Disorganised
response to an organised crime

While the
criminal network of trafficking is very well organised, the response of the
police, the state, and non-profits is disorganised. The investigators
entrusted with trafficking cases are from local police stations, which are
essentially meant to maintain law and order and address issues of the precinct
in which they are located. They are not meant to investigate crimes that are
transborder. And so, the police investigate cases either at the destination or
source, but hardly ever in conjunction.

State governments
also have no coordinated systems and work in silos. Over a decade ago, the
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued directives to state governments to create
specialised investigation units, called the Anti Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs).

On paper, there
are more than 220 AHTUs across the country, but less than 5% of them are
notified. This means that existing police officers have been given additional
responsibility to man AHTUs, but do not have the time, resources, or
infrastructure to investigate these cases. Bad investigations lead to low
conviction rates, which break the morale of the police, who then avoid filing
FIRs because they believe it is a waste of their effort.

Failure to
look at the lifecycle of trafficking

We often find
that a child or a young person who gets victimised today may become part of the
criminal network for her or his own survival tomorrow. For instance, brothel
managers or madams, as they are known, have shared that they too were once
trafficked, and recruited girls and women to work for them when they got older.
Because this is stigmatised labour, there is no easy supply of younger women.
Consequently, brothel managers rely on traffickers to supply young girls, which
is where the demand lies.

When the state does
manage to rescue girls and young women from sexual exploitation, they put them
up in closed institutions that are referred to as shelter homes. Shelter homes
have, however, failed to rehabilitate survivors. They are unable to provide
skills and training that make survivors employable with reasonable incomes but
instead make them feel punished and incarcerated.

In addition, sex
workers are often in debt bondage. They cannot open bank accounts due to lack
of proof of residence and are therefore unable to save and borrow through
financial institutions. This makes them dependent on moneylenders who operate
in these communities and borrow at high-interest rates of 25-50%. This keeps
them in perpetual debt.

We need to invest
in the financial and social inclusion of survivors. Rescuing a sex worker of 35
or 40 years of age and institutionalising or criminalising them is not a
solution.

Gaps in law
and its implementation

Laws on human
trafficking—the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, the Bonded Labour Act, and even
certain sections of the Indian Penal Code—have not been very successful in
securing convictions or increasing rehabilitation for survivors of trafficking.
These laws criminalise brothel managers and employers, but not traffickers.
They try to fight the crime at one end (the destination) while allowing
impunity at the other (the source).

What is the
role of civil society in the anti-trafficking sector?

Most non-profits
working on human trafficking have taken over responsibilities of service
delivery, such as running shelters, but do so amidst many challenges. They are
dependent on either foreign funding or state budgets. With foreign funding, many
have created large facilities with a sizeable workforce, who are not always
trained for the job. Government funding for service delivery remains frugal and
inefficiently disbursed. This leads to poor quality of services resulting in
poor benefits to survivors. There needs to be a shift in the role of civil
society organisations (CSOs) from being service providers to becoming
facilitators. Five approaches that we advocate for are:

Build
survivor leadership

There is a
tendency in the anti-trafficking sector to label survivors of trafficking as
‘victims’, who need to be protected and spoken for. Nonprofits must transition
out of being ‘saviours’ and focus on building leadership among survivors,
encouraging them to fight for their rights and services from panchayats and
governments.

There is an the assumption that survivors do not want to come to the fore or show their faces.
In my experience, survivors seldom feel the shame that our society associates
with them. When CSOs help them to resist and challenge stigma, they reject that
shaming and are able to fight for their own justice.

Instead of being
the voice for survivors, non-profits must assist them to speak for themselves.
Often, non-profits themselves treat sex work as a sin or a reason to feel
shame. However, when trafficking gets treated as a crime, the strategies to
fight it will be different. The focus will shift from saving survivors, to
empowering them to fight through robust legal aid, training, sharing
information, collectivising, collaborating, and so on. As leadership gets built
among survivors’ groups, they will take the lead in this effort.

Secure
compensation

India has a
strong provision for compensating survivors, but it is poorly implemented.
According to the State Legal Services Authority, no compensation has been
awarded to survivors of trafficking in many states, because there were no
applications. This happens because survivors do not know that they are entitled
to compensation and are unable to secure legal aid to access these funds.

The Nirbhaya Fund
of the central government, which pays for this, has been poorly used by many
state governments and non-profits. But some lawyers like Kaushik Gupta and
Anirban Tarafdar have managed to secure compensation amounting to Rs 4 to 6
lakhs. This enables survivors to pay for their own rehabilitation rather than
having to depend on CSOs.

Make
rehabilitation community-based rather than institutional

The focus of
rehabilitation for governments and non-profits has been on shelter homes. But
it needs to shift to helping survivors return to their families, and then
helping the families combat stigma and poverty, and claim services from
panchayats, police, and healthcare providers. Working in groups and collectives
helps to fight stigma and challenge traffickers.

Facilitate
work that is already happening

To effectively
counter human trafficking, non-profits working separately in source and
destination areas must come together. This is an opportunity for larger
organisations to play the role of the facilitator—bring together organisations
from the villages as well as those working in red-light areas in cities, so that
they can communicate with each other and coordinate their efforts. There will
be barriers to this, such as language and mobility, and non-profits can work to
remove them. Non-profits can also facilitate dialogue between survivor leaders
and the state. Instead of speaking on behalf of survivors, non-profits can
bring survivor leaders to the same platform as parliamentarians, so that they
can speak for themselves, and present their concerns using their own voice.

Gather and
disseminate information

For any kind of
policy advocacy or activism against a social issue, the evidence is key. Here, non-profits
can play the role of researcher, evidence builder, and synthesiser of
information. They can then arm survivors’ groups with this information.

For instance,
government departments often release legal and policy documents, which have a
direct bearing on the lives of survivors, but which could be difficult for them
to understand. We, at Sanjog, took one such document, translated it to Bengali,
because the survivors’ groups that we were working with were from West Bengal.
We took each clause of that document, and explained its implications through
the use of examples, over a 3-day workshop. As a result, they are now better
equipped to negotiate with the government for their rights and justice and can
respond to questions that are thrown at them.

What lies
ahead?

The MHA has
introduced a National Investigation Agency (Amendment) Bill (NIA), which,
despite being controversial, promises to investigate human trafficking cases
and improve infrastructure in the judiciary for prosecution. We wait to see how
these cases will be referred to the NIA, how the NIA will engage with the
AHTUs, the role boundaries and convergence issues, etc.

The previous
government tried to reform the law on human trafficking, but the Trafficking of
Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018 lapsed, and it
is yet to be seen whether the present government will revive it. Perhaps there
will be changes made based on earlier objections, particularly on issues of
shelter homes and lack of community-based rehabilitation.

Meanwhile, there
are organisations that help survivors of human trafficking form their own
collectives and create SHGs and federations; and leadership is emerging from
these groups. The volume of discussion on trafficking in the past two years is
unprecedented. The media and the parliamentarians are talking about it, and
while it hasn’t yet become a mass issue, it is no more just a social sector
issue. These are all positive developments, and herein lies the dream of making
our societies free of human trafficking.

(Uma Chatterjee is the co-founder and executive director of
Sanjog, a technical resource organisation based in Kolkata. Sanjog works with
governments, civil society organisations and businesses, as well as individuals
and collectives to combat violence against children and women)

This article was
originally published on India Development Review and can be viewed here.