Internet offers traffickers new opportunity to lure victims
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A day after police rescued a Nepali woman from employment fraud and drug trafficking at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Aika (name changed) talked to me. Her hopes of living the good life were still there, she said, but had now become mo
I cannot imagine how she must have felt. Her body was black and blue when she was brought to MAITI Nepal, an NGO that provides counselling, shelter and employment to women rescued from trafficking; her mental state was greatly disturbed. From what I saw, I can only testify to one thing – that the discolouration on her body could have only come from savage beatings.
Just weeks ago before she left for Dhaka, Aika was full of dreams about the future. She sent me a private message on Facebook saying that she would meet me when I arrived in Nepal, and that she had recently found a job in Bangladesh that guaranteed her a secure path in her chosen career. She felt a twinge of uncertainty knowing that she would soon be separated from her family in Kathmandu, but she just shrugged it off, believing that she was entrusting her fate to divine providence.
Aika told me that the three weeks she was detained upon her arrival in Dhaka were the worst she had ever experienced. She was locked in a room for days, beaten and sprayed with cannabis derivatives. Her harrowing nightmare went on for weeks and the faces of people who abused her disappeared from her memory just as fast. She could not remember most of their names, as a result of the drug abuse.
Aika’s fate is comparable to the 10,000 Nepali girls and women who are trafficked every year to neighbouring countries such as India and Bangladesh. Reports claim that they are forced into prostitution and burned with cigarettes until they learn how to service up to 25 clients a day. Some girls even go through “training” before being initiated into prostitution, which can include constant exposure to pornographic films, tutorials on how to please customers and consequently subject to repeated rapes.
Aika looks me straight in the eye with the conviction that most sex trafficking and drug dealing transactions in Bangladesh involve police protection, with gold coming in and out. If this is true, then it is a crime of epic proportions.
This is the war the Nepal government has been fighting. The 1,850 kiometres of open, porous border between Nepal and India, and the Siliguri Corridor connecting to Bangladesh, make trafficking difficult to stop. Most victims are lured with promises of better jobs in countries such as India, Dubai or Saudi Arabia. Other tactics include false marriages and proposals, where criminals approach indebted families to trade their daughters to pay their debts, sometimes under the guise of a dowry for a marriage.
But this problem goes further. Trafficking of women nowadays has transcended physical borders. The crime has conquered a new space: cyberspace. In this modern, technology-driven world, the trafficking of women has shifted from personal encounters to bits and bytes, from face-to-face engagements to virtual chats.
Aika was a victim of job fraud and drug trafficking through a social network that a majority of us use – Facebook. She was promised a job by a person who claimed to be acquainted with her family and friends. Her constant online conversations with the cyber trafficker allowed that person to access her personal background and her desperate need to apply for a job to sustain her family’s needs. She felt a “social connection” and believed that the cyber trafficker could lift her from gut-wrenching poverty.
Indeed cyberspace has opened up new ways of commodifying women and sexualising violence. As Aika said, the methods of control used by her cyber traffickers are similar to those used by batterers: women are denied freedom of movement; locked in a room for weeks, isolated, deprived of earnings, threatened, and made dependent on drugs or alcohol. Physical and sexual violence is central to these traffickers’ maintenance of control.
The anonymity of cyberspace has allowed cyber traffickers to breed exploitation and violence with impunity, especially in countries with weak cyber policies. According to the 1986 Human Trafficking Prevention and Control Act of Nepal, anyone convicted of selling people is subject to 10 to 20 years in prison. In 2011, the 11th Annual Trafficking in Persons Report released by the US State Department said that Nepal has not fully complied with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. The report cited the lack of proactive victim identification despite the establishment of a special unit at the Crime Investigation Bureau to investigate trafficking.
With trafficking gaining speed in the world of cyberspace, how do we fortify our sentinels? With little fear of detection, apprehension or punishment, cyber traffickers now buy, sell, auction, degrade, humiliate, torture, stalk, view, consume and dispose of women, wherever they are in the world. This experience teaches us to be on our guard every time we start communicating with remote persons in front of our screens.
Aika escaped and lived to tell her story. As she stays alive, her struggle has not ended. Cooped up in a cybercafe somewhere is the next victim. We know this will happen. But like Aika, will she survive?
Chin Cabrido is a communications specialist consultant in a multilateral development bank and a Kathmandu-based stringer for GMA 7 News and Public Affairs, the Philippines.
