BANGLADESH SHISHU ADHIKAR FORUM (BSAF)

Trafficking Routes

Bangladesh has a 4,222-kilometer long border with India and a 288 kilometer common border with Myanmar. Nearly half (28) of the districts of Bangladesh have common borders with India and two have borders with Myanmar. Monitoring and policing any unlawful activities be it trafficking of humans or smuggling, is a gigantic task and traffickers take advantage of this situation. The most preferred route used by traffickers is the land route followed by air and waterways.

There are as many as 18 transit points along the India-Bangladesh border through which children and women are smuggled out of the country. The border areas of Khulna, Jessore, Rajshahi, Dinajpur, Rangpur, Mymensingh, Comilla, Brahmanbaria, and Sylhet are frequently used as land routes for trafficking. In the northern region, the districts of Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari, Panchagarh, Thakurgaon, Dinajpur, Naogaon, Nawabganj and Rajshahi and in the South Jessore and Satkhira are the areas in which women and children are most susceptible to trafficking. Cox’s Bazar is also a common site for the recruitment of children and women to be trafficked because there are three muslim rohinga refugee camps in this district from which traffickers obtain victims. Although reports and studies identified these border routes, traffickers use different routes at different times to avoid police and other law enforcement agencies. Herefore, for entering India through Kolkatta, the two most common routes are the Benapol borders in jessore from which almost 50% of the trafficking take place and Satkhira (Source: Trafficking of Women and Children In Bangladesh, 2001, ICDDR,B).

Causes of Trafficking:

Most reports emphasis that, in recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of children and women being trafficked into India and Other countries, from Bangladesh. The causes of trafficking and the factors leading to this apparent increases in recent years are multiple and complicated. These factors are embedded within the socioeconomic structure of the country and require an in-depth analysis. However, for the present purposed the factors have been categorized into two groups. The first group, the “push” factors are the conditions in the environment of the “sending” communities or countries that ensure a supply of people for trafficking. The second group refers to the set of “pull” factors that support the demand for trafficked persons.

Causes of Trafficking

• Break up of traditional joint family and the emerging unclear families.

• Pseudo marriage

• Dowry demand

• Unequal power relations and discrimination in the family by gender and age

• Negative attitude towards women and the girl child

• Socialization which devalues the girl child

• Social stigma against single, unwed, windowed women

• Misinterpretation of religion regarding women

• Religious fundamentalism

• Complications out of conditionality and fraudulent practices in marriages/after marriages

• Child marriage, polygamy, incompatible marriages

• Easy divorce

• Incest

• Physical as well as mental illness, contagious diseases turning women as outcastes.

• Frustration in love, failure in conjugal life

• Enticements for better life e.g., job, prospect of marriage

• Globalization and export oriented growth model, consumerism

• Increased dependency of the guardians on the income of their girl child

• Natural disasters making families homeless and disintegrated

• Acute poverty forcing parents to abandon their children

• Lack of shelter for women in distress

• Inadequate government policies in favour of women

• Inadequate rural development projects for women and unemployed

• Lack of social security and safety

• Inefficiency of the law enforcement agency

• Corruption amongst the members of the law enforcing agencies

• Women released from jail/hazat are given to the guardians/custodians without proper/legal verification

• The malpractice of providing affidavit for women entering into the profession of prostitution without verification of age

• Complications of restoring to law is both expensive and time consuming for women victims

• Non-registration of female domestic help

Source: Consultation meeting: Trafficking and Prostitution. CWCS, 1997, pp 19-20