Thousands of Nepalis have petitioned their government to adopt the world’s primary anti-trafficking treaty. Nepali anti-slavery groups supported by Free the Slaves have mobilized impressive grassroots support for the “Palermo Protocol.”
The protocol’s official name is the “United Nations Protocol to Prevent and Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.” The name says it all. Countries that adopt this pact commit to combating slavery and helping survivors rebuild their lives. So far, 146 countries have signed. But Nepal, which was suffering under civil war, has lagged behind.
The petition – and street rallies to show that fighting slavery is important to Nepali citizens – was organized by the Alliance Against Trafficking in Women and Children in Nepal, a coalition supported by Free the Slaves.
“It is an exciting milestone,” says Free the Slaves Nepal Director Neelam Sharma. “Nepalis have shown their commitment to fighting slavery,” she says.
There’s a hopeful sign that Nepal’s Parliament will adopt the Palermo Protocol. Nepal recently adopted the U.N. Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. Countries must adopt this umbrella treaty before they can ratify the anti-trafficking protocol.
You can see the frontline work of our Nepali partners in an uplifting 13-minute video called “Turning the Tide: Fighting Slavery in Nepal” below:
Turning the tide: Fighting slavery in Nepal from Free the Slaves on Vimeo.
Free the Slaves partner in Nepal, WOSCC (The Women Skill Creation Centre) works to rehabilitate women returned from slavery. Many of the women who come to WOSCC are survivors of circus slavery in India.
Life in the circus can be horrifying for these enslaved young women. Ginny Bauman, Free the Slaves Director of Parnterships, spoke with a group of women, ages 18-24, who had returned after years of slavery in India’s circuses. Ginny’s reflections on this conversation were written in a case study, focusing on one survivor: Rama*. Here is an excerpt:
The names of the circuses speak of the glamour and excitement they hoped for: the Golden Star, the Empire, the Western. Now they have returned home to villages like this one, reached only by foot, without electricity, between towering majestic hills . . .
Rama’s hopes of a glittering life in the circus were painfully short-lived. The girls survived on a sparse diet of dal and rice, and they trained and performed from 9am to 2am each day. All these girls were caught between the fear of being kicked and beaten if they showed any resistance, and the terror of the acts they were forced to learn. Rama explained that on the high wire, they used a safety net during practices, but at performances, there was nothing to save her if she fell. The other girls spoke of horrific injuries: a boy tied inside a rotating wheel who fell out and died; a girl who fell and snapped her thigh bone. Rama herself had three serious injuries including blows to the head.
(Read more here: “Rehabilitating Enslaved Circus Performers in Nepal”).
Hopefully, the recent decision of India’s Supreme Court to prohibit circuses from employing children under 14-years of age will prevent more children from suffering Rama’s fate. This landmark decision followed the tireless work of the Save the Childhood Movement advocating for the “full implementation of Indian child labour laws, which are regularly flouted by circuses.”
From an article on Dawn.com:
Children are often trained to perform high-wire acrobatic acts, juggling stunts and other attractions for audiences in India, where circus companies move from town to town throughout the year.
‘The court has ordered the government to rescue all children below 14 years of age and also instructed them to formulate a rehabilitation policy for the minors,’said Colin Gonsalves, a lawyer for the Save the Childhood Movement, which brought the case.
The court order said that all children rescued from circuses should live with their parents and that the government should provide care and education if their parents are unable to look after them. Read More >>
Circus owners are already protesting the high court’s decision, claiming that the only way for them to train circus performers is to begin their education at an early age. A trainer at a Gujarat-based circus said: “[o]ne can only perform acrobatics if rigorous training is imparted at an early age. Children are needed for the job and you cannot train adults for it.” The Indian circuses are also highlighting the practices of European circuses, which allow children performers to be hired if “one parent accompanies them and full education is provided.”
Find out more about our partner organizations in Nepal. And donate today, to help ensure that FTS and our frontline partners can continue our work.
*Name has been changed to protect her identity
This video, produced by Free the Slaves, takes a big picture look at slavery in Nepal, and how FTS works to end it.
We’ve told you about Human Goods, a magazine-style website that publishes feature-length articles on modern-day slavery around the world. Christa Hillstrom is the journalist who founded and manages the magazine-style website. She has reported on human rights issues both in the U.S. and in India. (Learn more about Hillstrom here.)
Read ‘Nepali Women Vulnerable to Multiple Enslavement’
Her most recent article on Human Goods is a profile of Shanta Sapkota, founder of the Peace Rehabilitation Center (PRC) in Kathmandu, Nepal. PRC is a safehouse where survivors of sex trafficking find sanctuary and rehabilitation.
Read about Free the Slaves work in Nepal: ‘Bringing All the Children Home from Slavery’
Hillstrom’s article focuses on the slow, often unglamorous work of rehabilitation. Often, news stories focus on raids and rescues—the action-packed moments when victims are pulled from enslavement. Experience has taught us that, without holistic programs that deal with the root causes of slavery, people find themselves re-enslaved, re-victimized. Raids and rescues are not enough to eradicate slavery. Hillstrom writes:
“In the media, sex trafficking has become the most tantalizing. There’s a tremor of something excitement-like when women are plucked out of the red-light squalor of ‘Third World’ megacities on camera. There’s a glamour in the raids.” But the work doesn’t end there. For survivors, the long road to recover has only just begun. Hillstrom continues: “Behind the unremarkable walls of safehouses like PRC… the plodding work of rehabilitation takes place. For caregivers like Sapkota, it’s gradual, wrenching, and also rewarding.”
Read ‘Rehabilitating Enslaved Circus Performers in Nepal’
Here is Christa Hillstrom’s article, ‘Peace on Earth’:
It’s a well-worn path, several lanes wide, that flows from one nation into the other: sprawling, spectacular India, and the snug mountain gem of Nepal. The actual border is hard to discern because passports are rarely examined where the meager sprawl of Nepal’s Birgunj breaks for India’s simmering sister town, Raxaul. No one stops the men in trucks carting Indian goods up into the Himalayas, sides ablaze with folk art. Or the auto-rickshaws and chortling buses that taxi day laborers back and forth in the clingy heat. Hundreds of migrants snake through the traffic—pedestrians spilling out on a sunbaked floodplain; past two tan-clad officials smoking bidis at a card table, shunted almost out of sight and sprayed with what looks like hand-drawn letters: “Indian Customs.”
As with most major crossings, the lanes bubble with commerce, ambition, and the promise of futures both real and imagined. For some, these will shortly be swapped for confinement, betrayal, and death.
It was a few miles from a passage like this that a broker of women ushered a small band of girls through the brush to avoid the border’s activity. When the authorities caught him, they discovered that he’d trafficked women down this route before, including his own pregnant wife. He sold her to the Indian brothel circuit for $100.
These young women were trafficked into slavery in Indian circuses. Now, they don't need to leave home to earn a living, thanks to the income generation program led by FTS partners in Nepal.
UPDATE 2: We did it! Thanks to your support, we hit our mark. $50,000 will go to Free the Slaves Nepal projects.
UPDATE: We are just $7,000 away from reaching our goal of $50,000! Every penny counts—today is the last day to have your donation matched!
Give the gift of FREEDOM this Valentine’s day!
Since 2007, FTS and our partners in Nepal have helped women and girls gain freedom from slavery and rebuild their lives while also addressing root causes that allow slavery to flourish.
To help us do our work, a generous foundation has agreed to match every donation made to our Nepal projects, dollar-for-dollar. But time is running out. Today is the last day to have your donation matched.
Give the gift of freedom today by going to our donation page here and selecting “Nepal Matching Fund” in the designator window when prompted. Or click on the orange box below.
For more information, contact Free the Slaves Major Gifts Officer Sarah Gardner here!
Find out more about our work in Nepal here, here and here.
- By implementing anti-slavery Community Vigilance Committees, communities in Nepal are taking control, and working to end slavery holistically.
Recently, Free the Slaves Partnerships Director Ginny Bauman, accompanied by FTS South Asia Director, Supriya Awasthi visited the work of our partner organization, Women Skill Creation Center (WOSCC) in Makwanpur District, Nepal. Here is her report:
Supriya and I arrived unannounced in Gairigaun village, picking the location at random from among the 40 sites where our local partner has set up new anti-slavery Community Vigilance Committees (CVC) in the past year. As in the other places we visited, WOSCC and the CVC are in a step by step process of stopping and then reversing the flow of children into domestic slavery. The committee’s volunteers collected detailed information throughout the community, through door to door visits, about who is going to school and which children are missing. These visits to all the homes in the community help the committee understand the struggles faced by many of the households and why children were sent to work elsewhere. It is a very visible and systematic outreach against child slavery, and in small communities like Girigauns, it marks a big turning point. It is not too hard for people to come from the outside to spread awareness against trafficking—to hold a few meetings or perform street theater—but this work is much more persistent, and much more owned by members of the community.
Up to now, for poor families, there has been nothing remarkable about sending off their 7 – 15 year old children to live and work in someone else’s house. It has been a way to make the food stretch to feed everyone. These families couldn’t afford the school costs anyway. But WOSCC and the local CVC members know the real situation facing most of these children: As one of the young leaders of this group (herself a former child slave) told us: domestic slavery means eating leftovers or going hungry; no pay; and the promises of school never becoming real. That was as much as she wanted to tell. It was clear that there was so much else about her time in domestic slavery that was quite beyond sharing with strangers.
- This drawing illustrates how an entire community in Nepal can become engaged in eradicating slavery.
In this place, the CVC found there were 8 children in slavery. It took several months to convince the parents that their children were in danger and facing abuse. But once the process began and the CVC found where the children were and helped them return, the effort gained momentum. WOSCC made sure the local government paid the school expenses for some of the children, and WOSCC itself funded the others to go to school. With their children home, the parents turned into anti-slavery advocates, becoming active members of the CVC, and supporting each other, while also making sure that no more children are allowed to slip into slavery.
In site after site, WOSCC is triggering similar processes, coordinating over a thousand new CVC activists in the past year alone. They are finding the facts, counseling each household, locating the children, using legal threats against slaveholders to get them released, bringing them home and then making sure they have the best chance to thrive. It is especially important to integrate parents, former slaves and other community members together in a tight-knit group to sustain the effort.Each group is trained to advocate persistently with local authorities about school scholarships, skills training and income generation.
In the process, in Girigauns, the group also stopped excessive alcohol abuse and curtailed domestic violence. They got a successful prosecution in a rape case, and they also try to counsel each person migrating for work, to help them think through the risks and protect themselves. In one case where a person was in trouble in Malaysia, they successfully pressured the trafficker to bring him back. Many more opportunities are needed in this place, families are still struggling, and the children who were in slavery seem to hold inside a lot of hidden pain, but here the people have drawn a line: their children will not be slaves.
Child slaves carry slates down mountains in the Himalayas. Photo by Peggy Callahan.
In December, we announced our end of year Nepal Matching Fund program, in which every donation you make to Free the Slaves’ Nepal work will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to $50,000 by a generous foundation.
We are excited to announce that the deadline for this program has been extended to February 15th. Now there is even more opportunity to double your impact against slavery in Nepal. Find out more about our work in Nepal, and donate to this matching fund today!
With your help, our grassroots partners have helped women and girls escape Nepal’s notorious “cabin restaurants,” which are crude fronts for sex slavery. They’ve helped bring education to villages where children have been forced to work in stone quarries instead of attending class. They’ve helped secure legal aid for survivors and financing for microenterprises that provide alternatives to slavery. Nepali activists are combating the root causes of slavery.
You can see the difference that freedom makes in our 10-minute Nepal mini-documentary, “Turning the Tide” (watch it below). And you can help this important work to continue and expand by visiting the Free the Slaves online donation page. Just select “Nepal Matching Fund” in the designator window when prompted.
These young women were trafficked into slavery in Indian circuses. Now, they don't need to leave home to earn a living, thanks to the income generation program led by FTS partner WOSCC.
As 2010 draws to a close, we have an incredible opportunity to support FTS and our Nepali partners, where you can double your impact! Our work in Nepal helps women and girls out of sex slavery, domestic servitude, and agricultural slavery.
Right now, every gift made to our Nepal program between now and December 31st, 2010 will be matched dollar for dollar by a generous foundation up to $50,000. Which means, if you donate $100 dollars, $200 will go towards combating slavery in Nepal.
Since 2007, FTS and our partners in Nepal have helped women and girls gain freedom from slavery and rebuild their lives while also addressing root causes that allow slavery to flourish, such as poverty and legal impunity. FTS focuses on developing on-the-ground strategies through which communities can rid themselves of the traffickers. We then use what we have learned to help improve anti-trafficking policies.
What has been our impact? We have piloted and documented ways to eliminate slavery in cabin restaurants and massage parlors in Kathmandu, as well as in private homes and farms. We have assisted in securing legal aid for survivors, and helped them achieve economic stability through access to education and income generating projects. We help secure funding and support for micro-enterprises, so survivors can become economically self sufficient—and never have to fall prey to traffickers again.
We have protected girls from sexual slavery by educating vulnerable communities to guard against traffickers. One of our partners, the Freed Kamaiya Women Development Forum has founded seven women’s groups through which 162 previously enslaved girls initiate rescues and educate adults to reject slavery in their community.
Working with our local partners, Free the Slaves has helped ensure that the Nepali government adopt better anti-trafficking regulations, and comply with the UN Protocol against trafficking.
We have had countless victories in the movement to eradicate modern day slavery in Nepal. But there is still much work to be done. Your donations will help us continue to do our work.
There are only a few weeks left to have your donation matched. Join us today to make slavery history. Donate today by clicking on the icon below, and selecting “Nepal Matching Fund” when prompted.
To learn more about Free the Slaves’ work in Nepal, watch “Turning the Tide: Fighting Slavery in Nepal” after the jump!
Shivanna (second from left) and his family were bonded laborers in India. But with the help of anti-slavery organization JEEVIKA, they are now free.
Washington, D.C.—At a hearing held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, the State Department’s anti-trafficking Ambassador Luis CdeBaca recommended that slavery eradication efforts take a more victim centered approach. Survivors of modern day slavery should not be treated like criminals, he said.
The hearing, titled “Out of the Shadows: The Global Fight Against Human Trafficking,” took a broad based look at human trafficking around the world and what was being done to combat it.
MODERN SLAVERY IS ‘SUBTLE’
Slavery is often difficult to detect. And millions are vulnerable to it. Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) said there is only a “thin line between being short on your paycheck and being held bondage.”
Neha Misra of the Solidarity Center’s Migration and Human Trafficking program said media and policy focus on commercial sexual exploitation has caused enslaved laborers to be overlooked.
“In 2010, a slave is not necessarily a person in chains or shackles,” she said. “Modern day slavery can be much more subtle. Trafficking victims toil in factories that produce products that are exported to the U.S. [They] harvest vegetables and process food that ends up on our dining room tables,… pick crops or mine minerals that are raw materials in the products we buy.”
SLAVERY IN ASIA
Asian countries and their Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report rankings were at the center of much of the discussion.
Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) showed his disappointment that Cambodia was moved up from Tier 3—the lowest possible ranking—to Tier 2, saying it was a “slap in the face to the thousands of victims” still enslaved. David S. Abramowitz, Director of Policy and Government Relations at Humanity United spoke about his work in Nepal, where 90 percent of migrant workers are trafficked into labor and sex slavery.
Read about Free the Slaves’ work in Nepal
Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) shared stories of North Korean defectors trafficked in China. He criticized China’s one child policy, saying it contributed to the trafficking of women into forced marriages. He pointed to an investigative article in The Economist titled “The War on Baby Girls” that said 100 million girls are missing, due to sex selective abortions in China and Northwestern India.
And yet, China and India are Tier 2 countries. Smith urged CdeBaca to re-assess these rankings, saying that neither country complies with the minimum standards prescribed by the Trafficking Victims Protections Act.
MOST OF THE WORLD’S SLAVES ARE IN INDIA
India’s caste system drives millions into slavery, said Dr. Beryl Ann D’Souza, Medical Director of the Dalit Freedom Network. “Of the 27 million people around the world that the UN considers human slaves in the trafficking industry, the UN recognizes that most live in India and most are Dalits,” she said. Dalits are the lowest level of India’s caste system. While slavery is illegal in India, centuries of social pressure keep many dalits in bonded labor.
UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras
It’s exciting to see anti-slavery activism highlighted in this year’s CNN Heroes. Mira Sorvino, who was named UN Goodwill Ambassador for Human Trafficking last year is presenting and promoting the campaign. And one of the 10 runners up is Anuradha Koirala, founder of anti-slavery organization Maiti Nepal.
Sorvino has been involved in anti-slavery work since at least 2005, when she appeared in the Lifetime film “Human Trafficking,” playing an ICE agent—a role that earned her a Golden Globe nomination.
Anuradha Koirala founded Maiti Nepal in 1993 in order to combat human rights abuses toward women. Maiti is focused on rescuing and rehabiliting survivors of sex slavery—and to prosecute perpetrators of the crime. The organization has reportedly emancipated 12,000 women and girls altogether.
Maiti is an affiliate of the Philippines-based organization ECPAT (End Child Prostitution Child Pornography and Trafficking)—a recipient of the 2008 Free the Slaves William Wilberforce Award.
See video of Sorvino and Koirala after the jump!
This video, produced by Free the Slaves, takes a big picture look at slavery in Nepal—and how Free the Slaves partners with grass roots organizations to end it.
