The Overseas Report Wednesday 28 July 2021
by Mike Evans
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
– Nelson Mandela
The Covid pandemic has been responsible for so many things but in a report from the organisation- Save the Children, the latest thing is that the pandemic has been responsible for pushing Child traffickers online and out of sight.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed child traffickers indoors and online in Europe, Save the Children said today, making it harder to track down the criminal gangs forcing their victims into prostitution, to smuggle drugs or into forced labour.
Save the Children’s 11th edition of the report Little Invisible Slaves, focusing on child victims of trafficking, found the COVID-19 crisis had made victims less visible and traceable as criminal networks shifted their work off the streets.
Children and teenagers were particularly at risk of becoming victims of e-trafficking due to a combination of poverty, the closing of schools, and an increase of time spent online.
The report found that Western and Southern Europe had the highest number of confirmed cases of child trafficking globally, with 4,168 child victims.Followed by South Asia (3,447), Sub-Saharan Africa (2,833), North America (2,370), East Asia and the Pacific (1,845), Central and Southeast Europe (459) and other regions.
In Italy, about 5% of 2,040 trafficking cases that were registered in 2020 involved a child, while about 80% of all cases involved women and girls. Most of the reports of child victims involved sexual exploitation in relation to teenagers from Tunisia (27.5%), followed by Ivory Coast, Guinea and Egypt.
Particularly worrying was the rise in trafficked women with children returned to Italy from other EU countries under the Dublin Regulation which gives powers to transfer refugees and migrants back to the EU nation in which they arrived, Save the Children said. The number of cases involving families rose to 12% last year from 6% in 2016 with most of the women from Nigeria.
Girls and boys, sometimes born out of abuse, witness violence against their often young mothers and could be at risk of violence themselves, or used in blackmail to keep their mothers under control. Some 190 women with 226 children are currently supported in the Italian protection system.
“These are often children of single girls who have been deceived, sold, kidnapped, and who have suffered torture and rape on their way to Europe. The children are often prisoners as well, along with their mothers. They are trapped in a cycle of violence, blackmail and abuse that must be broken at all costs. It is vital to strengthen and support services to help these women escape and to guarantee health, education, protection and inclusion for their children”, said Raffaela Milano, Save the Children’s Europe Programme Director in Italy.
Globally more than one in three victims confirmed of trafficking (34%) is child, mostly girls. Of the 50,000 victims in court cases between 2016-2018 including 16,217 were minors (9,127 girls, 7,090 boys) according to the Global Report 2020 on Trafficking in Persons – a percentage that has more than tripled over the past 15 years. In some low-income regions, around half of victims are children. Girls are mainly trafficked for sexual exploitation (72%) while boys are mostly trafficked to work (66%).
Save the Children’s report Little Invisible Slaves – Out of the shadows: the suspended lives of the children born of victims of exploitation, released on the eve of the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, analysed the situation of girls, boys, young victims or potential victims of trafficking and exploitation in Italy, in Europe and globally.
Save the Children said the numbers are most likely just the tip of the iceberg as they only show registered cases and the trafficking market may be changing but shows no sign of diminishing.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 50,000 confirmed human trafficking victims in 2018 across the world, a number that is likely to have risen on the back of the COVID crisis that has pushed an additional 142 million children and adolescents into poverty in 2020. According to estimates in Save the Children’s The Global Girlhood Report 2020, due to the economic impact of COVID-19, some 500,000 more girls in the world could be forced into marriage. In addition, it could lead to one million more early pregnancies, the main cause of death for girls between 15 and 19 years old, and 2 million more cases of female genital mutilation in the next 10 years, especially among girls under 14.
At the peak of the pandemic, some 1.6 billion children were out of school, increasing the risk of them falling victim to trafficking or sexual exploitation, forced marriages or early pregnancies.
According to Europol, technology has expanded the capacity of criminal networks, both in the countries of origin and in those of transit and destination. Through technology, they can use encrypted communications, avoid direct interaction with recruited victims, avoid coming across police, and have access to GPS-based apps. Save the Children said there was insufficient commitment from governments to monitor, prevent and fight child trafficking.
“The pandemic has hindered the direct contact of anti-trafficking organisations with victims or potential victims, which, in addition to the general economic vulnerability, has increased the risk of trafficking for a large number of young victims”, explained Ms Milano. “The limitations caused by the pandemic have been transformed into opportunities by traffickers, who are using technologies and resources of the online network to consolidate their terrible system of human trafficking.
The situation is not just happening on the shores of Europe. In India there are many stories of child trafficking during the pandemic.
Dilbar was on his way to Delhi along with 16 other children from West Bengal in August 2020 when some activists spotted them in Bihar and sounded out the authorities about a possible case of child trafficking. When the train stopped at Delhi’s Anand Vihar station, the police and members of a child rights foundation were waiting to rescue them. This wasn’t the young boy’s first trip to Delhi for work. The 11-year-old had worked in a sewing factory for six months before he had to return due to the Covid-19 induced lockdown in March. “My uncle got me a ticket in August,” said Dilbar who has been living in Mukti Ashram, a short-term rehabilitation centre run by Bachan Bachao Andolan for rescued boys in Burari on the outskirts of the national capital Delhi. His uncle faces prosecution under the child labour law.
Data compiled by Bachan Bachao Andolan (BBA), the non-profit founded by Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, indicates that Dilbar is among the 9,000 children who were rescued when they were being trafficked for labour between April 2020 and June 2021 as the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the country. At 3,183, the largest number of children were rescued in Uttar Pradesh, followed next by Telangana (2,805), Andhra Pradesh (593), Rajasthan (430) and Gujarat (333).
Child rights activists, and even the Union home ministry, have warned about a possible increase in instances of child trafficking after the country started emerging from the national lockdown in June and July last year. The BBA had then underscored that there would be greater demand for child labour because factory owners will look to cover their financial losses by employing cheap labour.
BBA executive director Dhananjay Tingal said the assessment wasn’t off the mark. “Last time, even when the modes of transport were limited, (still) children continued to be trafficked,” he said, adding that there was a substantial increase in the number of distress calls received by the foundation.
To be sure, the foundation started getting SOS messages within weeks of the national lockdown imposed in March 2020. “In many places, the children were left without any food or work.” Experts have pointed out how systems designed to help children failed to keep up with the alarming spread of Covid-19; the economic situation pushed many into destitution.
There were also reports of an increase in child abuse and trafficking during the Covid-19 lockdown. Enakshi Ganguly, the co-founder of child right’s organization HAQ, said no one had done a systematic study but there was some evidence to indicate an increase in the vulnerability of children, with a rise in school dropout rates and an increase in child labour.
The study by the Campaign Against Child Labour in states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan shows very clearly that there is an increase in child labour. “They found that it was a combination of not having schools, devices and economic distress that led children to drop out of school and venture into child labour. The connection between child labour and child trafficking is a very thin line. There is no reason to believe not an increase in trafficking. An increase in vulnerability creates a situation where children are bought and sold.”
The National Crime Records Bureau hasn’t released official statistics for 2020. The 2019 report, however, counted a 2.8% increase in cases from 2,837 in 2018 to 2,914 in 2019. The total number of persons trafficked in 2019 was 6,616.
Tingal said when the lockdown was lifted in August, the foundation did notice a trend of children travelling in trains meant for migrants and even in buses. “The major mode of transport was buses,” he said. “From August to October, there was a sharp increase in the number of children travelling without parents or guardians in these, it was then we realized that they were being trafficked. We rescued nearly 400 children during this period and nearly 100 traffickers were arrested.”
It is in this context that the government is expected to again introduce a bill targeted to deal with trafficking during the monsoon session. The draft bill has specific provisions to prosecute traffickers and those who help them such as Dilbar’s uncle. It proposes seven to 10 years of jail and up to ₹5 lakh fine for those convicted. There is also a provision to enable the National Investigation Agency to investigate trafficking cases.
Ganguly of HAQ said strengthening social structures was the only way to stop child trafficking rather than more punitive laws and penal reforms.
As cases start to fall we can but hope that this will help see the end to this abuse of children across the world.
Until the next time Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 194,608,216
Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,188,802
Total Recovered Worldwide – 177,440,443
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 14,050,024 (7.2% of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 181,629,245
Information and resources:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.savethechildren.org/
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/delhi-news/over-9k-children-trafficked-during-pandemic-report-101627244144138.html