and India has meant that the number of girls trafficked through those channels has come down. I’ve always wondered about the accident of birth. Epicentre of trafficking. Long before the earthquake hit last year, the districts around Kathmandu were already hotbeds of trafficking Shakti Samuha STOP, LISTEN AND GO: Prospective female migrant workers at a counselling centre run by Shakti Samuha in Sindhupalchok, the district with the highest number of female migrants.
Charimaya Tamang was just 16 when she was drugged, trafficked and sold into a brothel in India. She was rescued, and returned to Nepal in 1996. Twenty years later, Nepal has introduced multiple measures, most importantly the 1998 National Plan of Action (NPA) to eliminate human trafficking, to allow the government to stop the scourge.
Tamang founded Shakti Samuha along with 14 other trafficking survivors, and fought against trafficking. Read also: Hiding hidden wounds, Shreejana Shrestha However, new forms of trafficking are emerging, and the problem is now becoming much more complex than it was two decades ago. She says: “We are revising the Act, but this is not enough. Time to prey, Bhrikuti Rai. Child survivors of Nepal earthquake ‘being sold’ in the UK. The home secretary Theresa May has urged police to investigate claims that child survivors of the Nepal earthquake and other vulnerable children are being sold to British families to work as domestic slaves. An investigation by the Sun newspaper suggests that boys and girls as young as 10 are being sold for just £5,300 by black market gangs operating in India’s Punjab province.
The paper says the gangs are preying on the children of Nepalese refugees, as well as destitute Indian families. May called child trafficking a “truly abhorrent crime” and urged the National Crime Agency to investigate the newspaper’s findings. She said the paper should “share its disturbing findings” with the agency, “so that appropriate action can be taken against the vile criminals who profit from this trade”. She added: “No child, anywhere in the world, should be taken away from their home and forced to work in slavery. “Most of the ones who are taken to England are Nepalese. “Take a Nepalese to England. So you want to be a voluntourist? Well-meaning foreigners are being duped by fake orphanages unknowingly contributing to a vicious cycle of abuse In February 2014 the founder of Happy Home Orphanage in Dhapakhel, Bishwa Pratap Acharya, was arrested on charges of fraud, kidnapping and child trafficking after years of physically and psychologically abusing the children at the home, most of whom were not orphans.
But Acharya was released one year later after it was ruled that the case lacked sufficient evidence, largely due to witness tampering by Acharya’s wife, Pooja. Today, the couple continues to run Happy Home, business as usual, profiting from foreign volunteers and donors. This is not an isolated story. For-profit and fake orphanages are rife in Nepal, evidenced by the fact that over 80 per cent of all the 600 registered orphanages in the country are concentrated within the five tourism-heavy regions of Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan, Bhaktapur and Kaski.
Wisdom Wednesdays Talks on ethical volunteering Thamel, 5:00-6:30pm. Nepal earthquakes leave bitter legacy as children become quarry for traffickers | Sam Jones | Global development. When the morning lessons are over in the low, colourful classrooms of the child transit centre in Sindhupalchowk, its 28 residents pass the time playing football and hopscotch, or chatting under the shade of trees. In the rare moments when the laughter and shouting subside and the valley falls silent, some of the young boys reach up to clasp the hands of the older girls. Among the latter is 13-year-old Pharbati. In May, a few weeks after the earthquake that killed her mother, a Chinese man arrived in her village with a proposition for her grandmother: how would she feel if he took Pharbati and her two younger brothers to Kathmandu to resume their education?
The children’s father had died some time before the earthquake struck, leaving their grandmother to make the decision. Soon afterwards Pharbati and her two younger brothers were in a car with some Chinese men and a Nepalese driver, leaving their home district for the capital, a few hours’ drive away. Pharbati is among the luckier ones. Back with babies. Women migrant workers returning penniless and with children face a double stigma at home. Rama Rai travelled to Kuwait six years ago with dreams to build a better life for her family back home.
She was cheated by her agent, abused by her employer and raped by an acquaintance. After serving an 11-month jail sentence for possessing a fake passport and an expired visa, Rai came back to Nepal penniless and with a baby. Saraswati Bhattarai came to Kathmandu a day before she was due to fly to Kuwait. Desperate to support her family, Lila Dong took up a job as a housemaid in Lebanon where her employers beat her up regularly. These are just some of the stories of dozens of Nepali women who have returned with babies from domestic work, mainly in West Asia. “These women face a double stigma, they return with no money and with a baby, which allows society to question the woman’s character,” says Satra Gurung of Pourakhi. Some names have been changed. Lila Rama “I was shocked. Saraswati Safe house. What went unnoticed in the Saudi diplomat case: The grim story of human trafficking. While the alleged sexual exploitation and torture of two Nepalese women by a Saudi diplomat and others in Gurgaon continue to hog national attention, another issue of grave humanitarian concern linked to the matter has slipped under the radar.
In what appears to be a clear case of human trafficking, the victims were first lured by a woman agent to Delhi with the promise of a job carrying handsome salary in Saudi Arabia. They were then allegedly sold to another agent in Delhi for Rs 1 lakh each and then to the Saudi diplomat. Every day, as a rough estimate by anti-trafficking NGO 3 Angles Nepal suggests, more than 54 young girls and women are trafficked out of Nepal into India. Then they are shifted to Middle-East countries where they enter a life of slavery. The border between Nepal and India is 1,850 km long and there are only 14 checkpoints along the route.
This makes it easy for traffickers to smuggle around 15,000 women and young girls into India every year. Traffickers who pose as well-wishers, parents who reap benefits, villagers who keep quiet and countries that turn a blind eye. An India Today investigation uncovers the shocking underbelly of sex trade that has surged alarmingly in the wake of the devasta. Baini. O baini. Kasto chha" Sister, what's up? An NGO worker calls out from a little tin cubicle, fitted with CCTV cameras, on the edge of the 66-feet No Man's Land separating Nepal from India at Sunauli in Uttar Pradesh. The 'sister', in a red nylon dress, hurries towards India, as if she hasn't heard. The NGO worker catches up, with constables of Armed Police Force Nepal in tow: where are you going, why? The 'sister' stutters: she has got a job in India but doesn't know where.
The NGO worker makes a few quick calls, tells her no such job exists, packs her off home and starts scanning the horizon again: "O baini. " But for every girl rescued, countless others slip through the cracks of Nepal's porous borders. THE CRISIS Sex traffickers on the prowl It's the scream of unimaginable loss. A village near Kathmandu still reels from the April earthquake. Trafficking is not new to Nepal. But the nation hasn't healed. EASY PREYThe 'Safed Bakri' are coming "Madam, some 'safed bakri' are coming. Female refugees of Nepal’s earthquake. A new wave of outmigration of Nepali women desperate to earn cash to rebuild family homes TAKING LEAVE: Dhanmaya Tamang at Kathmandu Airport before boarding a flight for Muscat last week.
She had planned to quit her job and return to Nepal to be with her children, but with her house in Kavre destroyed by the earthquake, she is going back to Oman. Photo: Karma Dolma Gurung Dhanmaya Tamang, a mother of two, lived the perfect Nepali migrant dream in Oman. She worked as a janitor in a hospital, and her husband was a waiter in a restaurant in Muscat. Their two children studied in a private English school in Kathmandu. From the savings of their two years of hard work the family had built a house in Kavre. Finally, her employers were convinced about the seriousness of her loss and allowed her a month’s leave. “By the time I reached my house, everything was gone. It has been a month since she came to Nepal, and Tamang says she can’t stay in Nepal anymore. Some names have been changed.
Read also: What you discover about sex workers when you raid a brothel. It was business as usual at brothel 59 in Delhi's GB Road, which houses more than 4,000 sex workers. What was unusual on the night of June 23 was the deliberate gait of Sameer Tyagi, a regular client of this brothel. Sameer appeared a bit jaded, busy on the phone, scanning the faces of about 20 odd garishly painted faces of women as they waited around for the next deal. It was 10pm, humid and a Bollywood number was playing loudly. "Naya muniya laye ho kya (have you got a new girl?) " Sameer was standing at a distance from us and watching the goings on intently. Escorted by police officers and members from Shakti Vahini, Vasantha literally ran out of the brothel. Vasantha, a widow and mother of a girl, was sold to this brothel by a fellow worker's mother in Bangalore where she worked in a garments factory as a tailor.
"The process of victim rehabilitation and victim compensation is very complex and slow. Two month flashback. Nepal's Police Are Teaching Self-Defense To Women And Girls Left Homeless By The Earthquakes - BuzzFeed News. Aftershock: Here’s how Nepal is coping after two earthquakes left nearly 9,000 dead, 16,800 injured. The sun dawns on the snowy peak that pokes above the clouds, dabbling light on Mount Everest’s Hillary Step, the last death-defying rock wall before the summit.
Below the clouds, at ground level, a collection of coloured shapes — red, yellow, blue, green, orange — spreads out like flags signalling a colourful denial of death. They are the tarpaulins that have become home to the survivors of two devastating earthquakes that convulsed Nepal on April 25 and May 12 — symbols at once of the triumphant survival and inescapable fear of recurrence. This is the aftershock.
Approaching me in the park of tarpaulins and proud of the English she has learned in school, Palistha Shakya, 11, says carefully, “Where — are — you — from?” I reply, “Canada,” and anticipate her next question will be, “Where is that?” But I’m wrong. Post-traumatic stress disorder in Nepal is at epic proportions. Nearly 9,000 dead, 16,800 injured, 500,000 homes destroyed, 270,000 homes damaged. One simple question undid the scam. Nepal moves to protect children from traffickers after quake. Nepal on guard against human trafficking.
Kathmandu: Nepal has banned child adoption in the country in an effort to curb human trafficking, especially of girl children who are at risk of falling victim to traffickers, in the wake of the April 25 earthquake that claimed thousands of lives and left a huge section of the population homeless. "Children are at high risk of becoming trafficking victims during disaster as they can be lured by traffickers with the prospect of comfortable life and better education. So we have banned child adoption for now," Radhika Aryal, joint secretary at the ministry of women, children and social welfare (MoWCSW), said on Thursday. The ban applies to both international and local child adoption. According to Aryal, 59 children have been rescued from human traffickers in the last 30 days. Security forces in the border areas have also been ordered to remain vigilant.
"Maiti Nepal is concerned that this trend puts women and children at high risk," the non-governmental organisation said in a statement.