Human Trafficking Around the World (33 page)

Forced labor is not the only form of human trafficking in India. Adults and children are also trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. As in labor trafficking, those most vulnerable are persons of the low castes, specifically women and girls. Young boys are also vulnerable, some as young as 10 years old. As HIV/AIDS becomes more of a concern for clients, the age of those forced into prostitution is decreasing. It is estimated that there are more than 20,000 female sex-trafficking victims in Delhi brothels—many as young as 12 or 13 years of age. The majority of these girls and women are forced to work in brothels until their debts are repaid, somewhere between four and eight years (Asian Development Bank, 2002). Another area of high commercial sex trafficking is the red-light district of Kamathipura in Mumbai, an area known for sex tourism and pedophilic activity. It is estimated that Mumbai generates more than $400 million annually in revenue from the estimated 100,000 girls and women who service roughly 600,000 clients per day (Asian Development Bank, 2002). Sex tourism, specifically child-sex tourism, is widespread not only in Mumbai but also in other major cities and towns in India with tourist attractions, even in religious pilgrim centers such as Guruvayoor, Puri, and Tirupati. Indian nationals engage in child-sex tourism within India and, to a lesser extent, in Nepal (U.S. Department of State, 2010).

Each year during the monsoon rains, thousands of people in India die while others face displacement and a complete upheaval of their lives. This instability and movement create circumstances ripe for human trafficking. According to Vijay Kumar, activist and former child laborer, in such settings many children become prey to traffickers:

After the floods, the people lost all their savings and belongings and only escaped with their lives. Most sought refuge in community halls, government buildings, schools and relief camps. The traffickers also went there. When I went home, I asked the villagers who were living in tents and huts, if any of these traffickers had been seen after the floods. The villagers said that many people approached them asking to take their children to Delhi because they had nothing to eat in their house. And they also gave them some money. So after the floods it’s almost natural for the traffickers to come. There were many children who got separated from their families who were washed away and still haven’t been found. So whenever these disasters strike, child trafficking increases. (Bamforth et al., 2009)

It is not only the annual floods that create a suitable atmosphere for human trafficking but also the successive droughts that are wreaking havoc on the livelihood of local farmers, apparently as a result of climate change and environmental abuse. Bharat Dogra, a fellow at New Delhi’s Institute of Social Sciences, says climate change has adversely impacted the crops in the Bundelkhand region of central India, leaving many farmers insolvent and vulnerable to loan sharks. “Before, a bad year would lead to a good year,” Dogra told the
Los Angeles Times
. “Now climate change is giving us seven or eight bad years in a row, putting local people deeper and deeper in debt. I expect the situation will only get worse” (Magnier, 2009). Sanjay Singh, founder of the NGO Parmarth Samaj Sevi Sansthan, points to specific environmental abuses such as the cutting down of hardwood trees in the region and the growth of soybeans, a legume that demands more water than the region’s ever-diminishing rainfall provides. “This led to a never-ending cycle of loans,” Singh explained. “Droughts and climate change after 2000 [were] the final nail in the coffin.” Loan sharks charge farmers exorbitant annual interest rates, some as high as 60 percent. Often human trafficking occurs as a result of these debts, Singh said. “Powerful people give loans backed by clothes, tools, land and sometimes women as collateral, figuring they can sleep with them if they’re not repaid. It’s a completely feudal thought process” (Magnier, 2009). On account of insurmountable debt and interest rates, many farmers have no choice but to forfeit their land and in some cases have been forced into indentured servitude in order to work off their debts (Magnier, 2009).

The idea that education can aid children at the lowest socioeconomic level is certainly not new, but what is novel is the creation of a model that could help successfully re-integrate child trafficking victims into society. This is exactly what is occurring in India through the BBA rehabilitation center Bal Ashram, where boys are given a nonformal, formal, cultural, and human rights education. They also receive social development, vocational, leadership, and physical training (Aliperti, 2009). Most children at Bal Ashram start with nonformal education that focuses on literacy, creativity, dialogue, and human rights. The objective is to mainstream the children into formal education, but in using nonformal education the center aims to teach children to be active participants in their education. The BBA believes the return of bonded and child laborers to their homes without rehabilitation would be “hollow and meaningless,” as it would simply re-immerse them in a system of potential exploitation (BBA, 2010). The Bal Ashram believes that offering boys an opportunity to obtain a well-rounded educational experience may help insulate them from future exploitation and give them the tools to make a better life for themselves.

At the Bal Ashram the boys receive basic and formal education, but what is most intriguing is the center’s focus on social and human rights issues. The boys explore the topics of child labor, child marriage, and poverty as well as women’s rights, gender equity, and environmental protection. The goal of the center is to build and promote confidence and leadership, but most importantly the center allows the children to simply be children (BBA, 2010). Aliperti reported that Bal Ashram has facilities for up to 80 children. “It is located in a part of Rajasthan that is conducive to real rehabilitation. With open fields in a rural area, the children have plenty of room to run and play.” One graduate of the Bal Ashram rehabilitation center, a 13-year-old former child laborer, took a stand that resulted in a statewide change. When his government-run village school began to charge student fees, he responded by protesting to the regional magistrate, who in turn filed a petition. The Jaipur court ordered that all monies be returned to the parents, and the Rajasthan State Human Rights Commission ordered that schools in the state not charge student fees.

Another graduate of the Bal Ashram was a 17-year-old who had been a victim of bonded labor in order to pay off a loan incurred by his father. He was later trafficked for forced labor at a school hostel. After eight years at the Bal Ashram, he had learned Hindi, obtained a formal education, and actively participated in trying to promote education, peace, and international awareness on the issue of marginalized children. Once he realized that he could not apply for a passport without a birth certificate, he helped 550 children from Rajasthan to obtain their birth certificates. In 2006 he received a Children’s Peace Prize and spoke at a summit for world peace in Italy attended by the Dalai Lama. The young man continues to be particularly focused on the relationship between education and poverty, in which corruption plays a detrimental role. “Corruption and bribes are a big problem,” he told Patricia Aliperti. “The government has the ability to help poor families and give them education, but officials keep about 90 percent in their own pockets and use only 10 percent for people” (Aliperti, 2009).

One more success story is that of a 15-year-old ninth-grader who at the time Aliperti interviewed him had been at the Bal Ashram for seven years. He participated in the 2005 Children’s World Congress and the South Asian March Against Child Trafficking. He pushed his local school to expand to cover eighth though twelfth grades, to create a playground, and to install access to tap water for drinking and washing. He managed to increase the number of teachers in the local primary school from four to eight. He also succeeded in enrolling in school at least ten children from a poor Muslim area in a Jaipur slum by promising their parents that the children would receive free school materials until fifth grade. His long-term goal is to become a doctor to help poor families. “The poor become poorer and the rich richer,” the boy told Aliperti. “If the poor get sick they die, but the rich are taken to the hospital as soon as possible. My priority is for the poor marginalized people in society whose needs are deprived” (Aliperti, 2009).

After rehabilitation, these children go back to their respective villages where they either enroll in schools or get jobs, if they are 18 or older. But even with the benefits of rehabilitation and education, the children will once again be vulnerable to child labor and trafficking. In 2008, just a year after the initial interviews, Aliperti returned to India to conduct a follow-up round of interviews but was able to reach only 10 of the 40 children. Aliperti suspects that some of the other children returned to child labor or were once again trafficked:

People do what they need to in order to survive. Poor children don’t get the benefits of education because they may have to help provide for their families. But it is education that helps diminish a child’s vulnerability to labor and trafficking. When a child is at school they get a midday meal which alleviates food expenses and they don’t have to do labor—of course they study and help their families and some may still work a few hours per day, but school keeps them out of long workdays and hard labor while giving them the tools for greater opportunity.

The prospects for rescued girls, who attend the Balika Ashram for rehabilitation, are less certain. In contrast to the Bal Ashram, the Balika Ashram provides girls with no access to formal education. According to Patricia Aliperti, the girls there “receive social class and vocational training such as sewing and cosmetology.” The teacher at the school told Aliperti that the girls do not attend the formal village schools because it is unsafe for them to go outside the center alone. “It makes one wonder about the fate of girls,” said Aliperti. “I suppose other factors come into play that limits the rescue of girls, such as the exploitation occurring behind closed doors—domestic labor, sexual abuse, and the social bias preferring boys rather than girls.”

Seven of the ten children whom Aliperti was able to trace the following year (2008), along with an eleventh child interviewed only in 2008, were boys that had remained at the Bal Ashram rehabilitation center. This outcome illustrates the success of the Bal Ashram program but highlights the problem with follow-up once the children return home as well as the lesser success of the Balika Ashram.

TRAFFICKING ABROAD

Each year thousands of citizens from India who work abroad in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States face forced labor and debt bondage. Some experience fraudulent recruitment and are placed directly in situations of forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation in the destination country while others face debt bondage as a result of substantial fees charged by unscrupulous recruiters and employers (U.S. Department of State, 2009). Fees often include recruitment costs, ongoing housing fees, food costs, and even payment for the tools used on the job. The debts are supposedly taken from the victims’ wages, but of course the wages are never enough to discharge the inflated debt that the victims owe. Thus victims find themselves in a position of involuntary servitude facing nonpayment of wages, restrictions on their movements, the withholding of their travel documents, and the threat and actuality of physical and/or sexual abuse.

One case of alleged debt bondage involved 500–550 persons from India trafficked to the United States Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina. They were allegedly trafficked by the U.S. company Signal International, LLC. As stated in the complaint filed by the victims, recruitment advertisements promised permanent residence in the United States for workers. In fact Signal intended to use the workers only temporarily. Recruitment and other fees totaled roughly $20,000 per victim. Fees included the cost of travel, recruitment, skill tests, and immigration processing. Additionally, recruiters told applicants that permanent residence could also be offered to the workers’ spouses and children for a fee of around $1,500. In order to ensure that they received their final payment from the workers, Sachin Dewan, the labor recruiter hired by Signal, required that the workers hand over their passports either just before or after their consular interviews. “The passports were returned to the workers once they had arrived in Bombay and gave Dewan (or his agents) the third installment of approximately $6,000,” said Dan Werner, deputy director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “Within an hour the workers were in a taxi to the airport and on their way to the United States.”
³

The sacrifices the workers had to make in order to come up with the money for fee payments often involved taking out substantive loans and borrowing money from family members. Werner reported that the workers obtained money wherever they could get it—including loans from loan sharks who charged astronomical interest rates:

Many of the men speak of having to sell their family jewelry—jewelry that is passed from generation to generation through marriage and has both cultural and symbolic value for these families. The men also sold or took out loans against their property. They did whatever it took to come up with the money. They were investing in what they believed to be a whole new life in the United States. At times this involved workers transporting suitcases and duffel bags full of Indian rupees to their traffickers. Some traveled with as much as 295,538 INR [roughly $6,000] in their possession. Just imagine their desperation to be willing to haul suitcases and duffel bags full of that amount of cash down city streets.

Upon arrival in 2006 and 2007, the workers allegedly were forced to live in dirty, crowded, remote, fenced, and guarded camps in Orange, Texas, and Pascagoula, Mississippi. The workers were shocked by the conditions. Through other employers, many of them had previously worked outside India, predominantly in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. “In the UAE,” Werner explained, “the workers lived in furnished apartments paid for by their employer. Two workers shared a decent-sized room with a common area.” But in these camps they were placed in single rooms that housed 22 to 24 people: “Each housing unit appeared as though multiple trailer-like structures had been pushed together, with the interior walls removed, creating single modular structures. The aisles between many of the bunk beds were barely large enough for a human body, so that a person had to turn his body sideways to walk through them. A worker’s only privacy was his bunk, so many workers used drapes to create some semblance of privacy.”
⁴