CHILD TRAFFICKING is becoming increasingly sophisticated globally, with traffickers constantly altering methods to avoid detection by authorities, a UCC conference on Child Trafficking for Labour and Sexual Exploitation has heard.
Sarbani Das Roy, executive director of the Hope Foundation in India, said traffickers were well aware of threats to their livelihood.
“They are very well informed and they keep changing their operation style every so often so that it becomes very difficult to know what they are planning next . . . They come up with different ideas all the time. It is well organised. There is a very good intelligence system at work.”
Ms Das Roy, who works to end child trafficking, said children are rarely trafficked in India through means of drugging, kidnapping or extreme violence. Instead they are lured from their communities by a promise of “a better life”. This could amount to the promise of being given four meals a day.
In the course of her research Ms Das Roy spoke to one trafficker who showed her a photo album he had compiled, which contained pictures of girls lounging on a sofa watching television. Poor girls were often impressed by the album and left with the hope of leading such a lifestyle. The researcher said traffickers used ingenious methods to ensnare young girls into a life of sexual exploitation.
Ms Das Roy said one of the biggest misconceptions was that sexual traffickers were exclusively male. Many women become involved in trafficking due to poverty – others were trafficked themselves as young girls but were set free a few years later after they promised to lure even younger women into sexual exploitation.
Maureen Forest who founded the Hope Foundation, an Irish charity which works with street children in Calcutta, said India’s human trafficking problem is estimated to be in the millions.
A new trend emerging in India is that the minimum age of children being trafficked has fallen below 10 years of age. She was also concerned about the growth of sex tourism in Goa, India.
“India and the other south Asian countries are slowly replacing southeast Asia, as the venue of choice for tourist sex . . . there are fewer laws against child sex abuse in these countries. Another reason is that European tourists believe that HIV/Aids among children is not as rampant.
Christine Beddoe, director of End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes, said Europeans should not be under the illusion that trafficking was a problem that only affected countries like India.
The director of the UK-based charity said she and her fellow activists had to fight long and hard to get a focused national response to child trafficking. There was a culture of disbelief surrounding the possibility of such trafficking in the UK, but the reality was that children were being exploited throughout the country.
She claimed Vietnamese organised crime groups were trafficking children from their country into the UK to participate in the production of cannabis called skunk.