Women and girls dwelling in delicate surroundings across the globe are aspiring to do something for the betterment of themselves and their families. Lamentably, for many of them, these dreams never turn into reality. With hopes of getting a well-paid job and freedom from their miserable financial and social conditions, countless women and girls fall into the trap of frauds and are often exploited and abused.
Particularly, women residing in rural areas are often drafted into the gulf countries and neighboring India as semi-skilled laborers because of the absence of attractive employment opportunities and economic disparities back at home. Conflict, violence, poverty, limited access to education, and gender disparity drive these girls and young women to choose such uncertain and dangerous migration pathways. This has led to Cross-border human trafficking. International, internal trafficking of women, men, and children for multiple purposes, including sexual exploitation and forced labor, has become an alarming problem in Nepal.
With the notion of protecting Nepali women against the possible threat of trafficking, the Department of immigration has recently prepared a draft amendment to the Immigration Procedure of 2065 BS, which suggested that women under the age of 40 proceeding to African and Gulf nations for the first time and having no relatives in the destination country would need to procure a recommendation letter of the local level authorities and a letter of approval from their family. Every policy has seen and unseen consequences. Likewise, though it looks like the government is trying to safeguard the women from pervasive human traffickers, this approach may induce several unintended consequences by opening doors for more persecutions and exploitations.
The proposal of such a law amendment clearly raises the question about women’s individual freedom and ability to make their own decisions. Restraining women’s freedom of movement is a direct violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which elucidates that everyone has the right to leave any country, including their own, and return to their country. Besides, this discriminatory proposal is unconstitutional as the constitution of Nepal 2015 ensures equal rights to men and women on freedom of mobility.
The government of Nepal put in place broad confinements on female mobility throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Though such policies were implemented as protective measures against female migrant workers’ exploitation, qualitative researches have shown that the migration bans have not stopped women or girls from migrating. Instead, female migrant workers were lured into risky and illegal migration pathways to go aboard, leading to rampant black marketing of such migration services. A ban on work in the Gulf pushed women desperate for work to migrate through irregular channels and put them at higher risk of trafficking and exploitation.
Incidents of women being harassed and questioned by immigrants officers while traveling abroad is not a new thing in Nepal. However, this time, government intervention has gone too far by drafting a legal provision to attack women’s autonomy. It’s obvious that these unnecessary hassles of the governmental process will only add up to the mental stress that the women have to endure while traveling.
On the other hand, a significant number of male Nepali workers have been working as forced laborers or debt bondage, living in enslavement in the gulf countries due to fraudulent employment promises. Nepali men and boys are oppressed in the Middle East in sectors such as construction, agriculture, and domestic subjugation. Just because there are a larger number of female victims doesn’t mean that there is no issue for male workers. Accordingly, applying such a proposition only towards women makes no sense at all.
Nonetheless, traffickers use the open border to traffic Nepali girls and women to India and smuggle them into the Southeastern and Gulf nations. Hence, trafficking persists as a big challenge for the country. It seems that the government is trying to disguise its incompetency to restrain human trafficking by taking away the already limited liberty of women in the name of safeguarding them. Regressive rules and limitations on our freedom are not what the citizens asked for when we asked the system to guarantee our safety.
First and foremost, it is crucial to recognize the complexity of the problem we are trying to address here in order to tackle human trafficking and prosecute the traffickers. Female education and empowerment should be promoted in the country so that girls become less vulnerable to trafficking. Entrepreneurship and business programs should be emphasized to women to make them able to stand on their own feet. Thereupon traffickers can’t lure them with promises of employment, education, and a better life.
Nepal’s government should work to improve the competency of migrant workers to monitor recruitment agencies rigorously. Instead of applying blanket restrictions on young women, the government should ensure that migrant women know where to get help if they need it. Nepali embassies in the Gulf countries are often criticized for not empathizing with the overseas worker in distress. The embassies should be made responsible and accountable towards their citizens in order to mitigate the rampant exploitation of workers in the Gulf countries.
We cannot let ourselves overlook the issue of trafficking by considering that it can be stopped with a few extra approaches. We need to make everyone conscious about how it affects them and what they should do from their side to put an end to it. Thus, implying rules on women to protect women isn’t acceptable at all. Traffickers are the problem, not the people who are susceptible to trafficking.
