Human trafficking has become such an endemic part of social systems and power structures in South Asia that even strict border controls and tough visa restrictions don't stop victims being traded with impunity
Traffickers without Borders: The Banality of Sex Trafficking in South Asia
By Sher Afgan Tareen
Sapan News
Florida
“Is human trafficking modern-day slavery?” The question that popped up in a Zoom chat box some time back still haunts me.
How can slavery continue to persist, considering it was legally abolished nearly 158 years ago in the United States and more than 189 years ago in former colonies of Great Britain?
There are widespread linkages between human trafficking and slavery as the US Department of State has outlined. Stories about human trafficking draw mixed reactions because we lack consensus about how individuals’ bodies are coerced into performing forced labor and providing sexual favors.
Is it a case of a predator hunting its prey within seconds? Or does evil unfold more gradually, lacking the drama of predation and possessing a trait best described as ‘banal’ by Hannah Arendt ?
I started to think about the banality of human trafficking after a chance encounter with EJ Dickson’s critical review of the movie Sound of Freedom. A newly released action thriller, it features Jim Caviezel as a former US government agent who quits his job to launch a mission against child sex trafficking. With the help of other vigilantes, he travels to the Amazonian outskirts of Colombia, kills the leader of an armed rebellion, and rescues a girl who had been held as a sex slave.
EMBED: https://youtu.be/UwSBQWI-bek (film trailer)
Dickson writes that cinematographic representations of good and evil create an illusion of clarity around an issue that is otherwise blurry. They make it seem easy to track human trafficking survivors when only 0.04% of cases are reported.
Reading his critique spurred me to attend the webinar on the trafficking of women , where the question came up about the connection between human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
The event commemorated the United Nations World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, 30 July 2023, organized by the Southasia Peace Action Network , also known as Sapan. That is where I discovered an echo in the commentary of the panelists.
A recurring theme was the porous borders -- the transit, source, and destination of human trafficking, thus far invisible to the eye of the law, as described by multiple panelists.
Of all the borders in Southasia, two emerged as central nodes of human trafficking: the Bay of Bengal and the Pakistan-Iran border. The largest bay in the world, the Bay of Bengal spans numerous coastal cities in south and southeast Asia, including Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Cox’s Bazar is home to one million Rohingya refugees and a point of departure for hundreds of them as victims of human trafficking.
EMBED: https://youtu.be/yLZHcrSOGQI (Sigma Huda)
Sigma Huda, an advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, echoed a key finding of the UN Migration Agency (IOM) that the vast majority of the trafficking victims are women . They undertake a grueling voyage across the Indian Ocean with hopes of reuniting with husbands, entering into a marriage, or securing employment abroad. It begins with a short trip on a fishing trawler to St Martin’s Island followed by a week-long, one thousand and six hundred nautical miles journey on larger vessels to Malaysia.
Upon arrival, many are held to ransom for failure to pay the traffickers’ agent, a figure that amounts to anything between $350 to $3,500 and coerced into doing sex work as restitution. Others are abandoned on the shore. Some even fail to complete the voyage when the host country retracts the promise of berthing the vessel. They consequently return to the bamboo and tarpaulin shelters at Cox’s Bazar that serves as both a refugee settlement camp as well as a regular haunt for sex traffickers.
It is difficult to tell the difference between everyday life and criminal activity on the borderland between Pakistan and Iran. Although sparsely populated, the area features a thriving network of diesel smugglers who leverage kinship ties on both sides of the border to recruit children for their illicit trade.
The children hike the mountain ranges carrying Pepsi bottles filled with diesel while their smugglers drive diesel-loaded pickup trucks on barren roads, bribing guards who stop them at checkpoints. Diesel smuggling offers quick relief from long-standing unemployment and poverty rife in the southwest Balochistan region at the cost of causing immense pain to families of missing children .
Immigration and Anti-Human Smuggling for the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) assumes responsibility for identifying victims of human trafficking on the border. At the same time, the local police in Pakistan investigate all the other cases of human trafficking, classified as ‘domestic’ or ‘internal’ .
EMBED: https://youtu.be/whFGa8dGwmM (Mehr Husain)
Another panelist, Mehr Husain, a journalist with The Friday Times , blamed the dual system for exacerbating the pressing issue of human trafficking that it was designed to combat. At stake for her was gender roles performed in a Southasian household. While overlooked by the law, she argued that it plays a major role in putting women at risk of human traffickers everywhere from the heartland to the outskirts of a country.
Her fellow panelists highlighted the feeling of vulnerability to explain why and how the seemingly benign everyday interactions between fathers and daughters within the confines of the household leads to a menacing problem on the borderlands.
Doctoral scholar Sharli Mudaliyar at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai offered a hypothetical case of a girl from a poverty-stricken village who consents to a marriage with a man promising a better future in the city so that her father may project an image of the family as stable and well-off.
She cleanses her family’s emotional pain only to defile herself since her husband runs a lucrative business trafficking rural girls. Vulnerability undermines the role of men as the household’s head yet routinely impinges on daughters as they carry the emotional labor of making the rest of the family feel safe.
EMBED: https://youtu.be/sdrVSv1NpbQ (Ruchira Gupta)
The recently published young-adult novel I Kick and I Fly by Emmy-winning journalist and activist Ruchira Gupta, also a speaker at the seminar, is based on several real-life episodes from the writer’s own experiences. The protagonist Heera, a 14-year-old girl born in a red-light district in Bihar where girls are sold into the sex trade as soon as they come of age, develops an interest in kung fu after seeing a group of girls training after school.
By learning how to fight and achieving fame as an athlete, Heera undergoes a transformation. She not only defies the destiny that her community and traffickers had intended for her, she also inspires other families in the district to seek alternative sources of income instead of selling off their daughters. In 2002, Gupta founded a non-profit called Apne Aap (‘by yourself’) that provides real-life survivors of sex trafficking a platform to build new lives.
Prior to attending the Sapan webinar, I was guilty of dismissing human trafficking as a vice wholly unrelated to me. Since then, I have come to think of it as a symptom of a patriarchal culture that shaped my youth in Pakistan.
As long as women’s bodies, labor and subservience continue to be seen as mere tools for men’s pleasure, profit and comfort, human trafficking will persist. Empowering women to fight back is only one part of the solution; the real work lies in educating boys to see girls as humans, and ending the systemic impunity that traffickers enjoy. When demand ends, the supply will stop.
At present, however, that goal is a pipe dream in the face of the banality of evil.
(Originally from Quetta, Pakistan, now based in South Florida, Sher Afgan Tareen is a historian of religion who specializes in the study of 20th century Islam in America. His research interests lie at the intersection of religion and feminism. Specifically, he explores insights from Muslim practices of motherhood for understanding the interplay between intelligence and emotional cognition and developing culturally responsible technologies. Email: skt932@mail.harvard.edu
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.)
List Hyperlinks in Order of Appearance
- US Department of State - https://www.state.gov/what-is-modern-slavery/
- Hannah Arendt - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/62456/eichmann-in-jerusalem-by-arendt-hannah/9780241552292
- EJ Dickson’s critical review - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-child-trafficking-experts-1234786352/
- 0.04% - https://www.emra.org/emresident/article/trafficking-2020
- webinar on the trafficking of women - https://sapannews.com/2023/08/02/address-vulnerabilities-eliminate-impunity-to-combat-the-trafficking-of-women-and-girls-in-southasia/
- Southasia Peace Action Network - southasiapeace.com
- Women- https://www.iom.int/news/girls-sold-forced-labour-largest-group-trafficking-victims-identified-iom-bangladesh-refugee-camps
- undertake - https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/livelihoods/human-traffickers-prey-on-rohingya-refugees/
- Thirdpole- https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/livelihoods/human-traffickers-prey-on-rohingya-refugees/
- diesel smugglers - https://www.rferl.org/a/fuel-smuggling-pakistan-iran-balochistan/31097489.html
- Pepsi bottles filled with diesel - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/iran-sanctions-see-pakistani-kids-drug-dealers-turn-smuggling-diesel-flna1c9159516
- families of missing children - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/diesel-drugs-and-kids-pakistani-girl-caught-smuggling-iran-border#:~:text=According%20to%20a%202018%20US,in%20Iran%2C%20among%20other%20locations .
- ‘domestic’ or ‘internal’ - https://www.unodc.org/pakistan/en/stories/fia---inspector-irfan-abdul-nabi--incharge-immigration-and-anti-human-smuggling-at-fia-taftan-border.html
- The Friday Times - https://thefridaytimes.com/
I5. Kick and I Fly - https://ikickandifly.com/
