FEMINIST PULSE
On 26 August this year, Langtang Lirung saw an unprecedented glacial collapse leading to a flash flood that tore down a 72-kilometer stretch, including the China-Nepal border. Thousands of people, reports say, are dead; several more missing. Numerous homes have been entirely washed away. UN Women reports suggest that 157,050 (as of early September) women and girls in just two regions of Rasuwa and Nuwakot have been affected, with more than 40,000 requiring critical humanitarian assistance.
Nepalese Women’s Tragedy Spills Beyond the Floods
The 1800-kilometer open border with India – with no prerequisite passport for Nepali or Indian citizens to cross – has served as the single most tragic corridor for sex trafficking in the world. While there is no accurate data to support the number of victims, with UN figures estimating around 7000, it is clear where the journey ends for these women: Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Pune and beyond. Nepalese women are bought, sold and confined along with women trafficked from Bangladesh and India’s north-eastern states.
The scale of India’s sex trade exploitation engulfing countless women with little to no scrutiny can’t be possibly overstated. India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development, more than a decade ago, estimated some 2.5 million prostituted women held in about 300,000 brothels in 1,100 red-light regions in the country. These statistics were from a while ago, and the numbers ought to have been modest at best even at the time of publication. As always, women are bound by advance debts to their brothel keepers, who exploit them for decades in the name of “repayment.”
Earthquake in 2015 Led to the Rise of Trafficking by 15%
Nepal is an old hand when it comes to experiments such as these. After the 2015 disaster that killed about 9000 people and left over two million homeless, the National Human Rights Commission of Nepal confirmed that sex trafficking rates rose by an estimated 15% in the aftermath. From 33 cases in 2014, to 336 in 2015, and 501 in 2016, the border security confirmed that trafficking cases into India had risen by 500% since 2013. Indian authorities managed to rescue about 160 trafficked women from Nepal in the months following the quake. Researchers have also estimated that about 28,000 women were left freshly vulnerable to violence, including trafficking, due to the disaster.
The pattern is predictable: traffickers move rapidly into homes without a parent, without source of income by offering cash, fake promises of paid work, and even marriage proposals. Many have fallen victim to the grooming owing to the horrifying conditions of their lives. Young girls orphaned by any natural disaster tend to be named as a target group that warrant protection. While the reality is that before any actions could be taken, significant damage has already been done. Given this pattern, 2026 floods are about to be no different. Especially given that the two districts – Raduwa and Nuwakot – are considerably poorer, remote and have poor access, the exploitation could be much worse.
The Skin They Live in
Not much is spoken about the trafficking of women for their skin tissue. Stuff straight out of Netflix top 10 Crime Series, only this trade has been so normalised, it barely ever gets a news mention, let alone a TV series. A 2017 investigation revealed documented examples of Nepalese women being trafficked into India, later drugged and have their bodies cut and approximately twenty square inches of skin removed from their backs, and sold for $150. They then go to pathology labs that produce/supply skin and tissue products to the global cosmetic surgery market.
Women from Tamang, Rai and Thakuri communities have been known specifically as targets for this exploitation because of a skin tone deemed desirable for grafting. Here too, the pattern is heavily dependent on vulnerabilities like poverty, displacement, improper or non-existent paperwork, and sits adjacent to prostitution and forced labour. But somehow, this horrid practice falls outside of the rudimentary, and ineffective legal framework put together by the respective governments to combat the former two.
Undocumented and Uncared for
Even when humanitarian agencies have seen this pattern unravel time and again, they have failed to build a system to prevent it from happening, or at the very least, have some framework to mitigate the damage. Instead, the International Organisation for Migration’s 2015 review of trafficking during disasters – including that of Nepal – proved that trafficking is not just worsened by the crisis, but is a direct result of it. They’ve compared this with the likes of infrastructural collapse, food shortages; yet, it is treated as a secondary concern, if that. As opposed to a dire one requiring immediate action. The 2018 review presented by the Global Protection Cluster’s Anti Trafficking Task Team also found that trafficking prevention was almost always absent from formal humanitarian planning documents entirely.
This could just as well be one of the best-documented failures of crisis response – repeated after tsunami, Typhoon Haiyan, Nepal’s own earthquake, and now being flagged again during the floods, briefing after briefing. Just that, the funding required to meet the anticipated damage was never met, despite warnings. UN Women’s current appeal seeks two million dollars to reach about 160,000 women and girls. An amount that couldn’t possibly be enough for registration, tracing and community-based monitoring needed to fill the gap the traffickers keep stretching every day.
So many families in two districts have lost their homes, their records and in countless cases, their families. Somewhere in Mumbai or Kolkata, a broker or a pimp is already aware of this potential for exploitation. Nuwakot’s girls have been trafficked several times before – be it into brothels or the skin trade – and nothing in the current disaster response guarantees that more women won’t be trafficked again.
The floods may eventually recede, but the pipeline is going to take a lifetime – if ever – to close. And before we know it, we might be affected by another disaster, and the cycle tragically continues for Nepalese women and girls. From their bodies, to the very skin, nothing seems out of bounds for a cruel system that feeds on the vulnerable.