A Look at Human Trafficking
I’ve slowly come to realize what human trafficking generally actually looks like here in Bangladesh. While it can take many shapes and forms, I’ll try to paint a general picture. Although females trafficked for sexual exploitation or prostitution is common, the majority of trafficking victims are men. Most of human trafficking (including for children) is for labor. Mostly, it looks like this: someone has a hard time providing for their family. They seek out, or hear about a better paying job abroad. Many of their initial recruiters are relatives or close neighbors. They voluntarily coordinate with a recruiting agency for that job. They pay fees for paperwork (real or fake), and transportation. They travel willingly to the destination country. The exploitation takes place in the destination country. They are abused, or forced to work for no wages, or deceived about the nature of the work or their wages. They manage to call someone from home to get help. Maybe they get rescued and repatriated to Bangladesh. When it comes time to file a criminal case, it’s tricky. They probably only met a low-level recruiter that was part of a larger organizational network, possibly even one with government affiliations. And besides, it’s hard to prove that those recruiters did anything wrong because the victim went willingly, and they can just argue that they had no idea that the victim would be exploited at the destination. It’s hard to carry out a case against an international exploiter, and physical evidence is extremely hard to obtain once a victim has been repatriated. They may not even know what neighborhood they were kept in while they were abroad. Perpetrators threaten and pressure victims to drop or settle their cases illegally out of court. Family’s pressure victims not to pursue a case against a relative. To make it worse, the cases can drag on without justice or compensation for the victim for a long time through clogged court systems. While technically, as a criminal case, these cases can’t be dropped or settled, for the right price or with the right set of threats the victim withdraws support for the case, and the perpetrators give money to the investigating officers to submit a final report saying that the case was all just a misunderstanding. A vast majority of trafficking cases end this way. Which is tragic for a lot of reasons, including that traffickers are allowed to operate with impunity.
I recently interviewed a victim whose husband accepted a bribe to drop the case without telling her. She would like to pursue justice but is afraid to file her own case because it might anger her husband, and after finally getting back from the hellish experience of her trafficking and exploitation, she doesn’t want to lose anything else. If he leaves her, she will have nowhere to go.