Informant38

This traffic does not stop Like Rupa, 20-year-old Mala was lured to come to Uttar Pradesh from Nepal when she was 10 years old. She was raped by her custodians who held her captive for over a month and then took her to Mumbai. She has been working in this city as a sex worker for the last decade, often servicing six to 10 clients every night This bestial, sleazy world of intra-country and trans-border trafficking in women and young girls was highlighted recently in a workshop organised in Lucknow by the BETI Foundation, UNDP.
Trafficking in human beings is more lucrative than trade in arms or narcotics according to Roma Shyamsundar, Vice President of STOP, a Delhi based non-governmental organisation (NGO) actively involved in the rescue of trafficked girls. According to Shyamsundar, a lifelong exploitative situation is established when a woman or a girl is trafficked: she is forced into prostitution and thus begins a vicious cycle of paying the brothel owner for whom she works. Even if she is rescued, her plight does not improve because she is not accepted either by her family or by society. And she has no means of survival. Consequently, many rescued victims have no choice but to go back to sex work