Fighting to stop trade in sex slaves

Published on Saturday 29 May 2004 12:11

WITH mountainsides carved into giant staircases by farmers trying to use every inch of land, lush green rice fields, mango trees and giant waterfalls, Nepal’s countryside is absolutely gorgeous.

But behind this seemingly rural idyll is a story of landless people working for 5kg of unprocessed rice a day, living in mud huts and unable to afford to feed their children.

At the sides of mountain roads, better suited to goats than the ancient buses crammed with passengers inside and on the roof, I saw people struggling to get by. There were women and children working in the fields, carrying back-breaking loads in giant baskets tied round their heads, or, bizarrely, breaking medium-sized stones into smaller stones.

Nepal is a complex nation which is also one of the poorest in the world - 42 per cent of its people live below the poverty line.

Women can’t own property or even a passport without a father or husband’s name on it, and the caste system makes the British class system look like an egalitarian utopia. Discrimination against women and lower caste people leads to countless abuses of their human rights.

Life is very, very hard for the majority of people in Nepal and, understandably, many are looking for a way out. This has led to the despicable practice of trafficking in women.

Girls as young as 13 are taken from villages and slum areas by traffickers - men, and sometimes women - who lure them away with the promise of well-paid jobs in the country’s capital, Kathmandu, or in the big cities of India and the Gulf states.

But what actually awaits the girls is a life of forced prostitution in these cities’ brothels. The girls don’t know how to escape - they are mainly uneducated and extremely poor and too ashamed to tell their families what they are doing.

Even if they manage to escape or get rescued from the brothels, their families and communities often refuse to take them back because of the social stigma the girls now carry.

Oxfam is the first non-governmental organisation in South Asia to take up the cause of these girls. I met many very brave, very dignified women, some of whom had themselves escaped from brothels in India, who had set up organisations to tackle the problem.

These are ordinary women who not only have to do all the household work, hold down a job and look after their families, but also find the time to campaign for the rights of survivors of trafficking.

THEY confront the influential people in the villages to persuade them to lose their prejudices and speak for the girls. They actually insist on giving counselling to victims and their families to show them that girls must be allowed to return to their homes.

They organise groups of teenagers from slum areas to give talks in schools and to perform impromptu plays about trafficking in parks and public places.

One group had persuaded a training college run by a British man to take on victims of trafficking free of charge to study computer programming, business management and, in one case, electrical engineering.

There is now far greater awareness of the problem so fewer girls will believe the traffickers’ lies and more people realise that the shame lies with the trafficker, not the girls whose lives they ruin.

Another group of people Oxfam is supporting are the so-called "untouchables" from the Dalit caste. I visited a Dalit village where many of the children had the swollen bellies of malnutrition and women covered their heads when strangers arrived because they believed themselves to be untouchable and so should not show themselves to higher castes.

Their homes were made of bamboo and mud, they used dirty ponds for washing, they had no land on which to grow vegetables, owned no livestock and the men worked as bonded labourers - basically slaves - for landowners who paid them in rice.

It perhaps goes without saying that Dalits have almost no rights and those they do have they are not aware of.

My first reaction was that the situation was so desperate and the obstacles so great that the prospects for change were almost non-existent.

But Oxfam’s partners had other ideas. They had trained a young man from the village as a teacher who taught children that the caste system was created by people and therefore could be abolished by people.

Women social workers had spent many days and nights in this and other villages, teaching women about hygiene and encouraging them to register the births of their children and send them to school.

You have to be very strong-willed to do this work. The social workers themselves don’t earn high salaries. And they get to the villages by bike, which brings fresh problems because women who ride bikes are seen as being of poor character. At first, they were pushed off the bikes and had stones and insults thrown at them. Now they are cheered along the way and younger girls in the district are starting to ride bikes as a symbol of defiance.

Dalits have started to organise and have marched in huge numbers for the right to education and land ownership, and to protest at the unpunished rapes of Dalit women.

THE strongest impression I’ve come away with from Nepal is the importance of education, not just formal education, but the kind of awareness-raising work that Oxfam helps fund and promote. All the children and young people I met loved school and some had had to fight even their own parents in order to get the education that is their right.

Ramila Shrestha went to school from the age of six but had to leave when her mother died. Her father wanted her to get married when she was 14 as he said he couldn’t afford to keep her, but she insisted on going back to school. She still does all the housework for her father as well as going to school and now, at 16, she wants to be a social worker and is starting up a campaigning group in her school with a couple of friends.

She was not the only young person I met who was determined that the next generation of Nepalese must have a better life.

Given the chance and a bit of support they will surely succeed.

• Kate Kirton is a campaigner with Oxfam in Scotland.

• To find out more about Oxfam’s work in Nepal visit www.oxfam.org.uk or phone [phone]