UNIFEM’s Anti-Human Trafficking Prevention Programme

[Guest guest]

UNIFEM's Anti-Human Trafficking Prevention Programme.

Dear Members,

Trafficking in persons for forced labour, commercial sexual exploitation and

other illegal purposes (e.g. domestic servitude, bonded labour, begging, organ

transplant, pornography, camel jockey, etc) is a gross form of human rights

violation.

(For what `trafficking in person means' and the UN Protocol to prevent suppress

and punish trafficking in persons, please access

http://www.uncjin.org/Documents/Conventions/dcatoc/final_documents_2/convention_\

traff_eng.pdf)

Human trafficking is recognized as a systematic complex phenomenon, involving

the interplay of several contributing factors and vulnerabilities that are

created by socio-economic, cultural and in some cases, political issues.

Women and young girls fall an easy prey to traffickers as they have a greater

tendency to face exclusion and discrimination, have fewer means to avoid abusive

situations, have inadequate access to skill enhancement and employment

opportunities, and have marginalized access to justice and other resources for

redress.

India is a `source', `transit' and a `destination' country for human

trafficking. 90% of India 's trafficking is internal.

According to a report of the National Commission for Women

(http://www.deccanherald.com/content/28628/many-districts-india-affected-women.h\

tml), at least half of the 612 districts in the country are affected by

trafficking of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation.

In the Indian context, anti-trafficking initiatives implemented on a substantial

scale, have tended to focus on rescue, prosecution and law enforcement; thus

addressing the problem primarily from the criminal justice perspective.

UNIFEM is on the verge of initiating an anti-human trafficking prevention

programme entitled, " To support the Government of India 's efforts to stop

trafficking in women and girls through community action at the Panchayat Level

in partnership with the National Commission for Women " .

The following are some relevant details of the programme:

• UNIFEM is the only UN agency with a mandate exclusively devoted for women's

empowerment, gender equality and eliminating violence against women. This gives

it a comparative advantage to put women's issues in the forefront; share its

knowledge and expertise with the government and the civil society for ensuring

women's human rights and safe livelihood opportunities.

• UNIFEM possesses and can mobilize the technical capacity to encourage national

and state governments to ensure adequate availability of alternatives for

victim's safety and protection and for the designing and rolling out of

community-based models for prevention and redress.

• UNIFEM's anti-trafficking efforts across the country have covered a wide

spectrum of interventions. These include better implementation of

anti-trafficking laws and coordination in rescue and rehabilitation of the

victims, enhancing capacities to ensure minimum standards of care and support in

the institutional set-ups, improving mechanisms of return/reintegration of

victims of trafficking, strengthening interventions to prevent recurrence of

trafficking and trafficking of second-generation individuals.

• The programme will result in a holistic and comprehensive community based

prevention model by sensitizing and empowering the communities as well as local

governance structures to adopt the human rights approach to claim their

entitlements, to participate and to take on the onus of prevention of violence

and reduction of vulnerability to trafficking in the source areas. It will

create opportunities and enhance the capacities of survivors, and vulnerable

women and young girls to undertake sustainable livelihoods.

The overarching goal of UNIFEM's programme is that by 2015, the Government of

India's efforts at creating institutionalized care and support structures for

rehabilitation as well as prevention mechanisms to stop trafficking at the

source districts get supported and enhanced through community action at the

village level.

The programme will create a strong gender responsive, human rights based

anti-trafficking community based prevention programme in the three operational

states - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal (to be replicated in six other

states of the country later) -thereby ensuring a reduction in the number of

trafficked victims from these contiguous source areas.

The programme further aims to create three sustainable community-owned centres

of action against trafficking and HIV and AIDS at the Panchayat level.

The survivors of trafficking along with at-risk population where women (and

girls) would exert their rights through an organic oneness would govern these

centres supported through common property resources. The centres are also

expected to be result oriented learning centres for the skills development of

survivors of trafficking, People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and vulnerable

women and girls for strengthening of their psychosocial needs, development of

their entrepreneurship abilities and fostering of their sustainable livelihood.

In the light of the above, I would like to request Gender Community members for

their inputs to the following:

• Please give ideas on strategies that UNIFEM may adopt to demonstrate that

women centred local governance can result in reduction of trafficking from

source areas

• Please also share with us any research studies, case documentation, and good

emerging practices that could inform UNIFEM's implementation plan of such a

programme (focusing on strengthening of psycho-social life skills, development

of entrepreneurship abilities and employability, fostering of sustainable

livelihood for survivors of trafficking, PLWHA and vulnerable women and girls)

UNIFEM would be implementing its programme in partnership with the local

Panchayats and the National Commission for Women along with its State

counterparts. Through this discussion, we look forward to receiving specific

inputs from the esteemed members of the Gender Community , which would enable us

to develop the operational guidelines and implementation plan of this programme.

UNIFEM would duly acknowledge the contributions of the community members.

Anne F Stenhammer

UNIFEM - South Asia Regional Office (SARO)

(Part of UN Women)

New Delhi

South Asia Sub-Regional Office

Website: http://www.unifem.org.in/

Cross posted from www.solutionexchange-un.net.in