A trafficked survivor reunites with family in Vietnam. Courtesy: Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Australia, May 18 2020 (IPS)

A single mother, Mai (name changed) had the responsibility of providing for her young son and grandparents, who had brought her up in a poor rural province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. While she was looking for employment, somebody approached her on social media with an offer of a high-paying job in China. When she arrived in China, she was sold into a forced marriage.

For two months, Mai suffered violence and beatings from her ‘husband’, who kept her locked in the house. When she tried to fight back, the ‘husband’ sold her to another man seeking a wife. She was forced to have sex as the family wanted a child. When she became pregnant, she was given some freedom and allowed to work in a nearby shoe factory. Desperate to escape this forced marriage and modern slavery, she managed to connect online with a Vietnamese man, who referred her to Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, an Australian charity working in Vietnam.

• A forced marriage is when a person is married without freely and fully consenting because of either coercion, threat or deception.
• The Asia Pacific region predominates in the numbers of victims of modern slavery. The region had 55 percent of the victims of forced marriage worldwide.
• Sexual exploitation was also rife in the region with more than seven in 10 victims worldwide, according to the 2017 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery.

Mai is amongst a small number of fortunate women, who were able to seek help and be rescued. She returned to Vietnam in December 2018, and after the police were able to arrest her trafficker, she was reunited with her family.

“I have been able to rebuild my life with Blue Dragon’s support. Recently, I have completed hospitality training and have a part-time job in a city café. I can save some money to send to my grandparents, who are nurturing my children,” Mai told IPS through a social worker. 

Her experience resonates with many young Vietnamese women, who are tricked and trafficked into sexual slavery. Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation rescues 110 to 130 women each year. Its co-CEO Skye Maconachie told IPS, “Once rescued and returned to Vietnam, their family situation usually hasn’t changed and they are still impoverished and vulnerable to being re-trafficked or exploited. Our teams provide emotional, psychological, basic living and legal support as they work with each survivor to help them learn skills and get employment.”

While survivors seek normalcy on first returning home, Maconachie said, “It is not until later in their recovery that the trauma they have experienced emerges and impacts them with flashbacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, low self-esteem, fear and distrust.”

The Asia and Pacific region predominates in the numbers of victims of modern slavery. The region had 55 percent of the victims of forced marriage worldwide. Credit Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

• Women and girls are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, accounting almost 29 million or 71 percent of the overall total.
• On any given day in 2016, an estimated 15 million people were living in a forced marriage.
• More than one third of all victims of forced marriage were children at the time of the marriage, and almost all child victims were girls, according to joint research by the International Labour Organization, and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the International Organisation for Migration.

Walk Free’s Senior Research Analyst, Elise Gordon told IPS, “Our research has indicated that traditional views of the role of women, girls and children could be contributing to increased vulnerability to forced and underage marriage, forced sexual exploitation, and commercial sexual exploitation of children in the Asia Pacific region.”

Trafficking contravenes fundamental human rights and freedoms. As Australian Red Cross’ National Coordinator for Trafficked People Program, Sally Chapman told IPS, “We are concerned that people who have been trafficked may be subject to various forms of physical, sexual and emotional violence. They are often afraid of arrest, detention and deportation; don’t trust authorities, and can also be discriminated against throughout any referral and support processes. The impact can be significant and include permanent control and/or monitoring of their movement, fear of physical retaliation, death, or reprisal against or harm to their loved ones.”

The Australian Red Cross last year provided assistance with essential items, such as food, toiletries and clothes while addressing accommodation, health and wellbeing needs to individuals identifying as being from 48 different countries.

Chapman cautioned, “During disasters and crises, people can be displaced from their homes, separated from their family members, school and employment can be interrupted, and systems of social support and law and order can break down. These factors can exacerbate the risk of trafficking, particularly for women and girls. The humanitarian impact of climate change and extreme weather events is likely to increase trafficking and forms of exploitation and slavery.”

The Australian Red Cross works to raise awareness in communities so that the general public, service providers and authorities can reduce risks; recognise the signs of exploitation, trafficking, slavery; be able to respond safely; and refer someone for help and support.  

• The hidden nature of exploitation makes it difficult to ascertain the extent of victimisation in Australia, which is primarily a destination country for people trafficked from Asia, particularly Thailand, Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Pacific Island countries.
• Recent research by the Australian Institute of Criminology (2019) estimated that only one in four victims are detected. This means that human trafficking and modern slavery victims in Australia ranged between 1,300 and 1,900 in 2015–2017.
• Modern Slavery trends vary widely across the Asia Pacific region and men, women and children are exploited for various reasons – slavery, human trafficking, slavery-like practices such as servitude, forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage or organ harvesting.

As Jenny Stanger, Executive Manager of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney’s Anti-Slavery Taskforce told IPS, “Awareness about trafficking and slavery outside the sex industry has grown only in the last decade. Human trafficking for organ removal poses new challenges. There is a global shortage of organs and there are a lot of vulnerable people who might be willing to sell their organs. There is also mounting evidence that prisoners in China are forcibly having their organs harvested for profit”.

Global Financial Integrity (GFI) estimates that 10 percent of all organ transplants including lungs, heart and liver, are done via trafficked organs. The most prominent organ traded illicitly is the kidney. The World Health Organisation estimated that 10,000 kidneys are traded on the black market worldwide annually, or more than one every hour.

Stanger, who has worked as a case manager and advocate for survivors of trafficking and slavery for over two decades, relates the story of a Filipino woman, who was approached by an Australian couple visiting the Philippines. They were looking for a kidney donor and they offered the woman money and permanent residency in Australia if she were to donate a kidney to their dying family member. The woman was advised by her own community that this was a good opportunity for her, so she agreed.

After arriving in Australia, she was treated poorly and forced to clean and cook for the dying recipient and her husband. By chance the woman disclosed the complete nature of the arrangement to a health worker in the hospital where the transplant was to take place and that person contacted Stanger for assistance. The kidney transplant did not take place and the recipient eventually died.

“In the end, the government response to human trafficking recognised the Filipino woman as a human trafficking victim. She was able to stay in Australia after she chose to cooperate with the Australian Federal Police in an investigation that was unable to be prosecuted. This failure changed Australian law forever because, at the time, the Commonwealth Criminal Code did have an offence to adequately address organ trafficking.  A new ‘organ trafficking’ offence was enacted in 2013,” Stanger explained.

• It is estimated that the illegal organ trade conservatively generates approximately $840 million to $1.7 billion annually, according to GFI, a Washington DC-based think tank, that provides analyses of illicit financial flows.
• In 2015, Australia legislated to make clear that that slavery offences have universal jurisdiction; it amended the Criminal Code to increase the penalties for forced marriage from four years to seven years’ imprisonment for a base offence, and from seven to nine years’ imprisonment for an aggravated offence.
• The ASEAN-Australia Counter-Trafficking Initiative, launched in August 2019 to fight human trafficking, modern slavery and forced labour, is a 10-year programme that will work to strengthen criminal justice responses and protect victim rights in the region.
• The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ), which actively supports the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 of decent work and economic growth, has focused much of its work on eliminating modern slavery.

“COVID 19 has demonstrated that when the whole world decides to take action to address a critical issue, change is possible. I hope that one day our leaders will truly recognise the tragedy of modern slavery and find the political will to make freedom from modern slavery a reality for everyone, ” Stanger added.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

In Kashmir there are thousands of young women who were sold in their teens by their parents to older men, and now living lives governed by restrictions which many equate to imprisonment. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SRINAGAR, Oct 11 2019 (IPS)

Haseena Akhtar was only 13 when an agent told her parents that they could earn a good amount of money by letting her marry a Kashmiri man. The man was, however, three times older than Akhtar, the agent said.

Akhtar’s parents, who lived in the poverty-stricken region of West Bengal (an eastern Indian state), had two other daughters and according to tradition they would have had to bear cost of their marriages. So they let their 13-year-old daughter go with the agent.

Akhtar, who is now 20, ended up here in Kashmir — a landlocked northern region of India caught in the grip of violence and conflict over the past 30 years.

The agent took her to an old part of the city in Srinagar, the region’s capital, and she was married to a middle aged, disabled, Kashmiri man.

“That was not a marriage in any terms. That was a pure selloff. I was sold to a man who couldn’t find a bride for himself in Kashmir because his right leg was amputated after he was injured in a bomb blast some years before,” Akhtar told IPS.

Too many daughters and no boy

A year after the marriage, she gave birth to a girl.

Three more daughters later, and the strong desire by both her husband and her in-laws for a son and grandson was not fulfilled.

By the age of 18 Akhtar was mother to four daughters and relations with her husband and her in-laws had deteriorated.

“I was nothing less than a sex slave for my husband who wanted me to give birth to a boy. When that didn’t happen, I was first ridiculed, then beaten and then dragged out of the home along with my daughters,” Akhtar said.

One of the neighbours provided her with shelter and intervened to talk to her husband and his family. A volunteer organisation also came to her aid and helped her get work as a cleaner in a private firm, earning $100 a month.

When efforts to remedy things with her in-laws failed, Akhtar’s husband  paid her $550 and divorced her.

With a meagre income and four daughters to support, the road ahead for Akhtar looks filled with hurdles.

“I don’t know what I will do and where I will go. I sometimes wonder why being poor makes you vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation,” she said.

It’s so common, its socially acceptable

Akhtar’s story is not unique here.

In Kashmir there are thousands of young women like her, sold in their teens by their parents to older men, who are now living lives governed by restrictions which many equate to imprisonment. 

Infested with violence and Islamist militancy, Kashmir is becoming a safe haven for human traffickers. 

A three-decade insurgency that aims to free the region from Indian rule and the Indian efforts to quell it have claimed at least 100,000 lives, including those of civilians, militants and members of the security forces.

The border tensions and insurgency have killed an average of 1,500 people each year over the last 30 years, according to official records. Here, many former militants, torture victims and people who remain psychologically affected by the conflict didn’t marry at the traditionally marriageable ages of between 25 to 35 years. 

Now much older, these rejected grooms are turning to agents who provide them with young, non-local women whom they can marry — all for the price of just a few thousand dollars.

Aabid Simnanni, a renowned scholar and a social worker who heads an organisations that focuses on human trafficking in Kashmir, told IPS that a majority of the marriages between Kashmiri men and teenage, non-local women end badly due to the generational and cultural gaps. 

“You see the men to whom these young brides are married to are middle aged — 40 to 45 years old. How could you expect such a huge generation gap to disappear? Also, there are cultural, linguistic and many other barriers between the two sides. These things matter a lot in a successful marriage,” Simnanni said.

He said that for the past five years his organisation has been helping women get legal and financial help but that it would be a Herculean task to stop the practice. 

Police won’t investigate because the women are legally married

A senior official in the anti-trafficking cell of the Kashmir police told IPS that it has become almost impossible to catch traffickers as there is no one willing to testify to the crime.

“The victim is usually married to the man by [law] and it is difficult to ascertain the victim’s age as the documents are already forged by the agents. We act only when we receive the complaint against anyone,” said the official who did not wish to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media about the issue. 

He says that there are no records available about the number of brides trafficked to Kashmir as the practice has societal acceptance in Kashmir. 

“The marriage is happens in a broad day light. Though it is an open secret that these girls are sold by their parents for a pretty sum, the relationship they get into is absolutely legitimate and legal in accordance the law,” the official said.

My marriage, my prison

Four years ago, Ulfat Bano, a 14-year-old from India’s Northern state of Bihar was taken to Kashmir by her distant cousin who herself was married to a Kashmiri man. 

Bano’s family was given around one thousand dollars and an assurance that she would marry into a good family. 

Here she was given to a  50- year-old torture victim.

“I was shocked when I saw him first. He was older than my father and I was forcibly married to him. I had no choice,” Bano told IPS.

According to her, her husband was tortured in the early 1990s when militancy against the Indian rule erupted in Kashmir.

His left eye was damaged and for years he could not find a local woman to marry him. His family contacted Bano’s cousin, who was married to one of their relatives, and asked her to find a bride for their son.

Now the mother of a three-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son, Bano longs for home every day. 

In the four years since her marriage, she has not been allowed to return to Bihar to see her family.

“Kashmir is nothing less than a prison for me. What good is this life for when you cannot meet your parents and share few moments of joy with them? My husband fears that if he allows me to meet my parents, I won’t return home.

“He is probably right.”

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

Christian girls at a school in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 19 2014 (IPS)

Minority communities in Pakistan have long had a raw deal. Accounting for just 10 percent of this country’s population of 180 million, they are no strangers to marginalisation, discrimination or even violence.

But persistent reports that Christian and Hindu girls are being forcibly converted to Islam might just take the top spot in a long list of atrocities that non-Muslims are forced to endure.

“The situation is extremely grim. About 1,000 Hindu and Christian girls are abducted in Pakistan every year. They are converted to Islam through the use of forced marriages,” Dr. Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, chief patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council (PHC), told IPS.

Rights groups who have been following the issue for years say the number of reported cases fails to capture the true extent of the problem, since many families are unable or unwilling to lodge formal complaints, and the girls themselves are reluctant to speak out against the perpetrators.

In December last year, a six-year-old girl named Jumna, along with her 10-year-old sister Pooja, went missing from their home in Mirpur Khas, a city in Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province. After hunting day and night, their parents discovered the girls were living with a man named Rajab Pathan.

Soma, the girls’ mother, told IPS that the case quickly blew up in the media, leading to a trial at which both girls admitted to having embraced Islam of their own free will.

This, according to a report released last month by the Movement for Solidarity and Peace in Pakistan, is typical of young girls who are kidnapped, forcibly kept away from their families and – in all likelihood – intimidated by their captors.

“Once in the custody of the abductor, the victim girl may be subjected to sexual violence, rape, forced prostitution, human trafficking and sale, or other domestic abuse,” the report found.

Focusing primarily on the Christian community, the study says roughly 700 of the girls abducted each year are Christians, while “conservative estimates” indicate that about 300 are Hindu. Most of the girls are thought to be between 12 and 25 years of age.

A dearth of press coverage and reluctance on the part of the police to disclose details of such cases mean the actual figures could be much higher, the report’s authors say.

Even when families do file official complaints in the form of First Information Reports (FIRs) for abduction or rape at the local police station, the kidnappers immediately file counter-claims on behalf of the victims, stating that the conversions were voluntary and accusing the families of “harassing” the happily married girls.

The cases are then closed, without any relief for the families involved.

PHC’s Vankwani told IPS he is unhappy with officials’ reaction so far to the problem. “The government fears reprisals from fundamentalist groups, so our complaints go unheeded,” he said.

The threat of armed groups is not to be taken lightly. A famous case in 2012 involving a girl named Rinkle Kumari illustrated the darkest side of the forced conversions.

Abducted from her home in the Sindh province in February, the girl was subsequently produced before a magistrate to whom she allegedly stated that she had married her captor, Naveed Shah, of her own free will.

That statement, according to PHC General Secretary Hotchand Karmani, was “made under duress” due to the presence of “dozens of armed men in the court premises,” he told IPS.

A troubled history

Comprising just 1.6 percent of Pakistan’s overwhelmingly Muslim population, Christian communities have traditionally settled in the southern port city of Karachi, as well as throughout villages in the Punjab, and in large industrial metropolises like Lahore and Faisalabad.

An estimated 200,000 Christians also dwell in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, formerly known as the North Western Frontier Province, with 70,000 Christian residents in Peshawar, the capital city of the largely tribal region.

Hindus form a larger group, counting seven million members who make up 5.5 percent of the population. Many reside in urban areas throughout the province of Sindh, but at least 50 percent are concentrated in the southeast district of Tharparkar, which borders India.

A long history of invasion, conquest and settlement has shaped the demographics of present-day Pakistan. Hindus, for instance, once made up the majority of the Sindh province, but were forced to scatter in the wake of Persian, Arab and Ottoman invasions, the earliest dating back to 513 BC.

Waves of violence following the bloody partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 forced thousands of Hindus to flee to cities like Delhi and Mumbai. While the Christian community has not experienced comparable bouts violence, they too have suffered attacks and systematic discrimination.

Those who wish to preserve Pakistan’s diversity fear that the latest wave of religious intolerance spells trouble for a country already torn asunder by fundamentalists often operating in collusion with what Vankwani calls the “illiterate clergy”.

All Hindu Rights Organization Chairman Kishan Chand Parwani told IPS he is “deeply perturbed” over the forced conversion of minority girls.

“Our problems are increasing with each passing day, with no apparent interest on the part of the government to solve them,” he added, pointing to the government’s failure to pass the 2008 Hindu Marriage Act, which would allow Pakistan’s largest religious minority to register its own marriages.

Government officials, meanwhile, deny that they have been sitting on their haunches. Federal Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yousaf told IPS his office had issued instructions to all provincial governments to take legal steps to prevent forced conversions.

“The government has given us approval to take concrete steps for the protection of the rights of minorities,” he insisted. “We are set to present the Hindu Marriage Bill in the National Assembly soon.”

For religious experts, forced conversions fly in the face of Islam’s most basic tenets of peace, love and brotherhood. “People should be free to live in line with their chosen religions,” Peshawar-based religious scholar Ghulam Rahim told IPS.

“The government should protect them. Islam itself forbids the idea of forcing someone to take a religion they do not truly believe in. It goes against the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him.”

(END)

A moment of silence in held in Washington, DC May 6th for the 234 missing Nigerian school girls who were abducted by Boko Haram on Apr. 14. Credit: Senate Democrats/cc by 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Amidst intensifying concern over the fate of more than 200 girls abducted by a radical Islamist group in northern Nigeria, at least 100 representatives of various activist groups Tuesday pressed the U.S. Senate to approve legislation designed to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls and discourage child marriages around the world.

Introduced by a bipartisan group of senators last week, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) would use existing foreign aid to achieve the bill’s major aims and mandate greater coordination of existing U.S. government programmes that address gender-based violence.A 10 percent reduction in child marriages could lead to a 70 percent reduction in infant mortality, according to the activist group Girls Not Brides.

“If passed, it would mean there would be enduring legislation and policy in place by the U.S. government towards violence against women that would not be based on the politics of any particular administration,” Jacqueline Hart, vice president for strategic learning, research, and evaluation at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), told IPS.

AJWS, an international development and human rights group, helped organise the activist lobbying.

IVAWA is no stranger on the Hill; its previous version was shelved as a result of right-wing Republican concerns that it could be used to support abortions and other women’s reproductive rights. The latest version was introduced in the House of Representatives late last year, where it was referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Gender-based violence is one of the world’s most prevalent human rights abuses, and has one of the greatest degrees of impunity surrounding it, according to the activist groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

At least one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to U.N. Women.

“This Act makes ending violence against women and girls a top diplomatic priority,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in a press statement.

“The world has just seen an appalling example of women and girls being treated as property and political bargaining chips in Nigeria, where the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 school girls and is threatening to sell them into slavery and forced marriages.

“Sadly, this is not a viewpoint limited to terrorist leaders: the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) says one in nine girls around the world is married before the age of 15, a harmful practice that deprives girls of their dignity and often their education, increases their health risks, and perpetuates poverty.”

Child brides in rural Senegal at work. Marriage before the age of 18 is a generally common practice in Senegal, with 16 percent of young women getting married and give birth before reaching 15. Credit: Issa Sikiti da Silva/IPS

Indeed, in addition to supporting programmes designed to support national legislation criminalising violence and abuse of girls and women, to provide training to police, prosecutors, and judges to handle such cases, and expand health facilities for women and girls, the bill would support projects aimed at offering girls and women more choices in life, particularly in education and economic opportunity, particularly in countries where early marriage is commonly practiced.

About 14 million girls are married before the age of 18 every year, according to Girls Not Brides. The largest proportion of early marriages occurs in Africa’s Sahel region.

In Niger, some 75 percent of girls are married early, followed by the Central African Republic and Chad. Early marriages occur in every region of the world, with the largest number in India.

According to UNIFEM, 64 million girls are child brides worldwide.

Early marriages inflict abuse on girls and women in many ways, from sexual violence to poor health.

They also increase the chance of physical or sexual abuse in a relationship. In Ethiopia, 81 percent of child brides describe their first physical experience as forced.

The issue is also tied to development. A 10 percent reduction in child marriages could lead to a 70 percent reduction in infant mortality, according to the activist group Girls Not Brides.

The lobbying day on Capitol Hill followed a policy summit hosted Monday by AJWS that featured new research on early marriage undertaken by Nirantar, an Indian feminist resource group.

The research, not yet formally published, focuses less on the appropriate age for marriage than on the role played by the institution of marriage in India’s social structure.

“When we talk about early marriage, it is always the early part we talk about, but what about the marriage part?” asked Archana Dwivedi, deputy director of Nirantar. “What is magic about the age 18?

“We often used child marriage as synonymous for forced marriage, but that is not the case,” she told IPS. “All marriages under 18 are not forced, and all marriages above 18 are not chosen. Imagine a gay boy married to a girl or a lesbian girl married to a man? It can be equally, if not more traumatic, because marriage is also license to have sex.”

Focusing on the age of 18 also diverts attention from girls over 18 who are still suffering the consequences of marrying young, she said. Although often overlooked, these consequences extend beyond the physical health of the women.

“There is too much focus on maternal health, which reinforces the patriarchal thinking that women are there to reproduce healthy children….What about her mental health, how she feels? After marriage, all the opportunities in her life are a given…there is nothing left in life to dream of or desire.”

Dwivedi argued that organisations working to end child marriages need to apply different indicators in assessing the effectiveness of their work.

While many organisations report how many early marriages they helped prevent or delay, they often fail to address the necessity of changing social and cultural attitudes about early marriage, as well as the institution itself.

Acceptance of conventional explanations for early marriage, such as blaming it on poverty, is unlikely to change long-prevalent attitudes.

Focusing on expectations surrounding marriage itself, on the other hand, will more likely lead to a broader range of choices for girls and women and thus empower them.

“Even in urban upper class families, a parent will spend half the family’s money on the education of the son and half on the marriage of the daughter,” she said.

“The attitude is that parents think marriage is the only viable solution for girls…Parents are working with the best intentions to help get their child settled, not doing it to ruin their lives, but to stabilise them. But there’s something wrong with our idea of stability.”