WUNRN
Ruchira Gupta, Founder President of Apne Aap Women Worldwide - www.apneaap.org
Seminar on A Human Rights Approach to Combating Human Trafficking: Challenges and Opportunities. Implementing the Recommended Principals and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking,”
Organized
by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the
Palais des Nations,
I am Ruchira Gupta and I bring greetings from the victims and survivors
of sex trafficking who are members of my organization, Apne Aap Women Worldwide
in
The victims and survivors
of human trafficking that I represent see visibility, accountability and access
to all civil, political, economic and social rights as the best way to combat
trafficking. They want their slavery to
be acknowledged as slavery. They want all forms of their enslavement
including prostitution to be not defined as a choice but to be acknowledged as
the absence of choice. Nobody chooses to be born poor, female, low caste,
fairer or darker in colour, or as an ethnic or religious minority.
Victims and
survivors of trafficking want us to not accept their slavery as
inevitable by simply trying to mitigate its circumstances through the offer of
beds in shelters or condoms in brothels. They want us to dismantle the very
system of trafficking by bringing traffickers and end users to book. They want a world in which it is unacceptable
to buy or sell another human being and to create an economy in which one is not
forced to sell oneself. They want Human Rights Principles to ensure their right
to food, housing, education and livelihood to pave the way for their right not
to be trafficked.
My organization has
a membership of over ten thousand trafficked human beings. They are women and
children trapped in prostitution. They were kidnapped, sold, coerced, tricked
or forced into situations of exploitation. Some are as young as seven. They
have been kept in small locked rooms and raped repeatedly. They live in
absolute terror. Most die by the time they are thirty or thirty five. They
never had a past, and now they hope to have a future.
We have been
organizing survivors and victims of trafficking in groups to be able to
collectively struggle for their own rights and entitlements. We have formed 150
self-help groups. These groups are demanding arrests of traffickers and end
users, jobs, safe housing, and education as a combined best practice to
dismantle the system of trafficking.
We have held
conferences of survivors in different states in
So far a large
number of trafficking interventions have focused on the victim through rescue
and post rescue care. While this has provided much-needed relief to victims and
survivors, it has not made a dent in the trafficking industry. According to a
study by the National Human Rights Commission of India, most traffickers state
that they identify the demand areas before indulging in trafficking to ensure
‘prompt delivery.
In each of the
survivor conferences, in state after state in India, and even in the conference
organized by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the
United Nations in New York last year survivors have repeatedly said they want
the demand for trafficked sex and labour to be addressed. They say and I quote
Fatima Nat Dhuniya, trafficked when she was 12 in
Our survivors
believe that if the number of convictions goes up, the costs of operations of
human trafficking will become untenable and the business models of traffickers
will be disrupted and individuals who create the demand will be embarrassed by
being identified.
The second demand
that survivors are asking for in each of the conferences is access to all their
economic and social rights along with their civil and political rights. They
want more than a bed in a shelter or a condom in a brothel. They want access to
safe housing, education and training, jobs, land and livelihoods based in open
communities.
They want both the
process of human trafficking to be tackled as well as its outcomes. In this
context they say that border management is not the answer to trafficking. In
fact, they say that trafficking is not always about movement of forced or
deceived people across borders. It is also about those whose vulnerability is
abused to trap them into situations of exploitation in brothels, sweatshops,
and farms, sometimes in the very places where they were born. Those targeted
for commercial sexual exploitation and cheap labour share key characteristics:
poverty, youth, minority status in the places of exploitation, histories of
abuse, and little family support. They
want comprehensive protection programmes that address their vulnerabilities.
They want legal protection tied in with viable economic options and the notion
of rehabilitation to extend to community empowerment as well as individual
empowerment.
They also want
immediate relief from the violence, trauma and sever exploitation that they
were subjected to. Trafficked women may
be freed from their employers in police raids, but they are given no access to
services or redress and instead face further mistreatment at the hands of
authorities. Even when confronted with clear evidence of trafficking, officials
focus on violations of their immigration regulations and anti-prostitution
laws, rather than on violations of the trafficking victims' human rights. Thus
those women who are trafficked across borders are targeted as undocumented
migrants and/or prostitutes, and the traffickers either escape entirely, or
else face minor penalties. By making the victims of trafficking the target of
law enforcement efforts, governments only exacerbate victims' vulnerability to
abuse and deter them from turning to law enforcement officials for assistance.
By allowing
traffickers to engage in slavery-like practices without penalty, governments
allow the abuses to continue with impunity.
Some brave girls and women, and men are in a faceoff with traffickers
and police in a small village Forbesgunge in my own country,
Apne Aap survivors
have repeatedly been petitioning the Parliament of India to change its law to
include more severe punishment for buyers and traffickers. Each country needs
to amend its own laws to tackle this growing crime and tragedy. The Central
Bureau of Investigation in
I appeal to member states, including my own country to apply a
human-rights based approach to identification, victim protection and support
that is embedded in the UN Protocol and put addressing the demand for
trafficking, exploitation of victims and abuse of a person’s vulnerability at
the centre of the amended laws. We want
the practical applications to not dilute, modify or change the UN Protocol.
protocol but strengthen it in every way.
Ruchira Gupta,
Founder President, Apne Aap
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