Gurung relates the case of 17 year old Kamla Sherpa (not her real name). Her case is representative of something he has seen countless times before, he explains, with minor variations of a common theme.

Five years ago, Kamla met a man who lavished her with gifts and sweet talk. Evolving into a love affair, they fled Kamla's disapproving family to Kathmandu where they lived together for three months.

Unknown to Kamla at the time, her new husband was a pimp whose profession was luring girls into prostitution. During an excursion supposedly to a famous temple in Nepal, Kamla was slipped a drug in a glass of soda. The destination should have been three hours away. Instead, the trip took three days by the time they arrived at a brothel in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay), India.

The brothel owner, posing as the husband's Aunt, left with Kamla to purchase some new clothes. Once separated from her husband, the "Aunt" revealed to Kamla that she had just been sold for 40,000 rupees (US $540 - a fortune by Nepali standards), which must be paid back to the brothel in "flesh."

At first, Kamla refused, so she was beaten and starved. Many new abductees are also gang raped during this "breaking in" period. Kamla gave in three days later and was given a tip of ten rupees (US $0.15) for it being her first time by a 40 year old man. She was just 14 years old.

For the next three years she lived in prison-like conditions - tortured, intimidated, and never allowed to venture beyond the watchful sight of her captors. She was forced to have sex (generally unprotected) with 5-30 clients a day - Indian, Middle Eastern, Western, and even Nepali men. Some returnees from the brothels even report seeing male relatives and acquaintances soliciting the red-light district.

Luckily, Indian police rescued Kamla in a raid and was eventually returned to Nepal.

A Global Human Rights Epidemic

Through a criminal network comprised of organized crime, the business sector, government officials, police, and community leaders, women and children are kidnapped or lured into the hands of brothels where they are sold and bonded virtually for life. A development agency report on girl trafficking in Nepal states that even though the girls "are told that to win back their freedom, they must first reimburse the [brothel owner] for the purchase price, plus interest… this is virtually impossible to do since much of the money they earn is used to cover their food, electricity, rent, and medical bills. In other words, they end up paying for many of the expenses associated with staying at the brothel…. Instead of gradually reducing the principle amount, after a year of working within a brothel, many girls often find themselves becoming even more in dept than they were when they first began."

Sexual slavery of this kind violates a wide range of human rights. Even the youngest of girls are systematically raped, tortured, and slowly murdered as a result of diseases like AIDS, Hepatitis B, and Tuberculosis (TB). In Mumbai, upwards of 80% of all prostitutes are HIV positive and 50% have two or more sexually transmitted diseases. Making matters worse, those lucky enough to escape this fate may be shunned by their communities and families upon their return.

Girl Trafficking in Nepal

Nevertheless, the trafficking of women and girls largely follows the course of the rivers of the Himalaya: out of the country. Every year, an estimated export of 5,000-7,000 females to India, ages ranging from 7 to 24 - 16 on average - has created a population in Indian brothels of 200,000 Nepali commercial sex workers (CSWs). Other major destination countries are in the gulf region.

The origin of Nepal's current situation is unclear, but generally traced back to several compounding factors during the mid-1900s. The political state of affairs of the region during this time was tumultuous. India gained independence, and Tibet lost it. This created an increased labor demand within India paralleled by an increase in demand for prostitutes. In addition, an influx of Tibetan refugees into Nepal married Nepali women in order to gain the citizenship they needed to immigrate to India to do business. However, the Tibetan men were later deported as security risks during the outbreak of the Indo-China war, often leaving behind their wives. Similarly, the ousted Rama Regime of Nepal entered India around this time with its substantial retinue of Nepali girl servants. Certain Nepali ethnicities, such as the Tamang, have a high "sex appeal" to Indians because of their distinct Mongoloid features. These factors paved the way for the sexual exploitation of the Nepali women as domestic servants and prostitutes. Gradually, these women, and others, returned to Nepal in order to traffic new girls. The traffic-prone areas were initially confined to a few districts, but has since swelled to the extent that no section of Nepal is immune to trafficking opportunists.

Although Nepal has outlawed the practice of trafficking since 1964, serious government commitment to deal with the issue has yet to materialize. Quite the contrary, political capital is often used for the benefit of alleged or convicted traffickers. The development agency report states that brothel owners "use part of their revenues to bribe police officers and politicians as well as to make campaign contributions." "Organized criminals also receive money for preventing police officers from intervening with the traffic. As well as accepting monetary bribes, policemen typically frequent the brothels themselves in exchange for not arresting brothel-keepers."

Such evident corruption and even collaboration with traffickers on the part of the criminal justice and political systems have produced several instances of notorious brothel owners escaping punishment by charges being dropped, sentences drastically reduced, or receiving a slap on the wrist with release on bail.

Even when justice is served, the law allows for a maximum of 19 years in prison regardless of the number of girls trafficked, and those without the wealth necessary for political assistance, the small time traffickers, are the likely recipients of such punishment. The misuse of power by politicians, coupled with lax laws and the inadequate resources and outright corruption of the criminal justice system has exacerbated the crisis and frustrated activists.

A Non-Governmental Organization Filling the Void of Government Commitment

Maiti, along with other NGOs in the region like ABC Nepal and Perana (India), has a simple vision: a society free of girl trafficking. However, the manifold undertakings of Maiti reflect the complexity of the flesh trade. When a girl like Kamla finds herself liberated and returned to Nepal, she may be traumatized, diseased and penniless. To provide shelter for safe passage, Maiti has established five "transit homes" along traffic-prone areas of the border. For up to two months, the homes provide food, lodging, counseling and medical checkups. When appropriate, the families of returnees are identified and the girls are escorted to their villages where Maiti provides family counseling to facilitate assimilation.

Maiti uses the "participant approach" throughout the process whereby returnees from the brothels are trained and mobilized to run the transit home programs. The returnees are the experts, says Gurung, because they have gone through the ordeal themselves.

Similarly, the girl volunteers monitor the border trafficking routes during all hours of the day to intercept potential victims, and identify and apprehend traffickers with the help of the police. Maiti's vigilance has paid off. 808 girls were intercepted between 1997 and 2000. During this same time, with the cooperation of Indian authorities and other NGOs in India, including Maiti's Mumbai branch, 284 girls have been rescued from the brothels, with 208 of them reintegrated with their families and another 35 rehabilitated to independence.

Reunification is not always appropriate because of the stigma placed on a former prostitute by the community, or possibly because the families had abandoned their children to the streets or did not interfere with the trafficking of them. However, as Gurung relates, it is often difficult to know with certainty of families' implication in the transaction, because often times the pimps pose as agents of "good jobs" in the city such as carpet manufacturing. If the girl is unaware that the family had been tricked, she may accuse them of selling her into prostitution.

Maiti operates other facilities for those who require additional assistance. The Rehabilitation and Crisis Center in Kathmandu provides a safe, nurturing environment for ongoing psychiatric counseling, medical care, and family searches. Sponsors are found for the girls to attend school, and older women to whom school is not an option are provided a non-formal education. Those dying of AIDS and TB - sometimes the children of returnees - are accepted at a hospice in another city where they can have a peaceful and dignified death.

The Cause?

Gurung himself is hesitant to comment on certain theories. Instead he first explains the dangers of this process. The formation of broad assumptions about the root cause of trafficking have serious implications for how the issue is approached by policy makers. Take, for example, the economic perspective:

For the trafficking circle, the venture of trafficking is highly lucrative. The development agency report estimates that if "there are 200,000 [CSWs] working in Mumbai providing ten 'tricks' a day, at $2.00 per trick, times 320 days per year (these are all very conservative estimates -- the numbers are probably much higher), the amount in revenue generated is a staggering $1.28 billion dollars a year."

At the same time, the annual per capita income in Nepal is a mere $210, making Nepal one of the poorest countries in the world. For families that may barely subsist in such poverty, the brothel may provide a substantial source of income assistance. The girls, out of a sense of obligation to their families coupled with the limited opportunities for women in Nepali society, may freely enter into the commercial sex trade.

However, these claims may muddle the issue as it leaves to interpretation whether the girls or families are willing participants throughout the trafficking process. In a speech to elected officials, the founder and director of Maiti, Anuradha Koirala, is adamant. "Nobody willingly prostitutes. Some have been tricked with jobs abroad and some have been lured, some are fake marriaged, and then sold, but none have desired to join the brothels."

While this may not be absolutely true, her point is clear: focusing on the economic factors distorts the picture and provides room for those biased against CSWs to discredit or diminish the efforts to combat trafficking. Consider the AIDS epidemic in the United States: while it may be true that the gay population has been especially affected, that fact can be distorted by individuals with even the slightest bias against homosexuals into the belief that AIDS is a "gay man's disease" of little consequence to the majority, thus dissolving political will to address the reality of the situation.

A prostitute undeniably wears a scarlet letter which can numb public opinion to the true horrors of trafficking. A case in Toronto, Canada, where 22 women from Thailand and Malaysia where rescued from an inconspicuous basement-operated brothel illustrated this tenuous sense of empathy when the women were "exposed" as morally base accomplices of the crime. Days after the rescue, a police wiretap caught the women boasting to people back home about the amount of money they were making by plying their trade. The public swiftly denounced the women for "freely" selling their bodies, and charges were filed against them. However, as Michele Landsberg in a Toronto Star editorial wrote, even if some girls willingly choose to become a CSW, no one chooses to be caged in a brothel, and treated as slave labor subject to harassment, torture, and rape.

Furthermore, there is data which casts doubt on a direct link between trafficking and economic factors like poverty and employment needs. First, there is no correlation between the level of the socio-economic situation of any given area in Nepal and the incidence of trafficking. Similarly, the poorest caste in Nepal, the Musar, has not been found to have a single case of girl trafficking. Gurung explains that "even the 'rag pickers'," or street beggars, "never say that they are so poor to sell there own daughters."

Indirectly however, poverty may play a role: 90% of the girls who have returned form the brothels are illiterate. These young girls are "innocent and do not know what happens outside their village," says Gurung. "They have no link to what is going on," he says, making them an "easy target" for traffickers.

While this may make the trafficker's job easier, a low literacy rate in Nepal for girls guarantees a high percentage of illiterate girls will be victims. Regardless, educated middle class girls still end up in the brothels. Gurung proposes that the focus for blame should first rest on the traffickers directly, by condemning the act of trafficking as a vicious act that takes advantage of vulnerability attributed to poverty. The chain of accomplices which play a role throughout the process of luring the girls must be held culpable for the human rights violations of those girls. Trafficking must be recognized as a crime, Gurung insists.

Beyond that, the unsophisticated question of a child may shed some light: "Can human beings be sold?" Perhaps the answer is "Yes," if they are not valued as human beings but as objects.

Women face pervasive discrimination within Nepali society, stresses Gurung, and women do not have the same legal rights and property rights as men because they are not considered to be equal. Gurung demonstrates the traditional thinking common in rural villages (the origin of 80% of trafficking victims) in the sayings, "Women have brains in their knees," and "Women and children have to be kicked when they don't behave properly to teach them a lesson."

Matthew Friedman, an expert and author of several books on the subject of trafficking explains that, "when a boy is born in Nepal, everyone celebrates. When a girl is born, there is often sorrow." "Girls are often considered a burden," because of cultural practices such as dowry payment required by the bride's family during marriage. "Many families don't want to invest in their daughters because it is like 'watering someone else's garden'," because the girls will leave their family once married. On the other hand, says Friedman, "Boys are needed to take care of parents, light the funeral pile, and to carry on the family name," making sons the essential caretakers of their past ancestors and future progeny.

Thus a family will worry for a missing son, doing everything possible for his return, but a missing daughter will result in much less of a stir. The perception that girls are dispensable, secondary, and in some cases worthless, "allows people to feel like it isn't such a big deal if their life is taken away from them. Likewise, in the absence of rights (or rather equal rights) under the law, most girls find it hard to use the legal system to protect themselves," explains Friedman. This discrimination causes people to think things like "what is the big deal if she gets trafficked? She is only a girl," he says.

The Cure?

With the conviction that "Prevention is better than a cure," Maiti has established three "prevention homes" where girls who are at a high risk of being trafficked are brought and housed for up to six months. They are trained about the threat of trafficking, and how to avoid it, which they then take back to the villages in public awareness campaigns.

Moreover, women and girls in these homes, as well as in the Kathmandu Rehabilitation and Crisis Center, are provided vocational training in making handicrafts, sewing, and fabric painting. With their skills, the women are empowered to stand on their own feet. Maiti also created a "micro credit fund" for the purpose of assisting women to establish their own business by providing small loans. More than 50 street shops have been started in this manner. These services are open not only to victims of trafficking or high risk individuals, but also to the women and children in the community at large.

Perhaps the most tragic fact of the flesh trade is that the girls who are deemed the most "high risk" have a sister or other relative who has already been sold to the brothels. Because the girls are indentured at an early age into the commercial sex industry, they may grow up to own a brothel and actually contribute to the perpetuation of the cycles of abuse by becoming a trafficker themselves.

Andrew Levine, who directed and produced a film documentary about trafficking in Nepal, had a personal encounter with this irony. "We interviewed a 17 year old girl named Chanda who at the time recently returned to Nepal from the brothels of Bombay," explains Levine. "She like many had scars from cigarette burns and acid marks left from the tortures she endured. To say the least she had become hardened by that life…. During our time with her during a two-day period we got to know her a bit and what she went through.

"Our time in Nepal came to a close and we returned back to the U.S. A few months later we learned that this wonderful young girl was brought up on charges of trafficking.

"I couldn't understand how it was possible. My first thought was that she was being set up some how. I later came to learn that the case of Chanda is not a rare case, but rather it occurs quite [sp.] often. It still didn't make sense to me that, after all this young girl went through, that she would send other young girls to there doom so to speak.

"Imagine however that you are a fifteen year old girl that was sold and hardened by brothel life for a few years. Some how she escapes and makes it back to her small village in Nepal. When she arrives back to her village instead of hugs and kisses the villagers, and possibly her family, kick her out because she was a prostitute who most likely has HIV/AIDS. Where does she go, what does she do? She has no education, so many of them get back into the business, because it is the only thing they know. To say the least it is a viscous cycle."

In an issue where the line between victim and criminal may blur, the victories of the war to end the flesh trade similarly have the shade of defeat. Gurung reports that usually two groups of returnees step foot back on Nepali soil every month, the most at one time was a group of 28 girls. Are these figures a cause to celebrate, or a sardonic reminder of the depth of an abysmal problem?

If it's the latter, Maiti remains undaunted. In the short period of time since Maiti has led the charge, since 1994, several successes have sustained activists. Bishwo Khadka, Deputy Director of Maiti, sites five positive changes, each following years of governmental lobbying and public awareness campaigns, which suggest a slow but optimistic move in the right direction:

• The government, after years of considering returnees as the HIV/AIDS-infected waste of India, finally relented to a coalition of seven NGOs, including Maiti, to establish a government operated "Women's Self Reliance Center" to reintegrate returnees into Nepal.
• The issue of girl trafficking had been introduced for the first time into schools as a regular part of the 10th grade curriculum.
• Originally, Nepali females trafficked to the gulf regions needed visas, which could be acquired from neighboring Bangladesh. The government of Bangladesh ceased supplying the visas after pressure from the Nepali government and NGOs.
• In the year 2000, a convicted trafficker received a 90-year prison sentence - much more than the law allows - from an enlightened judge. This verdict, inconceivable years ago, astounded activists and returnees.
• The issue has garnered domestic and international attention from the media, policy makers like American Senator Sam Brownback, and dignitaries like England's Prince Charles.
• While these victories are hopeful, they are but the first fledgling steps of realizing Maiti's vision, says Khadka. For instance, very few girls make it as high as 10th grade, so the lessons will largely fail to reach those who will be the target of the crime, he explains. "Next we will try for 9th grade, then 8th grade, and so on," adds Gurung.

The Role of the World

Friedman agrees. The United States especially has the capacity to focus the spotlight on areas of the world and bring disparate parties together. "Letters to politically elected representatives indicating that the US/UN needs to address this problem will keep [girl-trafficking] in the forefront," he says.

In fact, the issue has caught the attention of the United States Congress because, like Canada, the US is not immune to the trafficking industry. A CIA analysis of the international trafficking of women into the US estimates that 50,000 women and children are brought to the US each year and forced to work as prostitutes or as domestic servants with intimidation, rape and violence used to prevent them from getting help. House Resolution 3225, "Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000," (Sen. Chris Smith - New Jersey) enacted into law last year, was a comprehensive bill with bipartisan support that will provide "new tools that will strengthen the US Government's efforts to put traffickers behind bars and help trafficking victims to put their lives back together and others worldwide who are providing critical assistance to victims of trafficking," says Friedman.

The law also creates a monitoring system for Congress to evaluate the progress of foreign countries in their fight against trafficking. The bill also entails punitive measures for countries which consistently ignore, or whose officials even take part in, trafficking within their own borders by giving the President the authority to deny any non-humanitarian foreign assistance.

Individual citizens can participate in the war against the flesh trade by simply talking about the issue with friends and family, says Friedman. They can also financially contribute to the NGOs working on the issue. " There are many excellent organizations out there that lack funding," he says, and "any donations would he appreciated." Of Maiti Nepal, Friedman feels that they do "excellent work," and relative to other organizations, he thinks they are "very effective."

Levine agrees. "The organization that is doing the most for child trafficking in Nepal is hands down Maiti Nepal…. There are other good [organizations], but they are not doing as much as Maiti."

More information about trafficking in Nepal and the efforts of Maiti can be found at Maiti Nepal's website at maitinepal.org. For information about girl trafficking in the global context, visit www.captivedaughters.org. To watch the ten-minute expose version of Andrew Levine's documentary narrated by Winona Ryder, titled "The Price of Youth," visit www.witness.org. The shooting of the hour-long version was finished recently and could be ready for distribution by late fall.

In our own way, let's all raise the call of Maiti: "To see a society free of girl trafficking."