Human Trafficking Across Borders: Human Rights Violations of Women and Children, Challenges and Remedies

This paper seeks to deliberate upon the human trafficking in women and children in Nepal focusing on the need for regional coordination and cooperation in particular between Nepal and India for combating this menace effectively. It explores the issue within the ambit of the potential reasons behind trafficking such as abject poverty; underemployment, poor working conditions in source countries, vis-a-vis better conditions in affluent destination countries. It is important to understand human trafficking in its totality, by taking into consideration the social, economic and political reasons (structural factors) and seek to co-relate this to policy formulation and governance issues (proximate factors). There are numerous push and pull factors in human trafficking in Nepal’s context. There is significant, although still insufficient, knowledge about the networking of human traffickers and a range of policy options exist at the domestic and regional levels to address this problem. An understanding of the structural factors and their relationship to proximate factors is thus vital for combating the problem at both the site of origin and at destination and ultimately at the regional level. Quintessentially, current efforts to address the problem of human trafficking across the Indo Nepal border can definitely improved through bilateral cooperation between the two countries through adequate homework.