Thwarting the traffickers in Nepal

More than 15 thousand young women and girls are trafficked from Nepal each year to become sex slaves. Many of them end up in Indian brothels and around half of them are minors. Other young people from Nepal are trafficked to work as maids or labourers either in Gulf countries or in South Asian nations. The Catholic Church’s Caritas Internationalis confederation is at the forefront of trying to prevent vulnerable Nepalese people from becoming the prey of unscrupulous people traffickers. Susy Hodges spoke to Laura Sheahen from Caritas who has just returned from a fact-finding visit to Nepal to document the extent of the trafficking problem.

Sheanen says many of the girls she met who narrowly escaped being trafficked into the sex trade were very young girls: “I even heard ... about one girl who was 10 years old and her male teacher had said to her: let’s take a trip to India to see the movie theatres.”

Sadly, says Sheahen, even after these girls are rescued from the brothels following police raids and brought back to Nepal, they are often ostracized from their home communities: She talked of one “heartbreaking” case where one former victim of the sex trade traffickers “was rejected by the people she had grown up with.”

Those who are not trafficked into the sex trade, often end up going to work as housemaids in the Gulf countries. Sheahen says many are treated reasonably well by their employers but for others it is a very different story: “some are treated shockingly like animals, not fed, locked up” in dark rooms or closets.

Listen to the full interview by Susy Hodges with Laura Sheahen: