The Current - Climate change fuelling human trafficking

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Climate change is fuelling a spike in human trafficking in India's West Bengal region. The CBC's South Asia correspondent Salimah Shivji explains how dramatic shifts in climate are wreaking enormous change in peoples' livelihoods and safety.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. That's the sound of one of the many rivers coursing through India's Sundarbans. It's a large mangrove forest that India shares with Bangladesh to the east. You can hear fishermen on traditional Bengali wooden boats traveling downstream. This is in the eastern part of the country, in West Bengal state. It's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world for climate change.

And that is affecting people's homes, livelihoods, and safety. There has been a steep increase in human trafficking in this area in recent years. The CBC's South Asia correspondent, Salima Shivji, went there and joins us now. Salima, hi. Hi. Describe what this area looks like. Well, it's a couple of hours east of Kolkata, the capital of the state of West Bengal. And it's famous for its mangrove forests, like you mentioned, a world heritage site. The word Sundarbans actually means beautiful forest in Bengali. So you see mangroves everywhere, the tropical plant that hugs the edge of rivers, you know, wherever there's loose, wet soil. It's a plant that's often sitting submerged in high tides. And much of the Sundarbans is submerged, Matt. The land lies very low. There's water everywhere you look.

And it is a delta with several major rivers coursing through, and villages and islands are perched in between those rivers. It sounds beautiful. Why did you want to go there? What were you looking to hear? Well, the Sundarbans Delta is also known for being very susceptible to the effects of climate change because of the landscape. You know, the United Nations and other agencies have warned that this area will produce many of the world's climate refugees over the next few years.

So I went there to find out how that's affecting the people who live in the Sundarbans and how it's linked to that rise in human traffickers congregating there. And I met a group of women who wanted to tell me their story. What are we listening to here? So that's the sound of a meeting in a remote village in the Sundarbans. There are about 10 women tucked into a home that's half exposed to the elements. One wall of the crumbling brick and mud house is completely missing. It's replaced with a hanging tarp. The steps up to the home are also falling apart. And to even get to the house, you have to walk along a really narrow path with soil eroding on each side, you know, slipping into the water that surrounds everything in this area. There are some homes kind of perched along the edge, Matt, looking like they're minutes

from falling into the river below. So the women sit cross-legged and pull out some papers. They're talking about bank loans that they've applied for that some of them haven't yet received. And they're explaining to their social worker, who's also there, the deep struggle to make enough money to pay their bills. But it's really not just a meeting about financial pain. They're all here, part of this self-help group, because all of them are victims of trafficking, taken and forced into sex work. What did they tell you about what they had gone through?

So Matt, you know, it's difficult for women to speak about it openly, particularly in this community. But one of them, Mijana, actually told me her story while we sat inside her home, sometimes speaking in really hushed tones. So she, you know, she didn't want her neighbors to hear when they were walking outside her home. She was only 17 when the traffickers came for her. And it was actually her neighbor, a woman about a decade older than her with a young child. Mijana trusted her. She used to call her sister. But the woman was actually watching Mijana waiting to strike. And one day she asked Mijana to go to a nearby train station with her.

The premise was that she needed help looking after her young child. Once there, the neighbor drugged Mijana's food and put her on a train to Mumbai, some 2,000 kilometers away. And I'll let Mijana tell the rest. When I came to, I was with four or five other girls, all in small cramped rooms. There was only one window. It was like a prison. One of the girls told me the same thing happened to her and that I was trapped in our town. I was taken to another place and was crying so much that three or four men came in and gave me an injection that knocked me out again. So there you go, you can hear her saying she broke down crying, was drugged again and then it got worse.

you can hear her saying she broke down crying, was drugged again and then it got worse. The woman I used to call my sister came into the room I was locked in and told me a man would be coming in and then she said dirty, awful things. I started crying again but it didn't matter. They sent the man in anyway. He forced himself on me. I was raped. It went on for 15 days. She says every day it was a different man and that she felt so much pain. She thought of taking her own life. If only she could get her hands on a razor blade, she told me. She was just 17 years old when all of this happened. How did she get out of that awful situation and get back home? So there was a police raid at the makeshift brothel. And while officers didn't exactly rescue her, the padlock on her door was broken. So she was able to get out. When it got quiet,

she ran as far and for as long as she could until she really couldn't run anymore. An elderly man tried to help her get to a police station, but she didn't really understand him. First off, she didn't know if he was a friend or not. For one, she was just really too terrified. But also, she doesn't speak Hindi. She speaks Bengali. And that's the other thing that these traffickers prey on. There's a language barrier when they take the girls to cities across India.

Bijana was eventually taken to a shelter, and a local NGO in the Sundarbans called Goranbos Gram Bikash Kendra, they helped her get home. What happened to her neighbor, the person who trafficked her initially? Absolutely nothing. She disappeared. No consequences, no justice. But this story is actually not unusual in the Sundarbans, as Mijana told me. And she told me that when she was giving me a tour of her family home that she was returned to after her ordeal. So the home is really small. You enter from the village road and then there's a little extended section with a bedroom where the whole family sleeps. And that section juts out perched above a flowing river. And Matt, when you look down at the floor, it's just bamboo rods pulled together with rope. There are really gaping holes in between where you can see the water, the river flowing right below.

I was, you know, I was there with my cameraman, Glenn, and he was just stepping around the room gingerly, worried that he would fall through and ruin this home. And that's just one example of that water I told you about seeping up everywhere in the Sundarbans. And that's what traffickers rely on. And Mijana looked at me and she said, I know why I was a target. Trafficking was my neighbor's job.

She was a professional. She would go to different villages, rent a place and target young girls to take them. How are the traffickers able to do all of this? Well, to understand that, we have to talk a little bit more about the area. You know, I explained it off the top, but really you need to understand

how climate change has made things far worse for the people who live in the Sundarbans, essentially making it fertile ground for these trafficking gangs. So the Sundarbans is a unique but a very fragile ecosystem. Like I said, it has the world's largest mangrove forest. It's along a delta that has a cluster of low-lying islands, mudflats, there are rivers leading to the Bay of Bengal. But it is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change But it is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Several islands have already been completely swallowed up by rising sea levels. Others are partially gone, forcing people to migrate elsewhere. An estimate from a few years ago now was that 60,000 people have already had to migrate away from the Sundarbans,

becoming climate refugees. Because there's also no work and there's constant uncertainty. You know, their land, their homes disappear. Sometimes the villagers move to another island, then have to move again when the new land also erodes. And so what is climate change doing to the environment in this region? Well, the Bay of Bengal is warming faster than any other major body of water on the planet. And that means more frequent and more vicious cyclones are battering the area. I spoke to one social worker who said, you know, we were used to getting one cyclone a year. Now we get about four or five. And especially recently, some of them super cyclones, which just cause so much damage and destruction and death.

And with all of that seawater from the cyclones flooding into the area, the word is not just erosion, but it's also salinity. More saltwater damages the soil, so villagers can't grow what they used to, losing a major source of income. In a place where already about half of the population lives below the poverty line. So that desperation grows. I want you to listen to the founder of the local NGO that I mentioned earlier, GGBK. His name is Nihar Ranjan Rathen. Take a listen. Poverty is getting worse, and all of this is because of climate

disasters. The situation forces people to leave for work, to migrate to places where there is a language barrier and that helps the traffickers. They have easy access. They exploit the situation, luring people with promises of good jobs, a better life, or even the promise of a stable marriage. This is how they take victims away. He says traffickers look for young girls and sometimes boys from the most vulnerable families. Sometimes, you know, they're taken with promises, but often, like in Mijana's case, they're tricked and then drugged. His NGO is now seeing more than 30 cases a year. And the latest official India crime stats show that more than 40,000 women and about 10,500 girls went

missing from the state of West Bengal in 2022. Those are the highest numbers in the country. They weren't all trafficked, of course, but those numbers really are quite striking. And then when you look at the number of people reported trafficked across India, that's around 6,000 people across the country in the most recent year for which stats are available. That's 2022. But that number, 6,000, is widely presumed to be far lower than the actual number since trafficking is underreported and often miscategorized by police. What about the police? I mean, what are they doing?

If the numbers are that high, what are they doing to tackle the rise in trafficking in this area? Well, they do say that they are fully aware that trafficking is up dramatically in the Sundarbans. It is their main focus for the local police there. They say they're chipping away at a network that is India-wide with many layers and middlemen. So police often act on tips. They try to conduct raids in big cities like Mumbai and Delhi where many of the girls are taken. And they try to rescue as many of the girls are taken, and they try to rescue as many of them as they can. But sometimes word gets out that a raid is coming,

and the traffickers move the girls to another location, or they hide them. One trafficked girl told me they hide them in places so tight that the girls can't breathe, and some don't make it out alive. Many of the young women are recovered by police, and with the help of that local NGO I spoke about, they work tirelessly to help these young women and girls. But still, about 25% of those trafficked are never found. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. now wherever you get your podcasts. And so how do family members who are left behind cope as they try to figure out and piece together where their daughter or sister or mother might be? Well, it is excruciating for so many of them. I spoke to one couple who hasn't seen their daughter in close to two years, and the mother, Mushumi, she was in tears the entire interview, so much so that the family dog in another room was barking to console her. Mushumi's daughter, Sohani, wasn't underage. She was in her 20s when her parents say that she was lured away by an older man who promised to marry her. That didn't happen,

and they fear the worst. Here's her mom. and they fear the worst. Here's her mom. For nearly two years, we have had no contact with her. I don't know where she is or if she is even alive. It is so incredibly painful. I believe the man's family is deeply involved in human trafficking.

Not only trafficking, but they make women do terrible, unspeakable things. Every horrific news report on TV makes my heart race with fear. The pain never ends. And only those who have lost a child can truly understand this anguish. So you heard her father there Rana you can also hear the family dog barking in the back. Rana has a full file on the man he thinks trafficked his daughter

and he thinks she's been taken across the border to Bangladesh. But he says the police can't or won't help. And for those who do make it back, how difficult is it for them to reintegrate into village life? Well, they not only have to deal with the trauma of surviving sexual assault and confinement, but also deep mistrust in the community. And the stigma attached to trafficking in the Sundarbans is so strong, especially if a young woman is forced into sex work. They're often labeled as a girl gone bad. The local NGO has about 1,200 active cases of trafficking victims that their social workers are still following. They're helping them to get the support they need, providing trauma counseling. The founder, Nihar Raptan, who started the organization in the late 1980s,

says the first trafficking case he came across was in 1995, and things were very different back then. At the time, I wasn't even familiar with the term trafficking. I couldn't help the rescued girl reintegrate that responsibility felt to villagers and the local police station. Initially, we thought that if we managed to rescue the victims, our job was done. But I have now learned that the actual rescue is just the beginning of the work needed. You mentioned counselling. What other work is the NGO providing to help these women and girls? It extends beyond counselling to financial advice, negotiating with bank officials, like we heard at that meeting with the women.

The NGO helps if trafficking survivors want to report their abusers to police. And they also organize awareness campaigns in villages across the area to fight that stigma, which is so strong. And they were a huge help to another young woman I spoke with, Kashmira. Kashmira. What's Kashmira doing there? So she's serving customers at the little corner shop that she runs in her small village, selling snacks, selling toys. It's her safe space. Now, Kashmira was also trafficked at 17, just like Nijana. She was also tricked, and in her case, it was her cousin's boyfriend who slipped a drug into the teenager's soda and put her on a train to Delhi, where Kashmira was kept for six months, continually drugged, she says, beaten and forced into sex work.

And after her rescue, when she came back, it was almost worse, she says. For three full years, she didn't leave the house. Almost worse, she says, for three full years, she didn't leave the house. I couldn't bring myself to go out because of all the demeaning questions and accusations from people in my village. It was unbearable, especially when some of those hurtful words came from my own family. Even my own uncles and cousins would bombard me with ugly questions. So she's resilient. After months of counseling, she was finally able to start getting out and interacting with others. The NGO's social workers visited her village, spoke to people one by one and worked hard to change their minds, explaining that it's not a woman's fault that

she's taken. Kashmira's father set her up with that it's not a woman's fault that she's taken. Kashmira's father set her up with that shop that she calls her lifeline. It's made her independent, and her neighbors, who used to talk bad about her, now rely on her. People who experience trafficking are rarely welcomed back. But even after what happened to me, my community now stands by me. I am loved.

What about Mijana, who we heard from earlier? How did she fight that stigma that you've been talking about? She actually called it horrifying. The stigma was so strong after she was rescued that she couldn't bear to finish up her high school final exams that she was just about to do before she was taken. Her parents decided that the best thing for her was to get married quickly, a child marriage, because she was still just 17 when she got back. Her parents thought it would help her be accepted back by the village,

but she says it was awful. Her husband found out what had happened to her. He started demanding money, basically blackmailing the family and harassing her on social media and beating her. She left when she was nine months pregnant with her daughter, and it's for her daughter that she fights. Mijana works closely with the NGO, and so do other trafficking survivors. Kashmira does too. They go from village to village talking to young people. And so what do they say? I mean, what are they focusing on when they're speaking with young

people? Yeah, so they work really hard to warn them about how trafficking gangs operate. They list the signs to look out for and what they should do, what young people should do if there's a suspected trafficker hanging around their village. And you can hear how they get the kids' attention here. So they're playing a game there where their social worker is there. Mijana is there as well. They choose one kid to be the target and the other kids circle around, join hands, trying to ward off a trafficker. The social worker says he's a wicked man and you need to do everything you can to protect our daughter.

She's not just one person's child. She's all of ours is what they're saying there. Mijana had a leading role in that game. She was pretending to be the trafficker in that. And she told me she needs to be involved in this kind of work. It's really emotional for her because she doesn't want anyone else to have to endure what she did. Child marriage and trafficking are like a cancer. It keeps spreading, no matter what we do to try to curb it. Still, I'm not giving up. We are taking various steps to make sure that the trafficking cases here go down.

And mostly, Matt, she wants her young daughter, who's just five years old, to be proud of her, of her strength. It's a shocking story. Salima, thank you very much for bringing it to us. You're welcome. Salima Shivji is the CBC's South Asia correspondent.