India Urged to Fight Sex Trafficking, Prostitution
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 2 (OneWorld) - A human rights advocacy group said Monday it is launching a worldwide campaign to help stop human trafficking into India. The campaign organized by Equality Now, a U.S.-based international women's organization, is aimed at forcing the Indian government to adopt tough laws targeting those who hire prostitutes.
Though apparently willing to make changes in the existing laws on prostitution, the Indian government has failed to take any meaningful actions due to pressure from special interests, Equality Now said. "The Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA) has languished in New Delhi for two years with no end in sight," said Anantnarayan of a legislative proposal currently pending in the parliament. The amended version of the 1956 law would make it a criminal offense to buy, own, or pimp a woman in prostitution. According to activists, much opposition to the new legislation has come from the anti-HIV/AIDS lobby, which contends that further criminalizing and stigmatizing the act would make it harder to educate those involved about condom use. "The grim reality, however, is that women in prostitution are often unable to negotiate condom use," said Anantnarayan. "The most effective way to protect women would be by curtailing the commercial sex industry," she added. The campaign kicks off just a day before the UN General Assembly opens another round of debate on how to curb human trafficking worldwide.
Human trafficking is widely considered the third most lucrative illicit business in the world, after arms and drug trafficking. India and other countries in the South Asian region are second only to Southeast Asia with the highest prevalence of human trafficking. In most cases of trafficking, children and young women are lured with promises of a job or marriage. Often finding themselves far from home and without money or identification, the women are then forced by their traffickers to work in the sex trade or other industries. For this reason, many consider human trafficking to be a modern-day form of slavery. India is the center of this trade, with organized crime syndicates trafficking women and children both within the country and from across the border in Nepal or Bangladesh. Research shows that, within India, a vast majority of young women who are forced into prostitution come from lower castes. Many girls brought into the sex industry are as young as 13 years old. Last year in March, the Geneva-based UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) raised concerns with India about the sexual exploitation of Dalit (lower caste) and tribal women trafficked into prostitution. The Indian government admitted that caste has played a role in forcing women into prostitution, despite the fact that the constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.
According to a recent International Organization for Migration study, trafficking in women has become a key source of revenue for Russian organized crime groups who are making billions of dollars. Meanwhile, in targeting the Indian government, campaigners also took the international community to task for its failure to match its actions with deeds. "Too much has been said about trafficking and much-needed money spent in talking about it while little else has been done," said Anantnarayan of the UN General Assembly talks on human trafficking. In its meeting Tuesday, the General Assembly is likely to propose improved cooperation on prevention of the crime, protection of the victims, and prosecution of the traffickers -- as set forth in the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking In Persons, Especially Women And Children. "Human trafficking affects almost every region of the world and combating it requires truly innovative and cooperative approaches," said Srgjan Kerim, the former Macedonian foreign minister who is now president of the UN General Assembly. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the "global epidemic" of human trafficking includes 127 countries as sources of trafficked persons and 137 nations as destinations for those trafficked.
"We all have a role to play in fighting this crime," said Kerim. "Not only [UN] member states, the UN, and other international organizations, but also the private sector and civil society, the media, and law enforcement bodies." The UN debate, according to Kerim, will provide an opportunity to promote partnerships and to consider the approach the UN system might take to most effectively address human trafficking. The debate follows a Forum in Vienna organized by the UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT) earlier this year. The United Nations has already set international standards to curb human trafficking, but many governments continue to resist calls to criminalize buyers of commercial sex, including those that have legalized prostitution. Equality Now thinks that is the wrong approach. "Instead of controlling prostitution, legalization has led to a disastrous outbreak of increased exploitation of women in the sex trade," the group's executive director Taina Bien-Aime said Monday. "If India is truly committed to ending sex trafficking," she added, "the government must pass the ITPA Bill 2006, which criminalizes demand, an effective tool to end sex trafficking."
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