Chapter 1 

INTRODUCTION 

1.1 The Context 

In recent years, millions of women and girls have been trafficked across national  borders 

and within countries. The global trafficking industry generates an estimated US$5 to 7 

billion each year, more than the profits generated by the arms and narcotics trades 

(Widgren 1994). Over the last decade, the growing trafficking problem in South Asia has 

been particularly acute in Nepal, one of the least developed countries in the world, with 

42 percent of its citizens living below the poverty line. 

While there are no reliable data on the magnitude of the trafficking problem in Nepal, the 

most widely quoted sources estimate that 5,000 to 7,000 girls are trafficked from Nepal to 

India and other neighbouring countries every year, primarily for prostitution: 200,000 

Nepali girls and women currently are working in the sex industry in India (UNIFEM 

1998, UNICEF 1997). Another study postulates that 20,000 minors are brought into India 

from Nepal for sex work every year (Haemeed 1997). 

The occurrence of trafficking in Nepal is generally attributed to widespread poverty, lack 

of female education, low status of girls and women and social disparities rooted in ethnic 

and caste groupings. Women living in an environment of restricted rights and limited 

personal freedom with few employment opportunities may decide that out migration is 

their only hope for achieving economic independence and a higher standard of living. 

Those who are victimized by traffickers experience abuse, exploitation and greater 

vulnerability to human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome 

(HIV/AIDS) and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). 

The definition of trafficking proposed by the United Nations Special Rapporteur in a 

recent report to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights follows. 

Trafficking in persons means the recruitment, transportation, purchase, 

sale, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons by threat or use of violence, 

abduction, force, fraud, deception or coercion (including the abuse of 

authority), or debt bondage, for the purpose of placing or holding such 

person, whether for payment  or not, in forced labor or slavery like 

practices, in a community other than the one in which such person lived at 

the time of the original act described (Coomaraswamy  2000). 

The United States government definition of trafficking is similar to that of the United 

Nations: 

The recruitment, transport or sale of persons across international borders 

or within a country through fraud, coercion or force for purposes of forced 

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