Preventing Human Trafficking
Why should people be conscious of preventing human trafficking?
THP’s Jasmine Laws spoke with Clare Mathias on the subject of human trafficking. Clare is the founder of the Hummingbird Foundation – an organisation that works to prevent trafficking and help its victims.
"After, we went to visit Calcutta, which happens to be one of the largest areas for girls going into sexual exploitation, I felt I wanted to do something, because when you start seeing things and you try and put your feet in other people's shoes, you realize that things we completely take for granted just aren't available in other areas. I believe in changing the system, but how to break the cycle of trafficking is a multimillion-dollar question, as trafficking is everywhere.
When I met a victim of human trafficking and she was a trafficker herself. That made me feel incredibly naïve, because you think how could you do that? It’s just so awful. I felt so idealistic and silly and spoilt. I asked her how could you do that, and she said “because I am surviving”. She explained how brothels are institutions, they’re highly hierarchical, and she had been gang raped at 14 repeatedly, because girls are sold over and over again – it’s not like a cup of tea where when you drink it it’s gone. She said that now she had a couple of girls below her, and she had risen to a place in the brothel where she now had a position, as she had been there 8 or 9 years. She couldn’t remember where home was, and so that had become her family, and she had fought really hard to be in a position where she only had one or two clients. So, the way she survives is by bringing more people underneath her.
She asked me “well where were you when I needed to be rescued?” and that really had a huge impact on me.
When you start learning about trafficking, exploitation and vulnerability, you can't help but do something about it if you have the means. I do feel that we've got a bigger piece of the pie than we should have. Yes, I have that pie and I'm eating it happily, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be conscious of people who don't have their piece of the pie.
It's very important for people just to take the blinkers off their eyes, and stop living in their bubbles."
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What needs to be done to prevent this issue?
THP’s Jasmine Laws spoke with Clare Mathias on the subject of human trafficking. Clare the is founder of the Hummingbird Foundation – an organisation that works to prevent trafficking and help its victims.
"I am particularly interested in changing the system: all of us operate within an ecosystem. So here, we have medical care, education, health and safety, traffic rules, and police that are governed in a certain way so we can have standards of behaviour that will adhere to that system. This relies on good governance and it relies on citizens having power and the appetite to negotiate their agency effectively. So, you and I have rights because hundreds of people before us have argued for our rights. When working with people in human trafficking, you have to avoid Western arrogance as much as you can. You have to work with local people who are embedded in the community, who have the local dialect, but also who can understand what the reality is for the people that we work with.
We concentrate on prevention in three main components: working with young people, local government structure and infrastructure, which is critically important because that's how you get system change, and also with households to advocate their access to rights and entitlements. This includes their responsibilities, as people need to learn to equip themselves. When we first started, we worked with young men to give them the skills to be able to work in a gender equitable way, and be gender equitable human beings, so they could look at things from a different point of view, because otherwise they just do what everybody else does. It’s about breaking the mindset. The workshops for boys and girls also cover local governance and becomes a life skills program that empowers young people to craft their own future.
We really believe that young people can set a different tone, and they're the most vulnerable for being trafficked. They can become agents of change. Adults don't always behave like adults should behave, so they face challenges they need to be prepared for. This is human nature, and so you can see it is a very imperfect world with loads and loads of challenges."
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What are the challenges to be faced with trying to prevent trafficking?
"There has been, since COVID and the cyclone, a resurgence in trafficking cases. It is a question of when people are vulnerable, they are more likely to make unwise decisions without proper information, because then they don’t question it, and they are more desperate. So, if a farmer’s crop gets destroyed, they have no money. They have to either go into slave labour, or sell labour cheaper, or they have to move somewhere else and sell their labour. They would feel they need to reduce the number of people they have to feed in their households, and there are brokers who will take daughters off family’s hands and send them to Mumbai to work as a maid to send money back to the family. Families may or may not ever see her again, but she'll start sending money home. Remittances are a really common part of the developing world economy. So, when you look at that, climate change threatens people’s ability to have a workable livelihood and provide for their family.
There is also a very weak criminal justice system, so traffickers can act with impunity. Trafficking is a vastly profitable business, and it flourishes particularly when there are no other livelihood opportunities. So, there's a massive demand, there's a massive supply of very vulnerable people, there's a lot of money in the middle, and there's very little control from a criminal justice system. India has a wonderful constitution, and it has 125 anti trafficking laws. But, it's just nobody knows them, and it can't be implemented, and the police are so completely under resourced, so trafficking is the last thing on their mind. Good governance is a privilege. I think it takes a lot of people battling for it, and political will to make it happen, and so it is, to some extent, a luxury. So, we have the rights holders and the duty bearers, with people who hold power and people who have rights, but the link between the two doesn't always happen.
But ultimately, it’s all about a mindset. When you have that mindset, girls and boys are just not equal, and if you take that as a cultural norm, then why would you bother to help girls in the country. Cultural discrimination is a massive contributor, and it's something that is endemic everywhere. It brings out a very feminist side in me. In many cases, child protection mechanisms don’t exist, so there's no machinery to say, “I think something's going wrong here”, because there is no one to say it to. No one is going to listen to a girl. There was a domestic violence case, and the woman went to the policeman and said, “My husband's beating me” and the policeman says, “Well, don't annoy your husband”. That is the norm.
It also takes a lot of courage and willingness for people within their own communities to take up that challenge, often in the face of what could be insurmountable problems: so, if you're illiterate or you don't have access to education, you don't know that you can claim a certain benefit, or that you can demand the right for your girls to go to school. So, if your culture is very much against there being any value in a girl child, then why would you question it? As people are products of this system, it is simply the norm. All of us live within what our society's norms are. Peer pressure is a powerful thing. These are people whose paths are set out for them at birth, as part of their surname, or what industry their family is in, or whether they're female or male.
This is a massive human behaviour change program. People need the motivation and the opportunity to change, so, you can tell me what you like, but if that doesn't feel realistic to me, or if I'm unable to do that, then I will keep selling my daughters off. You can say whatever you like, but your reality is different from my reality. That's why you have to change the whole system, so that the norm is changed for the better. Human nature is human nature. So, I can say this is good for you, but it won't actually change unless I also change."
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