Long after being rescued the horrors of being trafficked remain in the victims mind. Many rescued girls suffer from depression, post traumatic stress syndrome and other problems. These often have serious effect on the girls' hopes to return to a normal life.
Two girls at the Rescue Foundation facility in Mumbai (Bombay) are told their familes have been traced and arrangements made to get them safetly out of India. They will be supported by a partner organisation to ensure they are safe and effectively accepted by their village communities. In the case of both these girls, false histories of working in a hotel were created to ensure they would not suffer further discrimination.
The majority of rescue work is conducted either by Nepali NGOs along the Nepali/Indian border, or by Indian NGOs in the major cities to which Nepali women and children are trafficked – Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Pune. AN partner Shakti Samuha works closely with a number of border NGOs and we regularly receive rescued girls into our Kathmandu refuge, Shakti Kendra.
Asha Nepal works closely with three rescue and rehabilitation organisations in India: STOP in Delhi, The Rescue Foundation (TRF) in Mumbai and Pune, and more recently Sunlaap in Kolkata - we now receive back many girls from the brothels of Kolkata.
STOP carries out regular raids on brothels, searching for under-age girls and women and children held against their will, often in caged brothels. STOP has its own refuges and carries out rehabilitation and education programmes, medical examinations and advocacy services. They often rescue Nepali girls and work hard to repatriate them. AN helped to fund their clinic and refuge.
The Rescue Foundation has its own refuge and teams of detectives who, against all odds, will trace and rescue girls often from just an old photograph or a written description. We have funded projects for TRF in previous years and until 2007 funded their legal activities. We desperately want to raise enough funds to renew this important work. Increasing the number of convictions of pimps, traffickers and brothel owners who put girls into forced prostitution will stop those criminals re-offending, and have a deterrent effect on others. TRF has been highly successful in seeing arrests through to prosecution and successful sentencing.
For a number of years Asha Nepal worked closely with the Nepali NGO Maiti Nepal. Between 1998 and 2005, AN funded the build and support of a transit home, extension of Maiti Nepal’s HIV/Aids Hospice and other counter-trafficking activities. With different thinking on rehabilitation, interpretation of human rights and the effect of long-term institutionalisation, the two organisations parted company at the end of 2005.
In 2008, Asha Nepal set up an office and small project centre in Kathmandu, moving to new premises in November 2010. In 2009, the centre was registered in Nepal as an NGO in its own right with a board of staff, volunteers and specialist supporters.
Download Peter Bashford’s report, A Sense of Direction, the Trafficking of Women and Children in Nepal.