Anti-Trafficking Efforts in Nepal

This summer, I'm living in Nepal as an intern with Chhori, a really neat NGO in the capital city of Kathmandu. After almost ten weeks I'm still having trouble grasping the huge scope of programs Chhori implements, because it's incredible to me that such a small organization is able to do so much. Chhori's programs include:

• Running a shelter for women who have been trafficked into Kathmandu's entertainment sector, and providing them with counseling, job training, formal education, medical treatment, and reintegration into communities
• Publishing a magazine for men to focus on the role men play (or need to play) in preventing domestic violence
• Running short-term mobile counseling camps in Kathmandu's entertainment sector, providing dance bar and brothel workers with physical and psychological medical care and giving them the resources to get out of unsafe situations
• Prenatal counseling and other services to stop Nepal's huge pattern of son preference
• Building an educational program for schools to teach kids about the laws and social issues surrounding human rights abuses in Nepal
• Creating a network for girls who do not have brothers, as certain tasks are assumed to be for men in Nepal, so that these women and girls have other resources to talk to about discrimination and son preference
• Research and data collection on trafficking, entertainment work, domestic violence, and similar issues
• Advocating policy changes and implementation to the Nepali government
• Working with police near the shelter and in red light districts to keep women safe and prosecute traffickers in those areas

It's impressive work and I am so lucky to spend 3 months here learning the ins and outs of the organization. It's one thing to study trafficking and gender discrimination from thousands of miles away (and I did, presenting a paper at a conference in April, and you can find it here), but things are not as cut and dry on the ground. Some police are corrupt and work with brothel owners, some are great and work with NGOs, some just don't have the resources or knowledge to know how to fight trafficking. Some Nepali NGOs refuse to work with anyone else, some are happy to collaborate and share data and methods, some are in between. Vague overarching solutions, including those in the paper I wrote in April, cannot possibly explain or alleviate the huge issue that is human trafficking in South Asia. Some organizations are working together, some police officers do care, some international donors are willing to fund the cause, some programs are effective. Of course some are not and do not, but the resources are there.

Today two of my coworkers and I went to a meeting with representatives from a few other anti-trafficking organizations in Nepal, talking about specific work that is being done and what needs to change and it was so interesting! Here are some points of note:

• Current data is critical. The trafficking scene here changes so quickly—women in Kathmandu are often rotated from brothel to brothel (or dance bar to cabin restaurant) every 2 weeks so that it's hard to find the same woman twice. As tourism patterns change and law enforcement improves in some areas and worsens in others, five-year-old data becomes incredibly inaccurate.
• Accurate data, of course, is also critical. One way to do this is for NGOs to cross-check their estimates (Which border checkpoints are the most common stops for traffickers? Are more women working in dance bars in Bhaktapur or Lalitpur? What is the most common age range of trafficked women?) with each other, and some are pretty reluctant to hand over hard-acquired data. If valuable information is caught up in the selfish goals of NGOs and in bureaucratic disagreements, though, that doesn't help anyone. On the other hand, cross-checking data not only helps NGOs to focus their efforts but also helps prove information to skeptical law enforcement officials.
• No one organization can do everything. Of course any NGO should be thorough with the work it's doing, but it's tempting to see the scope of the problem and criticize groups for not doing enough. My meeting notes from today include many repetitions of the phrase "Who's working on labor trafficking?" or "Why is this organization only focused on women? What about the men who are lied to? This is valid, but at a certain point that has to be left to someone else. Better to be effective in combating one small issue than ineffective in combating ten.
• Sources of valuable information on trafficking patterns include not only current and former victims but also independent journalists, missing persons reports, and even imprisoned traffickers. That last one was pretty surprising to me.
• The need for culturally-specific solutions extends not only to regions (what works in Thailand mights not be effective in Nepal) but also to each subset of one issue. Tiny Hands Nepal, which works to fight trafficking into India, handed everyone a copy of the interview questions they use when talking to women who are at risk of being trafficked to Calcutta or Mumbai, and it was of no use to Chhori, dealing specifically with internal trafficking to the entertainment sector in Kathmandu. That's pretty specific.
• There is a tendency by NGOs to believe they know what's best for a victim better than the victim herself. Just about everyone in the room had seen situations where NGOs forced women out of entertainment work and into shelters, and these women almost always relapsed. Sometimes people really do want to be entertainment workers, and sometimes it is the best option for the time being for any number of reasons: a child at home, a need to live in a certain location, connections to other people (shelters are often intentionally hard to find for security reasons), a desire to be financially independent even if that means sexual harassment on a regular basis. Forcing people into shelters for their own good denies them the agency that is already such a big issue for women who have been trafficked. I now appreciate the significance of Chhori's mobile counseling camps much more than I did at the beginning of arrival: for the hundreds of women who cannot or will not leave their entertainment sector jobs, providing consistent counseling, medical care, and job training is a way to help women transition into safer, better jobs without forcing them into the victimizing world of living in a shelter.
• Taking traffickers to court is often a huge hassle because of the difficulty of providing valid accounts from witnesses and victims while still maintaining privacy and safety for those people. In some countries video testimonies are ok, in some places the technology even for something that simple is lacking, in some areas the courts won't accept that. I had never even considered that issue.

So those are my thoughts and insights for the day. Many more to come I'm sure, and hopefully on similar issues in other parts of the world so that I can see what is different.