Kerala State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) Chairperson J.B. Koshy said on Monday that economic impact of globalisation had pushed people to migrate and made them victims of different kinds of trafficking.
Inaugurating a seminar on human trafficking organised by the Kerala Chamber of Commerce and Industry, he said the reasons for increase in human trafficking were commercial demand of sex and human organs, and greed for money. Poverty and lack of educational and economic opportunities also led women to voluntarily migrate and involuntarily get into sex trafficking.
He said that studies had identified the Internet as the single biggest facilitator of commercial sex trade.
Mr. Koshy said corrupt and inadequately trained police officers could be complicit in sex trafficking. The aim of the traffickers was to turn a human being into a slave. The perpetrators employed tactics that could lead to “the psychological consequence of helplessness” for the victims – they would find themselves in an “abusive situation” the escape from which would be difficult and dangerous.
He said forced marriage had also become a part of sex trafficking. Child trafficking for forced marriage was simply another manifestation of trafficking.
Labour trafficking took place when migrant works were pushed into forced labour.
The SHRC chief said laws such as Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, Protection of Child Labour Act, and Foreigners Act were intended to prevent human trafficking. In fact, the government had taken a lot of measures to prevent human trafficking. A regional task force had also been constituted on the basis of the SAARC convention on the human trafficking of women and children besides implementing a comprehensive scheme for establishing integrated anti-human trafficking units in 385 vulnerable places in the country, he pointed out.
